One of the main architects of the independents taking over Hollywood was director Bob Rafelson, the person behind the production company B.B.S., crafting films which reflected a more contemporary portrait of American life.

The production company’s first project to see the light was a low budget biker film: Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. Following the unexpected success of Hopper’s film, new productions went onto capture the unsettling mood of alienation and discontent in American society as the optimism of the 60s turned to the corrupt reality of the 70s.

Five Easy Pieces, B.B.S.’s most modest output, reflects that feeling of alienation in Nicholson’s extraordinary performance as Bobby Dupea; a shiftless thirty-something oil rigger and former piano prodigy immune to any sense of responsibility, who returns to reckoning at his upper-middle-class childhood home.

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