Jon Lewis's Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture is his most recent in a series of studies focused on postwar Hollywood in its many aspects—from the market for teen movies to the auteurist renaissance, from the pornographic film industry to the true-crime stories haunting Hollywood—and hence it is fitting that he would utilize a study of the counterculture to put all these aspects in a single frame. In this respect his case studies are logical: the copula of biker B-movies and European art cinema (Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point), which brought together the low and high appeals to youth culture; the rejection of Hollywood celebrity-as-usual modeled by the truncated film career of Christopher Jones; the variations on feminist self-creation embodied by Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, Dolores Hart, and Barbara Loden; and the apocalyptic narrative of the Manson Family that some observers—Joan Didion, for one—have insisted both...

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