Cast View all

	Jack Nicholson	Robert Eroica Dupea
	Karen Black	Rayette Dipesto
	Billy Green Bush	Elton
	Fannie Flagg	Stoney
	Sally Struthers	Betty
	Marlena MacGuire	Twinky
	Richard Stahl	Recording Engineer
	Lois Smith	Partita Dupea
	Helena Kallianiotes	Palm Apodaca
	Toni Basil	Terry Grouse
	Lorna Thayer	Waitress
	Susan Anspach	Catherine Van Oost
	Ralph Waite	Carl Fidelio Dupea
	William Challee	Nicholas Dupea
	John P. Ryan	Spicer
	Irene Dailey	Samia Glavia
	Clay Greenbush	Baby
	Bob Rafelson	Man in Elevator

Crew View all

Director	Bob Rafelson
Writer	Carole Eastman, Bob Rafelson
Producer	Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, Harold Schneider, Richard Wechsler
Photography	László Kovács

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Notes

Part of: America Lost and Found - The BBS Story boxset

Like the rest of America, Hollywood was ripe for revolution in the late sixties. Cinema attendance was down; what had once worked seemed broken. Enter Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner, who knew that what Hollywood needed was new audiences-namely, young people-and that meant cultivating new talent and new ideas. Fueled by money from their invention of the superstar TV pop group the Monkees, they set off on a film-industry journey that would lead them to form BBS Productions, a company that was also a community. The innovative films produced by this team between 1968 and 1972 are collected in this box set-works that now range from the iconic (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show) to the acclaimed (The King of Marvin Gardens) to the obscure (Head; Drive, He Said; A Safe Place), all created within the studio system but lifted right out of the countercultural id.

Five Easy Pieces
Following Jack Nicholson’s breakout supporting turn in Easy Rider, director Bob Rafelson devised a powerful leading role for the new star in the searing character study Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson plays the now iconic cad Bobby Dupea, a shiftless thirtysomething oil rigger and former piano prodigy immune to any sense of responsibility, who returns to his upper-middle-class childhood home, blue-collar girlfriend (Karen Black, in an Oscar-nominated role) in tow, to see his estranged, ailing father. Moving in its simplicity and gritty in its textures, Five Easy Pieces is a lasting example of early 1970s American alienation.

SPECIAL FEATURES
Restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photography László Kovács, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Audio commentary by director Bob Rafelson and interior designer Toby Rafelson
Soul Searching in "Five Easy Pieces," a 2009 video piece featuring Rafelson
BBStory, a 2009 documentary about the legendary film company BBS Productions, with Rafelson; actors Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, and Ellen Burstyn; filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom; and others
Documentary from 2009 about BBS featuring critic David Thomson and historian Douglas Brinkley
Audio excerpts from a 1976 AFI interview with Rafelson
Trailers and teasers
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by critic Kent Jones

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