Description

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.

DVD Collection Includes

Head

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack and newly created, optional DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring the Monkees
• New video interview with director Bob Rafelson
• New documentary about BBS featuring critic David Thomson and historian Douglas Brinkley
• Screen tests with the Monkees
• Trailers and TV and radio spots
• Ephemera, including behind-the-scenes photos by Henry Diltz
• Rare 1968 television interview with the Monkees

Easy Rider

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photography László Kovács (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack and optional DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Two audio commentaries, one featuring actor-director-writer Dennis Hopper, the other Hopper, actor-writer Peter Fonda, and production manager Paul Lewis
• Born to Be Wild (1995) and “Easy Rider”: Shaking the Cage, (1999), documentaries about the making and history of the film
• Television excerpts showing Hopper and Fonda at the Cannes Film Festival
• New video interview with BBS cofounder Steve Blauner
• Theatrical trailers

Five Easy Pieces

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photography László Kovács (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring director Bob Rafelson and interior designer Toby Rafelson
• Soul Searching in “Five Easy Pieces,” a 2009 video piece with Rafelson
• BBStory, a 2009 documentary about the BBS era, with Rafelson, actors Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, and Ellen Burstyn, and directors Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom, among others
• Audio excerpts from a 1976 AFI interview with Rafelson
• Theatrical trailer and teasers

Drive, He Said

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director Jack Nicholson (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• A Cautionary Tale of Campus Revolution and Sexual Freedom, a 2009 video piece featuring Nicholson
• Theatrical trailer

A Safe Place

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Audio commentary featuring director Henry Jaglom
• Henry Jaglom Finds “A Safe Place,” a 2009 video piece in which the director discusses the film
• Notes on the New York Film Festival, a 1971 video interview with Jaglom and director Peter Bogdanovich
• Outtakes and screen tests
• Theatrical trailer

The Last Picture Show

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer of Peter Bogdanovich’s director’s cut, supervised by Bogdanovich (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Two audio commentaries, one from 1991, featuring Bogdanovich and actors Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Cloris Leachman, and Frank Marshall; the other from 2009, featuring Bogdanovich
• “The Last Picture Show”: A Look Back, (1999) and Picture This (1990), documentaries about the making of the film
• A Discussion with Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, a 2009 Q&A
• Screen tests and location footage
• Excerpts from a 1972 television interview with director François Truffaut about the New Hollywood
• Theatrical trailers

The King of Marvin Gardens

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photogaphy László Kovács (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
• Selected-scene commentary featuring director Bob Rafelson
• Reflections of a Philosopher King, a 2009 video piece with Rafelson and actress Ellen Burstyn
• Afterthoughts, a 2002 interview with Rafelson, about the film, produced by Rafelson, Kovács, and actor Bruce Dern
• Theatrical trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critics J. Hoberman, Chuck Stephens, Matt Zoller Seitz, Kent Jones, Graham Fuller, and Mark Le Fanu