Jack Nicholson was ten years into a film career that seemed, as he neared 30, to be going nowhere and on the cusp of divorce from his first wife when he agreed to star in Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) for director Richard Rush. Made to cash in on Roger Corman's hugely profitable biker flick The Wild Angels (1967) but bearing the official imprimatur of America's most notorious outlaw biker gang (who also served as technical advisors and extras in the film), Hells Angels on Wheels offered Nicholson the chance to play a character closer in spirit to his true personality and emblematic of the sort of anti-heroes he would play in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). Though he was only in it for the money, Nicholson earned the best notices of his career to that point by playing a sensitive son of the middle class who joins a motorcycle gang on a lark but grows increasingly more disturbed by their hedonistic excesses. To prep for the role, Nicholson visited with Hells Angels head honcho Sonny Barger, who offered the young actor "a toke for a poke." After Nicholson graciously took a drag on an offered joint, Barger punched him in the stomach: the poke that was the price of a toke. Despite this rocky start, Nicholson and Barger became good friends during shooting, with the rank and file Angels coming to believe Nicholson was a real biker from an out-of-town charter.

By Richard Harland Smith