Five Easy Pieces of four: The title of "Five Easy Pieces" refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels 20 years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, "Five Easy Pieces" becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity... The movie is joyously alive to
Eugene, Oregon "Getting Straight", starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, was filmed at Lane Community College in 1969. As the campus was still under construction at the time, the "occupation scenes" were easier to shoot. The "Chicken Salad on Toast" scene in the 1970 Jack Nicholson movie "Five Easy Pieces" was filmed at the Denny's restaurant at the southern I-5 freeway interchange near Glenwood. Nicholson directed the 1971 film "Drive, He Said" in Eugene. "How to Beat the High Co$t of Living", starring Jane Curtin, Jessica Lange and Susan St. James, was filmed in Eugene in the fall of 1979. Locations visible