Production
Due to the huge financial success of Easy Rider (1969), Universal Studios gave the star of that film, Peter Fonda, full artistic control over The Hired Hand, his debut as a director. (Universal also did the same for Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie that same year.) The movie was shot in New Mexico in the summer of 1970 with a budget of slightly less than $1,000,000. As he would further elaborate on the audio commentary provided on the film’s DVD release, Fonda’s job as neophyte filmmaker was made relatively easy thanks to a cast of polished character actors, led by Warren Oates. In addition, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond provided naturalistic imagery that helped belie the modest budget. Fonda’s selection of the then-unknown Bruce Langhorne as the film’s musical composer would prove to be greatly inspired, as nearly all of the film’s reviews singled out the score as being unusually expressive and beautiful.
Frank Mazzola edited the film into shape, and utilized a series of complex and poetic montages, which featured elaborate dissolves, slow motion, and overlapping still photography. Mazzola’s opening montage was praised by several critics as the film’s most memorable sequence.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
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“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
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“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)