Peter Fonda wears a Rolex GMT-Master

Before the ride starts, Wyatt pulls the watch off his wrist and drops it in the desert dirt. The close-up that follows is one of the most quoted images in Easy Rider, a gold watch face-up among the stones, and the watch in that shot is not the Rolex. Look closely: a plain white dial, no rotating bezel, a cheap expansion bracelet. BAMF Style puts it plainly: "Rather than risk damaging his new watch, the Rolex has been clearly swapped out for a different watch that he pulls from his wrist and drops in the California desert."

The Rolex was Peter Fonda's own. Heritage Auctions, which sold the screen-worn piece at its October 2007 entertainment auction, described "a prototype GMT Master that he had purchased in 1968 to reward himself for finishing the first draft of Easy Rider's screenplay in less than three hours after inspiration struck while sitting on a French beach." It was 18-karat yellow gold with a brown dial, a matching brown insert in the 24-hour bezel, gold hour markers, and a date window at 3 o'clock. Its screen time is a matter of seconds: it flashes on Wyatt's left wrist during the opening cocaine deal, the transaction that funds the whole trip east.

The film around that flash of gold cost somewhere between $360,000 and $400,000 and grossed about $60 million worldwide, the lopsided arithmetic that convinced the studios to start bankrolling the New Hollywood. Fonda's reward to himself went to auction with a $10,000 estimate almost four decades later. The gold watch lying in the desert stayed the most famous timepiece in the picture, and it is not the Rolex, because Fonda kept that one out of harm's way.