by Tom Folsom
“Well, that’s what’s happened to America, man,” Fonda told Rolling Stone. “Liberty’s become a whore, and we’re all taking an easy ride.”
Terry withdrew into the Clark Cortez motor home production vehicle/on-the-fly-story-conference-room rambling through the streets of New Orleans. Karen affectionately called the camper “the Winnie.” Passersby might have seen a crumpled page of script ripped from the onboard typewriter go flying out a curtained window onto the bead- and confetti-littered street, or heard Southern, Hopper, or Fonda screaming inside—likely all three. The buzz among the crew was that Terry, being the screenwriter of the trio they called the “brain trust,” was there to write scenes with Hopper and Fonda.
Nobody was sure what was giving them such a hellish time in there. Could they not decide on the scenes they were going to film in Mardi Gras? Was there even a script? Or was Hopper overly confident about his ability to make up scenes based on in-the-moment inspiration?
“I believe what Cocteau said,” went the familiar Hopper rant. “Ninety-eight percent of all creation is accident, one percent intellect, and one percent logic!”
At any rate, something was being cooked up inside the roving Clark Cortez, which was like hell—or artistic creation and destruction—on wheels. The Winnie charged forth through narrow cobbled streets bloated with revelers. A circus car that had lost its train, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on acid, this character with headlights for eyes emitted the strange shouts, shrieks, and hysterical laughter of its riders, typically heard at odd hours. She huffed, puffed, gurgled, and belched out a cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke, seeing as everyone in the RV seemed pretty loaded. Terry was a big martini man, and Hopper enveloped everyone in his fairly continual cocktail of dope mixed with red wine, pills, speed, and whatever Cracker Jack prize made its way across the Winnie’s communal table.
While the brain trust battled their demons inside the Winnie, some crew members dropped the occasional tab of acid, waiting around to be told what the hell they should go shoot today. Fed up, some simply got up—“Well, screw it. Let’s just go out and start shooting things.”
Like tourists with very expensive cameras—an Arriflex, a Bauer, an Eclair—the crew shot the big Mardi Gras parades rolling down Canal Street. Flambeau carriers lit the path of three golden seahorses in the Krewe of Endymion parade. Bandits and a train barreled into a fake tunnel on The Great Train Robbery float celebrating the 1903 silent film. Crowds cheered on Paul Bunyan and Daniel Boone taming the frontier.
Meanwhile, another character of American folklore was going a little nuts.
In his fringed buckskin jacket and a necklace strung with white seashells from Baja, Hopper pushed his way into the French Quarter with his movie, weaving through street vendors hawking foot-longs and multicolored paper happy flowers in full blossom on long sticks.
“Be quiet, please. I’m trying to shoot a major motion picture over here!”
The crowd threw beer cans at him.
At night at the airport Hilton, Karen and Toni shared an uncontrollable case of the giggles. They felt trapped in Dennis’s movie. It was too funny. It was such a horrible disaster.
“We’ve made a terrible error in our lives!” squealed Karen.
They were laughing so hard, they fell off the bed. Suddenly a huge reel of black film came rolling through their door like a tumbleweed. Chasing after it was Hopper, followed by his cameraman. Apparently, Hopper was on a mission to collect all the canisters of the film they’d shot so far.
“I don’t trust you. Gimme all your film. I want it in my room!”
CRAAAASSSHHHH!
In the course of the struggle, a television was hurled across the room. The two rolled over each other until finally Hopper found himself sitting on top of his cameraman, straddling him.
“I love you, man,” said Hopper with genuine emotion. “Man, I love you.”
Securing the film, Hopper proceeded to try to wrench away the camera to go out to the parking lot and shoot the fantastic neon signs caught in the puddles. Karen noticed that he was always out at night, shooting, shooting, shooting. She worried about him and offered him some health-food shop vitamin E to keep him going.
“What’s that?” he said, examining the pill.
“It’s a vitamin, Dennis. It’s not gonna hurt you.”
Capturing the neon in the puddles was the least of his worries. The final big day of Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday was the next morning, and Hopper still hadn’t gotten a shot of their characters—Billy, Wyatt, and their two whores—in one of the parades.
Unfortunately, nobody had a permit to film the actors in those official parades about to hit Canal Street. That left only the ramshackle African Zulu parade with blackface warriors dancing and gyrating in grass skirts. The whole procession disembarked from the royal barge and meandered uptown according to its own whims and free will. With no set schedule, it was anyone’s guess how to catch the parade.
Luckily, among Hopper’s crew was cameraman Les Blank, self-schooled in the arcana of American spectacles—from kudzu to zydeco—and a dedicated student of the black Mardi Gras. A socially conscious great white hunter, Blank knew how to chase down the Zulu.
The Clark Cortez took off uptown as inside its tinny abdomen Hopper tried to work the Zulu into his script. The crew saw him constantly trying to control the chaos around him instead of just going with the flow—“Why doesn’t he just roll with what’s happening?” Deciding to leave the director behind for a little while, they went off and did what they thought needed to be done. Emerging from the Clark Cortez, which was parked on a little sandy spot near an intersection, Hopper got out and stewed in his sand pile as his movie walked away from him. Like Orson Welles once said, dashing off to Rio in a Mars flying boat to film Carnival, “You know, I hate carnivals.” In the swirling chaos, Hopper now felt the same. Rio was where Orson had lost control of The Magnificent Ambersons. Sweat bubbling on his brow, Hopper was terrified of his own grandiose failure.
“Orson Welles failed, but like hell I’m going to fail,” he told his crew throughout the shoot.
“Where are we?” asked Karen, grabbed by one of these rogue cameramen. “How are we gonna shoot this movie when we don’t have a director? We don’t have Toni or Peter.”
Feeling out to sea in the parades, Karen gave a local kid a buck to go find Hopper. But of course the kid went and got himself a soda and she never saw him again. Suddenly she heard the music and a thundering like a herd of approaching elephants.
“Mardi Gras is coming!” she cried. “What do we do?”
“Get in the Mardi Gras,” one of the crew guys told her.
Karen reached out to touch a gigantic white-feathered headdress that in keeping with the celebration’s tradition, the Mardi Gras Indians wore as they faced off against each other, preening and fluffing their feathers and spewing their rhyming verbal throwdowns until one was finally forced to give in to the other by calling him the prettiest, thus submitting to his foe. The posturing was all part of an elaborate ritual of life and death from back in the day when the Mardi Gras chiefs, before going off to fight their bloody turf battles, abided by the saying, “Kiss your wife, hug your momma, sharpen your knife, and load your pistol.”
The Indians swung their hatchets to make way for the chiefs. Karen was lost in the jewels and feathers of the Zulu parade. Suddenly Hopper was there. He steered his movie through uptown turf, clearing the path to be filmed.
His pudgy face masked by a droopy mustache and long greasy hair, Hopper, in his fringed buckskin, marched around the real star, Fonda, the chiseled motorcycle god in his black leather jacket with an American flag sewn on back. A walking piece of pop art.
Tourists puked Hurricanes onto Bourbon Street. Girls flashed their tits for baubles thrown from the wrought-iron balconies. Hopper got his parade shots, but would Easy Rider ever be his film? Would anyone even clearly remember Billy, the freak sidekick with the ill-defined, nearly blurry features, a giggling ma
dman?
“I’ll tell you what made me want to become an actor,” James Dean had once told Hopper, “what gave me that drive to want to be the best. My mother died when I was almost nine. I used to sneak out of my uncle’s house at night and go to her grave, and I used to cry and cry on her grave. ‘Mother, why did you leave me? Why did you leave me? I need you . . . I want you.’”
Dean pounded on his mother’s grave, cursing her and wailing, “I’ll show you for leaving me . . . Fuck you, I’m gonna be so fuckin’ great without you.”
“You see that guy?” Dennis asked no one in particular, peering out the window of the Clark Cortez. “I’m gonna get him. I’m gonna get that guy.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Karen.
Karen was here in the Winnie, but Dennis was somewhere else entirely.
“Den-Den,” Terry called his friend. When Den-Den went over the edge, Terry would say, knowing how much he worshipped Jimmy, “Jimmy wouldn’t like that.”
Perhaps that .45 Jimmy used to sleep with accounted for Dennis bringing loaded guns to Mardi Gras, keeping him safe at night in the airport Hilton. Terry dug the weirdness. Den-Den was a groove and a gas and a visual genius and all, but what was with him constantly screaming at him in the Clark Cortez? Feeling worn down to the nub like an eraser, an exasperated Terry, who spoke in beautiful sentences, most of the time anyway, said, “I can’t any longer stand the cacophony of your speech.”
“Ya can’t stand the cacophony, huh? Cacophony, huh? Is that right?”
The following morning they were supposed to shoot the graveyard scene. Karen couldn’t go to bed, so horrified because nothing seemed arranged. Nothing that needed to be decided had been decided—nothing, nothing, nothing!
“Well, I gotta sleep, and I’m real wakeful,” she said.
Peter gave her some sort of pill, a sleeping pill, or who knows what-the-hell-kind-of-pill it was. Karen swallowed it, but instead of it getting dark inside her head, like a movie theater, to go to sleep . . .
“I can feel the outside of my skin,” she whispered to Toni in their darkened hotel room. “I can feel the outside of my body, but I can’t sort of, get in.”
The next morning, Toni announced to the brain trust, “You know Karen was saying some really interesting things last night about what her response was to whatever it was that Peter gave her, and I think she should write it.”
Sitting in the Clark Cortez in her fishnets, Karen typed up some dialogue. Terry sat beside her giving her some writerly advice.
“I would really love it if you would give me your underpants so I can smell them.”
The Winnie bumped along toward the cemetery. Mardi Gras was over, commencing the period of Lent, the time of penitence and prayer. From ashes they came, to ashes they’d go.
The cemetery gate creaked open with wrought-iron arrows pointing downward toward death. Stone angels watched Hopper enter their maze of crumbling tombs crowded onto shallow swampland. Here lay, among duelists and scoundrels, the Voodoo Queen High Priestess of New Orleans Marie Laveau. White chalk Xs marked her resting place.
Despite Karen’s jittery reservations, the graveyard scene had actually been scripted in the screenplay pages that emerged from the Clark Cortez madness. Her and Toni’s time in the graveyard with Billy and Captain America was to be a holy communion of acid and red wine, everything in keeping with the Gospel according to Dennis Hopper.
Could they hope to reach the kingdom until they became little children again and took off their clothes and made merry? Billy got inside one of the tombs with “his whore”—Karen—his lady of the night.
“You can go crawling in these walls,” warned Terry from the sidelines. “But there’s probably rats in there.”
As the director, Hopper occasionally jumped out of the scene to look through the camera, then came back in as Billy and poured a bottle of wine down Karen’s throat and laid on top of her and started kissing her, his princess goddess with her long reddish-brown hair and silver dress.
“I wanna be pretty,” cried Karen, real tears starting to fall. “I just want to be pretty.”
Looming above the scene was a beautiful stone woman nestled in the baroque marble mantle of the New Orleans Italian Mutual Benevolent Society Tomb. The Italian Statue of Liberty was what Hopper called her, or . . .
“It’s your mother, man,” Hopper directed, prepping Fonda before the shot.
“You can’t ask me to do that,” said Fonda. “Just ’cause you know my family history and because you married into it in a way doesn’t give you the right to force me to do that. I’m not about to do that on film. I don’t wanna do that at all.”
“No, you gotta do it.”
Even if it destroyed their friendship, Hopper was going to make Fonda get up on that statue and ask his mother why she copped out on him, killing herself in an insane asylum when he was only ten, the year before he shot himself in the stomach. In the Fonda family, she was treated as if she had simply ceased to exist. No service, memorial, nothing.
“No, I don’t wanna do it. I’m not gonna do it, man.”
Tears riddled their way down Hopper’s face as he tried to make Fonda get up on that statue.
“Gimme one good reason,” yelled Fonda, finally, out of total frustration.
“’Cause I’m the director.”
Fonda climbed up. Cradled by the stone woman, he wailed to his mother, telling her how much he loved and hated her. It would work perfect for the acid montage. Hopper captured something for his film that was real. Hungry to break new ground, he wanted desperately to express something that the world needed. He could already feel this biker flick was gonna be major, just like he’d told the crowd of drunks at Mardi Gras.
The light was breaking out above the graveyard. Hopper directed the camera to tilt and crawl up the side of a stone crypt to the gray sky above, and the sun with all its crazy energy shot down upon him.
LEWIS AND CLARK
Herky-jerky shots plagued with light leaks. Erroneous exposures. Wrong focal length. Jumpy telephoto shots. Wet lenses.
Unfurling in the screening room, the Mardi Gras dailies were not a promising kickoff for Peter Fonda’s Pando Productions. The movie seemed to have so much promise back when it was called The Loners, originally slated to be the ultimate AIP shocker fusing Wild Angels choppers with the druggy haze of The Trip. Z king Roger Corman had been on board as the executive producer. And as for the script?
Well, see, Corman had a philosophy about writers. Take Jack Nicholson, that actor-turned-writer who was always hanging around? Jack had actually refused to write The Wild Angels when Corman offered it to him. Because Jack wanted to be paid more than just scale. He kept on needling Corman about the downside of making movies for as cheap as possible, so Corman finally ended up giving Jack just a tad more to write The Trip. These two megahits ended up making $16 million on a combined budget of around $700,000. It was Z heaven for Corman to sit back and think about how little he could spend on a screenwriter while making millions on The Loners, starring two bikers who make a big drug score, hit the road and retire to Florida.
“We’re not arty-farty here,” barked AIP executive vice president Samuel Z. Arkoff, bankroller of Z pictures, in case anyone misunderstood studio policy, or had pretensions of making a great biker flick. That sounded dangerously close to breaking the Z studio’s golden rule: skimp by any means necessary. Smoking a fat cigar while calling the shots, Arkoff budgeted $340,000 for The Loners, twenty grand less than The Wild Angels. He drew up the contracts for Hopper and Fonda, who would both costar and write for cheap. Hopper would direct, sure, but Arkoff wasn’t gonna give him an inch. To keep Hopper from being an arty-farty auteur on his dime, Arkoff included a flytrap—like Audrey Jr., Corman’s giant human-eating plant in The Little Shop of Horrors. If Hopper fell more than one day behind schedule, AIP had the right to replace him—or else feed him to Audrey. AIP’s way or the highway.
“I can’t put that kind of pre
ssure on Hoppy,” said Fonda, going to bat for his eccentric friend.
Knowing all about these boys and their beefs with AIP’s gangland restrictions, Jack slipped their potentially great motorcycle flick over to Raybert Productions. It so happened that Jack, also desperate to climb out of the Corman sale bin, was writing a psychedelic mind-bender starring the fake rock group that the hip production company had created for their hit TV show The Monkees. Raybert was into movies being really far-out, heady—something like Fellini’s 8½, but Jack figured nobody would put up money for a Dennis Hopper flick, so adding Terry Southern’s name into the mix as a screenwriter brought real cred. “I mean, if you know Dennis,” said Jack, “you don’t exactly turn some money over to him and say, ‘No problem.’ You know what I mean?”
The Bert of Raybert, Bert Schneider, promised twenty grand more than AIP and no pressure on Hoppy, and with a check for a certain amount of Monkee money, the boys went off on their Mardi Gras adventure. But after they returned from the Big Easy, the results projected on-screen for their backers were, well . . . Jesus.
“An endless pile of shit,” remarked someone.
Fonda was prepared to give back the Monkee money. He personally didn’t think the film could go on after Hopper’s megalomania during Mardi Gras. If the dailies weren’t enough evidence of Hopper’s madness, Fonda had recordings of Hopper’s manic ravings in the Clark Cortez from the soundman, a groovy guy of the audio persuasion who thought it would be interesting to stick a mike up in the ceiling and just roll tape, vérité-style. It wasn’t that the guy had any particular plan of what to do with the tapes. He was just going with the flow. Or that’s what he thought.
Weighing the available evidence, Bert judged whether or not to let the wild-man director run amok with more of his Monkee money. Any normal executive would’ve kicked Hopper to the curb, but Bert, steering Raybert’s vanguard of hip, would’ve gladly made another Head—the Monkees movie that was a total box office flop—over the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night, which was too predictable for his tastes.
