When hitchhiking was a thing back in the free-spirited ’60s and ’70s, the middle-class legend was “don’t pick up hitchhikers…they might be dangerous or worse!” This concern was 100% flipped in Quentin Masters‘ Day Tripping (’72), which basically said “don’t put your thumb out because truck drivers and other randy fellows will pull over and fuck your girlfriend, and she’ll be into it besides.”
Produced by the respectable Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler (The Gambler, Rocky, Raging Bull), Thumb Tripping, which no one has even thought about, much less seen, over the last half-century and was barely watched when it opened in ’72, was one of the less substantial, Easy Rider-ish, more fly-by-nightish indie flicks of that era.
Costarring Michael Burns (That Cold Day in the Park) and Meg Foster, pic costarred Bruce Dern (as “Smitty”), Hill Street Blues‘ Michael Conrad as a bully-ish truck driver, and Marianna Hill (the trashy wife of Fredo Corleone in The Godfather, Part II) as a frisky wife in a convertible that pulls over, etc.
“Thumb Tripping” began as a 1970 novel by Don Mitchell: “The song of the open road…blue, bitter, and mostly a bummer…Gary and Chay met on an acid trip — her last, his first. They decided to spend the summer on the road…no hurry, no special destination. The trip was in the people they made it with.”
A Kentucky resident, Burns (who’s still with us) became a respected academic and author.