Things were a little different with Cher. ‘She was very nervous,’ recalls Miller. ‘She hadn’t done much [acting] and was used to being a diva but here she was in an ensemble piece. Jack had this one long speech with her and every time the take was blown by Cher. We got to about take nine and everyone on the crew was grinding their teeth saying, look, Jack’s doing all the running and then you blow it. But Jack didn’t get angry at all, he was very kind and encouraging towards her. On the take we ended up using, there is one moment where she had to move into her light, and not only is Jack saying the dialogue and carrying the weight of the whole scene, he puts his hand on Cher’s shoulders and turns her body into the light. As part of the character he found a way to get her through it, and I thought, fuck, this guy’s a total master. He’s a master technician.’
On another occasion, early in the shoot, the crew were rigging lights on one of the big sets, banging and clattering, shouting instructions and making a terrible racket. ‘Suddenly Jack walks to the very centre of the room with his script and throws it down on the floor,’ Miller recalls. ‘And this slam echoes all over the place and everyone just froze and went silent. And then he stormed out again. As he passed me he winked. I thought, what the fuck’s going on? I went into his trailer and he said, “George, don’t ask me to do your work for you.” And I realised he needed the quiet to concentrate, and that was his way of telling me.’ After that the crew conducted their work in, shall we say, a more serene manner.
Witches was a big hit for Jack but his performance, grandiose and operatic, was criticised in some quarters. There were accusations of overacting. Not so, says Miller. ‘Working with Jack was like dialling the volume on an amplifier, you started on one and then you could go up to two and three and four. So we’d start on take one and he’d do a performance which was nothing too flamboyant, pretty naturalistic, and then we’d just ramp it up, and it often got to about take eight or nine and then he hit the sweet spot. And then the next take it just went too far. It was like calibrated. It was an amazing thing to watch. It takes a lot of creative courage to get big.’
Justice and law are distant cousins, and here in South Africa they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.
As rumours circulated that Marlon Brando planned a screen comeback after almost a decade away, people were asking just where the hell had he been and what had he been doing with his time off, apart from eating lard sandwiches. Such questions always irked the Great One, as if the rest of his life was spent taking time out. The simple fact was making movies was time out for him, it was the rest of his life that was real. ‘I’m not an actor and haven’t been for years,’ he said. ‘I’m a human being who occasionally acts.’
The film that tempted Marlon out of his creative idleness was an anti-apartheid drama called A Dry White Season (1989). And to prove wrong those critics who claimed he was only returning for the money, Brando donated his hefty salary to an anti-apartheid charity, a gesture that also served to show the world his commitment to toppling South Africa’s evil regime.
Inevitably Brando’s return to movies made headlines. What wasn’t known was that on his first day on the set he was too nervous to leave his dressing room. Despite all that bravado, the image, Marlon was essentially a deeply vulnerable individual. As he once admitted: ‘I put on an act sometimes, and people think I’m insensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armour because I’m too sensitive.’
On set co-stars Susan Sarandon and Donald Sutherland and the crew all waited for Marlon to appear. The director Euzhan Palcy – the first black woman to direct a major Hollywood film – went to see him. ‘OK, darling,’ assured Marlon. ‘I’m coming.’ Another twenty minutes went by, no show. An assistant went to see him this time. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m coming.’ Still no Marlon. Euzhan went back, sat down next to Marlon and they just talked. She couldn’t believe Marlon could be so apprehensive; after all he was a genius, wasn’t he? ‘But he was first of all a human being. And this guy hadn’t worked for years, and he knew that all these actors were there waiting to see the master, the myth. And he needed to wait a little bit to overcome his apprehensions.’
It was a nice little performance, an extended cameo really, but the Academy felt it warranted an Oscar nomination. Despite the plaudits, his considerable girth still bothered him more than he let on. Karl Malden went to see the picture and felt compelled to write to his old friend telling him: ‘I don’t care if you are 500 pounds or 50 pounds. You are a fucking genius.’
You don’t wanna get laid, man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you gotta talk to ’em.
With films like Blue Velvet and Hoosiers in the can, Dennis Hopper’s remarkable transition from train-wreck personality to respected actor was complete. He decided to leave Taos and move back to Hollywood after his doctor suggested it might be best if he left his Mexican hideaway and came back to reality. ‘Reality? In LA?’ scoffed Dennis. He didn’t quite walk back into the lion’s den. He hated Los Angeles so, recalling fond memories of listening to beat poets and cool jazz in the late fifties at Venice Beach, bought a property there instead. Situated to the west of LA, Venice is home to a thriving artistic community, so suited Dennis perfectly. The fact it was also a war zone didn’t seem to faze him. The place boasted something of a schizophrenic personality: funky boutiques and smart restaurants jostled for space with burned-out cars and driveby shootings. ‘It’s a low-income place you can actually walk round,’ said Dennis. ‘If you don’t mind being mugged.’
Paranoia has always been one of the great themes of Dennis’s life and it was no surprise to anyone that his house was Paranoia Central, a modernistic fortress, a bunker rather than a home with its corrugated steel façade, no windows, heavy-duty entrance door studded with bolts and surrounding 15-foot fencing topped with razor wire. Even the patio sported a steel mesh roof in case a wandering gang member attempted to lob a grenade in from the street. Don’t expect either anything as straightforward as a doorbell; instead visitors had to punch in a special code and wait to be escorted within.
Gray Frederickson, who’d worked with Dennis on Apocalypse Now, recalls visiting the Venice house. ‘Dennis lives in a gated, guarded, almost prison-like compound right in the gang area of Venice, and I remember he walked me out to the car and I started up a conversation and he said, “You better get in the car and go, this is not a good place for us to be standing.” I said, “Why do you live in a place like this, Dennis?”’ Because he revelled in it, he loved to reel off the latest crime statistics to visiting journalists. ‘On my corner there’s seven people killed on average every two weeks,’ he told a reporter in the early nineties.
By the 2000s the area had calmed down a bit, only to be blighted by yet another gang war. Again, Dennis was on hand with the statistics, this time to the Sunday Telegraph: ‘On my corner seventeen people were killed and seventy wounded during a three-month period in a Mexican-black drug war,’ adding for good measure, ‘And they shot the neighbourhood watch person a couple of blocks away, shot him sixteen times.’
Remarkably, not only did Dennis feel safe in the area, he’d never experienced any trouble. Maybe the muggers and gang bangers were too afraid of him. Walking home one day, he overheard a couple of locals say, ‘Don’t go in there, man. It’s that crazy person lives in there. Any person that chooses to live in a prison is a crazy person.’ But he was always on guard, ever aware of what suddenly might happen, like stumbling innocently upon a drug deal going down on some otherwise deserted stretch of pavement. ‘That would definitely constitute adios, Dennis, and that would be a fucking shame.’
A prison it may look like externally, but inside the place resembled more a piece of industrial art. Incredibly, in the living room, like in a Bond villain’s lair, there is a steel wall that rises up to allow Dennis to drive in and park his car – inside the house! There’s also a studio for his own painting and photography, which he’d recently taken up again. Then, on the walls, a stunning collection of contemporary
American art – Warhol, Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, several million dollars’ worth of prime museum fodder housed in one of the highest-crime areas in the USA. Only Dennis. ‘That house is very much a reflection of who he is,’ says filmmaker George Hickenlooper. ‘It stands for the post-Apocalypse Now Dennis, the Dennis who became much more serious about being sober, became more serious about finance and more conservative. There’s an iconoclastic aesthetic to the house too; it looks different than any other house in the neighbourhood.’
Rehabilitated, Dennis ironically was emerging as a hero to a whole new generation of disaffected actors such as Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke. They sought his advice and knowledge, held him up as this iconic figurehead of chaos and rebellion, someone who’d strayed pretty substantially from the path most of us trod, done his own thing, survived and returned to tell the tale.
Sean Penn, Hollywood’s current badass, had a script about cops fighting gangs in Chicago and wanted Dennis to direct. ‘I read it and told him it was the worst piece of shit I’d ever laid eyes on.’ There was no bite, said Dennis, no relevance to what was happening on the streets today. Dennis wanted to relocate the story to LA, where he knew the gang situation was out of control. ‘Are there gangs in LA?’ one studio executive asked Dennis at a script meeting. Looking incredulous, Hopper replied, ‘Jesus, there are gangs in my alley!’
It was an amazing turnaround, Dennis directing a mainstream Hollywood movie after years of Hollywood refusing to even give him a shot at directing traffic. ‘As everyone knows Dennis was slightly an erratic character,’ says producer Robert H. Solo. ‘It was like pulling teeth really dealing with him, though he kept making a big deal about the fact that he was now clean, that he wasn’t drinking or smoking or taking drugs, because the studio was afraid to hire him. They only agreed because they loved Sean Penn and wanted Sean to do the movie. And because he wanted Dennis Hopper, he got Dennis Hopper.’ Now he had a chance to prove himself a better director clean than he was off his face. ‘And to be honest once we got going, Dennis was ok, he did a good job,’ admits Solo. ‘And was on his very, very best behaviour.’ No, Dennis wasn’t the problem on Colors (1988), his star was: Sean Penn. Dennis genuinely feared that Penn might end up in prison before the film was finished, such was his reputation and tendency to violence. During a break in filming an extra took a photograph of Penn, who ran towards him and knocked the camera out of his hand yelling, ‘You bastard. Don’t take any pictures of me between takes!’ and then punched him in the face. Somehow Dennis guided Penn through the film and they ended up close friends. Penn would name one of his sons after him, Hopper Jack, a tribute to both Dennis and Jack.
Much of the film was shot on Dennis’s home turf of Venice, due to the inordinate amount of gang activity in the area. He also took the gamble of employing real LA gang members to act as extras and technical advisers. The day 140 gang bangers arrived at the studio to audition scared the shit out of the movie executives. The cops said they’d never seen so many gang kids in one location in their lives. ‘We also shot the film right in the real gang territory,’ says Robert H. Solo. ‘We used to get threats and often I needed a bodyguard to see me safe out of the location site and back home. We were in the black gang territory, the Latino, the Hispanic, and they would all come around. So it was a bit frightening at times. But Dennis thrived on it. He absolutely loved it. The more outrageous it was, the more he liked it. But that’s Dennis, that’s his nature, that’s his personality.’
When Colors opened it courted huge controversy, particularly in LA, due to its depiction of Latino and black gangs. Protesters marched outside cinemas accusing the film of glorifying violence. Dennis watched on closed-circuit TV as members of the Guardian Angels, the famous community-protection group formed in New York, paraded outside his home calling for his film to be banned. Nervous theatre owners beefed up their security, fearful of gang shoot-’em-ups in the aisles. In the end there was little bloodshed in the stalls, save for a few arrests of wanted gang members attending screenings.
In 1989 Kit Carson invited Dennis to be guest of honour at a film festival he’d organised. After a screening of The Last Movie Carson hosted a discussion on stage. ‘Dennis, tell me what method acting is like?’ Dennis looked at Carson, ‘Sure,’ he said and then stared down at the table between the two of them and began moving his fingers around the glass surface. ‘I’m thinking about my father’s death,’ he said. ‘After a while he looked back up at me,’ Carson recalls, ‘and there were tears coming down his face and his voice broke. And the whole audience, about four hundred people, just gasped. That’s how real Dennis is, he can put himself into another reality and be absolutely real there. That’s what making movies is about. It was a stunning moment, that he put himself back in the moment when he learned that his father had died.’
They say a Martini is like a woman’s breast: one ain’t enough and three is too many.
In 1987 Gary Hart looked a shoo-in to claim the Democratic presidential nomination, but his opponents took comfort from the fact that he still consorted with Warren Beatty and sometimes stayed at Mulholland Drive. There were even occasions when Hart used the house when Warren was away, leading to speculation that he was being unfaithful to his wife. Hart and Warren did seem to be spending a lot of time sitting round swimming pools with young ladies. His advisers warned him of getting too entangled with the Hollywood set, but he ignored them and stayed loyal to his backer.
Such criticism obviously hit home, forcing Warren to refute suggestions that his ‘supposed’ lifestyle would hurt his candidate. ‘Maybe twenty years ago, but not today. I don’t believe the majority of people in this country are interested in what your sexual preferences are.’ Warren was soon to be proven very wrong. The public, and most importantly the press, were very interested indeed in Hart’s sex life. And Warren’s naivety on this point made him something of a liability in Hart’s bid for political glory.
Sick and tired of the rumours that he was playing around, Hart challenged the media to follow him 24/7 to check that he was indeed keeping his pants on. It was a stupid tactic, a self-inflicted wound that would prove fatal. Reporters gleefully took up the challenge and three weeks into Hart’s campaign the Miami Herald, after camping for days outside his Washington residence, revealed that a woman had stayed overnight while his wife was in Denver. Hart did what all politicians do when faced with such accusations: he denied everything.
What happened next couldn’t be so easily waved away. A photograph appeared showing a very sexy twenty-nine-year-old swimsuit model called Donna Rice sitting on Hart’s lap. Oh dear. That didn’t faze people like Jack, who chipped in helpfully: ‘I’m a Hart supporter because he fucks. Do you know what I mean?’ Clearly, Jack was voicing the minority view. The bulk of the country saw only a liar and a hypocrite and many of Hart’s supporters defected. Warren told him to stand firm but it all went pear-shaped when the Washington Post threatened to publish more lurid details. That was it: Hart threw in the towel, his political aspirations apparently over. Charles Manson had more chance of becoming president than he did.
Incredibly, Hart re-entered the presidential race in 1988, his wife loyally by his side. It was a decision, according to the New York Post, that Warren had a major hand in, telling Hart that he had every right to keep his private life completely separate from his political career. But no one took Hart’s candidacy seriously and after a few weeks he pulled out yet again.
Looking back, it does seem as if Warren wasted a lot of his time on someone who turned out to be a political also-ran, but screenwriter and friend Tom Mankiewicz isn’t surprised Warren gravitated towards him. ‘I think it was no coincidence that Gary Hart was very good-looking and was the guy that got caught with the girl on the boat. It was just so fitting that that would be the politician that Warren would have a proclivity for; it was perfect. People said at the time, when Gary Hart was running for president, the problem is Gary Hart wants to be Warren Beatty and Warren Beatty wants to be
Gary Hart.’
Tell me something, my friend. You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
Ever since a Batman movie was first mooted in the early eighties Jack Nicholson was favourite to play The Joker. Batman’s own creator Bob Kane envisaged the actor in the role above anyone else, using a doctored photograph of him from The Shining to show studio executives, replete with green hair and kabuki-like white face. ‘Get Jack Nicholson,’ he’d roar. ‘He is The Joker. Get the man!’
The project was in limbo for years until producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber picked it up and offered the directorial reins to Tim Burton, who’d recently scored a hit with the wacky comedy Beetlejuice. Burton was someone determined to turn the direction of Batman away from the campy TV show of the sixties back to the dark, noirish original DC comics of the forties. It was during the making of The Witches of Eastwick that Guber and Peters first asked Jack to play The Joker. It was four o’clock in the morning when they rang and Jack, yawning, heard them make the offer. ‘The Joker!’ he replied. ‘In Batman! Babe, you’ve got to be joking. I wouldn’t do that even if the studio paid me fifty mil.’
Warner Brothers, who were already throwing millions at the project and desperate to land Jack – he was their insurance – told Guber and Peters to make the actor an offer he couldn’t refuse. And indeed they did. Jack duly signed on, giving huge momentum to the whole enterprise. ‘It was mainly because of Jack that the adrenaline ran so high on that movie,’ said production designer Anton Furst. ‘His casting was so fucking obvious. I don’t think there was ever a part more tailor-made for him.’ It also turned out to be the shrewdest financial deal Jack ever made. On top of his $6m fee he also negotiated a percentage of the box office and, crucially, a piece of the merchandising action. When Batman became the biggest grossing film of 1989, with toys and other spin-offs selling by the bucket load, Jack reportedly benefited to the tune of a whopping $60m. Such colossal remunerations caused commentators to suggest that stars’ salaries were driving up the cost of movies to breaking point. But as Jack helpfully pointed out, ‘They won’t pay it to us if you ain’t worth it. Period.’
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