1975 - Poison Trail

A group of left thinking anti-government hippies living on a commune find out that the government is
putting chemicals into the water supply. These hippie’s try to alert the public on their radio station but
before they can get the word out, a government agent kills the majority of the compound. Three escape
alive. This is the story of three hippies trying to escape the government agent and alert the public of the
fiendish ways of the government as they run from the man through the woods of Virginia.

My group did Poison Trail as our movie. We chose Dennis Hopper as our director because he had a connection with a major studio Columbia after "Easy Rider" which made lots of money while still going against the grain by making heroes out of the outcasts of traditional American society, but he also was an artsy anti-government type of person who could work wonders with this type of of the beaten path 70's Anti-hero and mixed elements of good and evil.

All of our actors were kind of unknown except for Jack Nicholson, but that made sense because Dennis Hopper had worked with him before. We chose new actors because we wanted to keep the movie low budget, so the actors didn't need to be big name guys.

We wanted to focus on costuming because Hopper did this in "Easy Rider" and because it seemed like the right idea for a movie about hippies and Anti-government. Having the hippies dress colorful and the government be dressed in all black seemed to make a lot of sense, it would be low budget, it would be easily spotted by almost all audiences, and it would still carry a subtle message. The reason we picked a new college graduate who happens to also be female is that she would be low budget but also she would be talented based on her later works.