Vintage footage of Allen and William Burroughs and Dennis Hopper at his (Burroughs’) 1996 art opening at Santa Monica’s Track 16 Gallery/Robert Berman Gallery – see here
Junkie – Hopper, (with Burroughs and Terry Southern), had, unsuccessfully, many years previously, tried to make a film of Burroughs’ great novel ($45,000 advance (each) and fourteen separate screenplays, but the movie never happened!)
Southern on Hopper:
“I remember several years back my first meeting with Hopper—at the outlandish East Fifth Street pad of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky – during what must have been one of the first “happenings” ever to occur in New York City. Orlovsky was playing on some sort of strange Eastern timpani, and chanting sotto voce: “Blood in the milk, blood in the milk, blood in the milk…” while Allen, dipping a rolled copy of The New York Times Book Review into a large can of honey, inscribed hauntingly cryptic word-images across the far wall. In one corner a movie projector was rattling away, showing Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or, in reverse, but was focused through an open door, so that nothing could be seen except when someone happened to pass through the stream of shuttering light. In the centre of the room an electric fan was lying on its back, blades up, whirling violently – and crouched beside it was a marvelous stark naked Negro girl of about twenty, holding a huge paper sack from which she took handfuls of what was apparently a mixture of rose petals and dog hair and dropped them into the fan, so that the room was like a kind of silent snow storm, all slow motion, the people moving about as in the softest dream. It was pretty weird, now that I think about it. And Hopper – who even then was probably one of the most talented actors alive – became quite excited by the spectacle and eager to take a part, gliding around in a Marcel Marceau manner, grimacing oddly and, at the same time, attempting to take photographs with a 135 mm. Nikon.
“No point to photos,” shouted Orlovsky, “unless there is treacle on your lens!”
“My lens is fast,” said Hopper calmly, “and my eye is keen.”
Dennis Hopper, actor, photographer, filmmaker, art collector, visual artist, Beat aficianado, was born on this day.
Southern again: “I asked Frank O’Hara..what he thought of Hopper’s (art) collection; “Excellent”, he said, but that’s not surprising because so is his own work”, referring to the myriad collages, assemblages, and photo-abstractions done by the collector himself – the bulk of which, as it turns out, was destroyed in the big Bel Air fire of 1961, along with some six hundred manuscript pages of poetry”
and, again: “Hopper, in his own odd (God bless him) way is forever prone to belittle his actual status – equally as an actor, photographer, and as a full-on artist. Complimented on a photograph, for example, he is most apt to shrug and say, “Well, man, that’s what was happening”
Dennis Hopper, movie-star. Auspicious beginnings – he had first film role at the tender age of seventeen, alongside James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and featured in Dean’s follow-up film, Giant. He became James Dean’s real-life sidekick, in the few years they had together. Dean mentored him – (“Yeah, Dean made a real impression on me. I thought I was the best young actor around, and then I saw him. I’d never seen anybody improvise before. I’d always been doing Shakespeare and other plays where everything was a preconceived idea, preconceived gestures, how I said a line..”) – Dean’s early death deeply affected him.
Following his work with Dean, Hopper acted in the 1958 film From Hell to Texas.
However, foreshadowing his later troubled and controversial film career, he famously clashed, viciously, with the film’s old-time director, Henry Hathaway, during the production (“He’d tell you exactly where to move, how to walk, how to talk. He’d give you line readings.
I was now trying to “live in the moment” and doing things without preconceived ideas, and
I walked off the picture three times on location”). The denouement came with a little ten-line scene (Hopper quotes Hathaway -“We’re gonna do this scene till you do it my way..”)
(”So we started about eight o’clock in the morning. Around eleven at night, after eighty-five takes (sic), I finally cracked, and said “Okay, tell me what you want to do.” I did it, then
I walked out. It wasn’t like somebody sent a black ball around after that, but word got around that I wasn’t somebody you wanted to work with. Soon after that, I was dropped from my contract at Warner Bros.. I went back to New York and I studied with (Lee) Strasberg for five years. I didn’t have another major role in a studio picture for nearly ten years”)
The perhaps unlikely figure who got him back in a Hollywood career was John Wayne.
He was hired for a role in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), (also (ironically?) directed by Hathaway). He also appeared some years later in Wayne’s seminal classic, True Grit.
It was a roller-coaster movie career. The breakthrough movie was of course Easy Rider (premiering around the same time as True Grit), made in collaboration with Peter Fonda and with Terry Southern (who came up with the film’s title), a film that now, looking back, might reasonably be declared to be the defining film of ‘Sixties counterculture.
Hopper: “I went out and shot the movie in five and a half weeks. László Kovács (the cinematographer) said it was the best-organized picture he’d ever shot…”“People talk about how crazy the shoot was, but there was nothing crazy about that shoot.”..I had an editing job (though) that was just horrendous, took me over a year. And driving on the way to the studio to cut the picture, I’d hear all this great music on the radio – Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds. I heard all these songs and cut the picture to picture, and not to sound. Then when I put in a song like “Born to be Wild” it just fit perfectly. But when you see the movie, the story is told through the music, not the dialogue. It was just one of those things that worked.”
The success of Easy Rider allowed a more ambitious project, (filmed in 1970 and completed in production in 1971, filmed, not unintentionally (sic) in Peru), The Last Movie. Expecting another blockbuster, Universal Studios were perplexed and disappointed and, despite it gaining international plaudits, gave it a less than enthusiastic release.
What brought him back a third time was a number of roles, most notably his cameo appearance in Apocalypse Now and an unforgettable role (as “Frank Booth”) in Blue Velvet
Prior to that, tho’, the dark, debauched, drug-fueled days – nowhere better shown than in Lawrence Schiller and L.M.Kit Carson’s harrowing 1971 documentary, Dennis Hopper – The American Dreamer
and here‘s another little curio from that time period.
2017’s Along For The Ride, another must-see Hopper documentary, tracks this period – via the recollections of Satya De La Manitou, his right-hand man, from the the craziness of The Last Movie and post-Last Movie years to his subsequent remarkable renaissance.
Just a few months back, Hopper was the focal point of an inspired and inspiring release by Mike Scott and The Waterboys, “Life Death and Dennis Hopper“
Reviews
Pat Carty in The Irish Times
Jim Farber in The Independent
Tom Doyle in Mojo
David Peisner in The New York Times
Harvey Kubernik for Music Connection
We’ll conclude on a suitably bizarre note. Dennis Hopper, in September 1970, on The Johnny Cash Show, reading Rudyard Kipling!