by Tom Folsom
“Profit i-t we figured because the price was so low,” Fonda said. “Prophet the other way I wasn’t so sure of. But Dennis, he knew all the way.”
After winning the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, Hopper traded in his Baja seashell necklace for a glowing medal for the best movie by a new director. High off his phenomenal success, having spun what began as a chaotic shoot in the midst of Mardi Gras into one of the greatest box office smashes in moviedom, our hero embarked on his overdue masterpiece, The Last Movie.
TEX
After his blazing success at Cannes for Easy Rider, Hopper left for London to meet screenwriter Stewart Stern and scheme about how they could make The Last Movie. Still wearing his leather and fringe like Billy, Hopper refused to take off his cowboy hat and wouldn’t part with that Cannes medal hanging around his neck. Every morning, Stern arrived at Hopper’s hotel room to work on the script. Having just woken up, the first thing Hopper did was fire up a joint and rant on about the movie. Smoking joint after joint, brandishing his medal and wearing his hat, he paced the carpeting while Stern tapped away at his typewriter.
In the beginning was Tex . . . Hopper’s hero would be a stuntman cast in a lousy Western being filmed in Peru. At the climactic death scene at the end of this Western, Tex would be “shot” off his horse in the village’s dusty plaza. The director yells, “Cut.”
Seconds later, Tex dusts himself off, walks away. All this would happen to the amazement of the real villagers, who’d never seen a movie before: ¡Un milagro! How can a man get up after he’s been shot? A miracle! They don’t understand the concept of using cardboard wads instead of bullets. When the film wraps and the movie unit goes back to the States, Tex stays on in Peru to develop it as a location for Westerns.
“He’s Mr. Middle America—he dreams of big cars, swimming pools, gorgeous girls. He’s innocent. He doesn’t realize he’s living out a myth, nailing himself to a cross of gold,” said Hopper. “But the Indians realize it. They stand for the world as it really is, and they see the lousy Western for what it really was, a tragic legend of greed and violence in which everybody died at the end. So they build a camera out of junk and reenact the movie as a religious rite. To play the victim in the ceremony, they pick the stuntman. The end is far-out.”
Not being able to tell anymore where reality ends and fantasy begins, something strange begins to happen to the villagers as they mosey past the facades of a fake saloon, a fake gun shop, a fake church. Slipping into the setting, they begin to reenact their own version of the Hollywood movie and begin to “shoot” their own movie, using a camera made out of bamboo sticks. The camera is fake, but everything else is real: real bullets instead of cardboard wads, and real violence.
As much of a barbarian as Hathaway, the primitive “director” casts Tex as the hero, but this time really sentences him to death. Even the village priest is so caught between the fake and the real, he doesn’t even know where to take the dying Tex, all bloody after being shot. The real church or the fake church?
Cut to: TEX’s face is covered with buzzing flies. Almost arrived to the village, the people carry him to where the road and street come together, then they stop. To the right at the bottom of the street is the plaza, with its ancient REAL CHURCH. To the left is the movie street, with its CARDBOARD CHURCH at its head. The people stand there, looking from right to left and back again, not knowing what to do. The flies buzz, the horse whinnies, no one says anything. They set the litter down on the street, look to the PRIEST for instruction. He comes to crouch in the dust beside the litter, fooling with his beads, looking at Tex, pondering. After a long time a MAN speaks. “Which one?” he asks in Spanish. “Which church?” The priest ponders, the people wait, some sit down in the road. MARIA clings to her fur stole, fussing the dust off, fluffing up the fur with her breath, weeping. The breeze disturbs the flowers on the camera made of sticks.
“Where is that, where is that coming from? How did you do that?” asked Hopper, peeking at the typewriter.
“Well, while you’ve been talking, I’ve been writing the script!”
“That’s amazing.”
Huffing and puffing, lighting up a new roach when the last had been misplaced, Dennis wasn’t the same Dennis who Stern knew from their earlier years on Rebel. He was more unhinged.
Hopper saw his follow-up to the money-making machine of Easy Rider as the great American art film. He had originally hoped to shoot The Last Movie in Big Duke’s Wild West town of Durango, but because corrupt Mexican officials were eager to censor the picture, he decided to go to Peru. Over Christmas 1969, he flew to Lima to scout for locations. Everything was closed in the capital because a left-wing communist military dictatorship had declared a four-day holiday to celebrate its seizure of American oil interests.
Hopper took a rickety cab to a town in the Andes on the shores of the largest lake in the world, Lake Titicaca. Despite its stimulating name, Lake Titicaca was frigid. Hopper hated the goddamn place, but as he walked down a street that was ragged with stray dogs, the sound of Bob Dylan playing on a jukebox wafted on to the lonesome path and led him inside a bar. In this watering hole, a couple of Peruvian kids were drinking beer and eating peanuts, tossing the shells on the floor. They agreed with Hopper. They all hated their town, too, but one of them told Hopper he must go to Cuzco, a city in southern Peru. Everybody knew the most beautiful women lived in Cuzco.
Yes, man, Hopper, the wild American, had to go to Cuzco!
On the way to this capital of the Inca Empire, the taxi driver had a curious habit of not letting anyone pass. It was very strange how as soon as Hopper arrived, he ran into a classmate from Helix High, a pretty far-out coincidence. A Helix Highlander living in Peru working as a travel agent? With his tendency toward paranoia, Hopper wondered who’d sent him. Was he an agent for the secret police?
“You’re not going to find much here,” said the Highlander. “But in the morning, you should take a cab to Machu Picchu.”
The following morning, all the taxi drivers laughed when Hopper told them he wanted to go. Unless the crazy American wanted to hike up the Inca Trail for four days, the only way to get to Machu Picchu was by a train that had left three hours ago! Hopper slunk back to the Highlander. Tacked all over the travel agent’s office wall, Polaroids featured the lush wonders of Peru, including the dreamy hillside village of Chincheros, where a stone fountain trickled in the middle of the dusty Spanish plaza with a gold conquistador statue.
That was where Hopper wanted to go, that strange, magical place in the photograph.
So, surviving on beer and dark chocolate, braving muddy hills, he took a cab that bumped up a rough Jeep trail strewn with enormous boulders, over stones laid by the Incas. Looming in the distance, 20,500 feet high, was the majestic bluish snowcapped mountain Dennis had seen in the Polaroids. It looked just like the Paramount movie mountain, only the native Quechua Indians called their majestic mountain of dreams Mount Salkantay, or “savage mountain.”
Graveyard scene in The Last Movie, Peru, 1970
MAGNUM/Dennis Stock, copyright © Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos
The last days of the sixties were upon Hopper, and as the new decade approached, he proceeded to drag his movie bit by bit up the mountain, an epic undertaking. A pack of trained movie horses was flown into Cuzco via cargo planes. Fifteen thousand pounds of camera and lighting equipment arrived, along with eight containers brimming with Western wear. Cutting off his dirty, matted hair, Hopper secured it in a Polaroid box and gave it as a Christmas present to his seven-year-old daughter.
No longer the unshaven hippie of Easy Rider, never without his buckskins and a lost-somewhere-faraway expression, Hopper was now becoming a lean, rugged cowboy. To play Tex in The Last Movie, Hopper saw himself as Tex’s alter ego and even took to calling himself Kansas. As the saying went, painted on the side of his muddy, red Ford pickup truck, KANSAS—HOLLYWOOD, CALIF. BROKEN BONES BUT RARIN’ TO GO!
In filthy Levi’s, a couple joints sta
shed in the pocket of his work shirt, a hat mashed on his head, boot on the gas, Hopper wheeled his truck down the treacherous Peruvian mountain path, terrifying a Life journalist sitting shotgun, and commenced his far-out tale.
“It’s called The Last Movie and it’s a story about America and how it’s destroying itself.”
PART 3
The Movie Within the Movie
PERU
Peru was a three-ring llama circus. Violent hailstorms bore down on Chincheros, beating Dennis’s Wild West frontier town like a drum. It took three hours for a fleet of taxis to bring the production up the slippery slope of a mountain and back down to Cuzco. If one vehicle met another on the trail, whoever decided to pull over was in danger of getting stuck in the mud, a constant battle; often the road was impassable.
Melting in a sweltering Peruvian hotel room, the stench of failure lingered over the prophet of Easy Rider, who wore a silver coke spoon like a crucifix around his neck and reeked of marijuana and llama and funky body odor. The drapes were drawn and portraits of saints hung on the walls around him. Hopper had gone native and his indigenous lover was asleep in the bed. He took a sniff from his tiny coke spoon and continued ranting to one of the slew of visiting reporters from Life, the New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, all hot to tell the story about what was next for Hollywood’s rebel genius.
“Listen, everybody in Hollywood is saying that Easy Rider was a mistake and that I’m an undisciplined kook. Well, an undisciplined kook doesn’t make Easy Rider in seven weeks. I am not a paranoid. I’m just protecting myself, man, against an industry that could care less about me! When Michelangelo was lying on his back, painting that ceiling, did the Pope give a shit about his welfare? All they care about in Hollywood is that the ceiling—the movie—makes bread. It all goes back to Kipling’s ‘If,’ one of my favorite numbers; it says something like, you can treat triumph and disaster the same, because they’re both impostors.”
The problem was if he spent too much and went over budget on The Last Movie, the studios could contractually take away his right to final cut. Maybe even send another director down to Peru to take his fucking movie away from him. He’d fought tooth and nail to get final cut of his movie so he wouldn’t end up like Orson Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons, butchered by the studio.
“Well, that’s not gonna happen, man! No way! This is my picture, nobody else is gonna get it!”
The whole production was threatening to collapse at any moment. Actors started throwing up from altitude sickness. One of the Mexicans attempted suicide after he was told there weren’t any more rooms for him to stay with the Hollywood guys in the hotel. The star and director of The Last Movie, Hopper was saddled with the knowledge that, according to Peruvian law, if the suicide died, the production would be responsible. Hopper could probably take a night in a dank Peruvian jail cell, but it now seemed that the FBI was closing in on him on account of a “situation” in a chartered plane hired to fly actors into Cuzco. Some burly ding-a-ling in Hopper’s cast had forced a Catholic stewardess to smoke a joint. She totally freaked out. The pilot had informed the head of the airline, and the Peruvian police threatened to arrest Hopper’s entire company.
“Now there is an investigation going on, and I will probably be busted the minute I set foot back in the States,” Hopper told a hip journalist from Esquire. “Can you imagine what’s going to happen to me, if the government decides my actors were offensive, smoking on that airplane? And what could happen to the movie?”
Fortunately, the police hadn’t discovered the big carry-on duffel bag full of drugs, which shouldn’t have been a problem because the cops were supposed to be paid off.
“For all I know, man,” said Hopper, “they’re telling the chief of police, between sessions, about how the hotel is full of junkies.”
Hopper was getting paranoid in this room decorated with saints. Their innocently knowing eyes seemed to watch his every wrong move, pleading with him to stay sane—for the sake of his great movie.
“They didn’t even leave me a joint, man,” he complained of his stolen pot stash. Another day, the hotel manager, who had become a familiar face to the production, informed Hopper to get ready because the police were going to make a big bust and everybody’s room was gonna be searched. Everyone had already split, so Hopper had to scoop up all the drugs floating around in the various rooms. Hiding them away only led everyone to suspect Hopper was doing most of them himself. Anyway, the real problem wasn’t those drugs brought from Hollywood.
Peru was nose-deep in cocaine, and Hopper, with visions of his cast and crew smuggling home coke in film canisters, could already picture how this one would go down. Their director would be the prime target to be busted by the FBI for an international smuggling conspiracy. Certainly there were those among his production who had the idea they could make a fortune by smuggling out the pure snow-white Andes shit. And that would really set back his grandiose film.
“Wow, whew! I don’t care for myself, man, but I’ve got to edit this picture when I get back,” Hopper told the Esquire scribe. “I mean this could affect the picture! Even before I get out of Peru, there could be a bust with all the ding-a-lings running around loose.”
Local authorities had already questioned him. If this wasn’t enough, one of his actors, a persnickety type, was threatening to send a complaint letter to the Screen Actors Guild detailing the abominable conditions of his dressing room pigsty, literally full of pig and llama shit.
As a director, Hopper could feel himself slipping into the part of Henry Hathaway. He’d actually cast his old nemesis as the director of the Western—“the movie within the movie”—that kicks off The Last Movie. It was a fair exchange, seeing as Hopper brought the Easy Rider multitude to see Hathaway’s True Grit, which Dennis acted in after Easy Rider, the two films coming out around the same time. Even though he just played a bit part as a bad guy who gets his fingers chopped off, Hopper got equal billing with Big Duke. As for flying down to Peru to be in a Dennis Hopper movie? Hathaway backed out at the last minute. Hopper instead cast Sam Fuller, a real gun-toting wild-man director.
“Whaddya want me to do here?” asked Fuller, wearing a Civil War cavalry hat.
“You’re the director, Sam, don’t ask me. I’m doing my film. You do your film.”
“Whaddya mean?”
Before Sam was an antiquated movie camera Hopper had acquired in Buenos Aires for the scene. Over there with Hopper, the real director, was a state-of-the-art 35mm movie camera expertly guided by his Hungarian cinematographer László Kovács. Hopper had yet to shoot the part about the camera the villagers make out of bamboo sticks.
“You see, Sam, that is my camera. This is your camera. You do whatever you wanna do.”
Hopper’s directing style was the complete antithesis of Hathaway’s bulldozing. For now.
“Action!”
The movie within the movie starred Hopper’s buddy Dean Stockwell as Billy the Kid riding in with his gang and getting shot off his horse. Dean had one line of dialogue, which he improvised. “Rose, my heart is burning!” Rose was the name of Dean’s girlfriend at the time.
Dennis didn’t direct Dean at all, but just went with the flow. As time on the shoot began to run out, new headaches arose hourly, the resounding theme being, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?”—or this picture within a picture.
Take this ding-a-ling actor suddenly stalling the production by mumbling his lines like a fake James Dean. The guy was asking all sorts of questions that had no place in a goddamn Western!
“Cut! Now you listen to me, man!”
“Wait a minute, Dennis.”
“Wait a minute for me, man! For me! I’ll tell you one more time. If you elaborate on anything in this shot we are dead! Just do what we rehearsed, Mr. Actors Studio, or I’ll cut off your cocaine supply. Now, get it together!”
On top of the multitude of problems threatening to blow his production over budget, Hopper had the
local priest to deal with. The priest was becoming a problem. Not the actor who was playing the fake priest, Cuban-born Tomas Milian, who had made his name as an Italian film star playing the Mexican in spaghetti Westerns. Tomas was terrific. Hopper thought the real priest was the problem.
Most recently the real priest had complained to the archbishop that some of the scenes being shot violated church doctrine. Of course it hadn’t helped that Hopper had held a special mass dedicated to James Dean.
“Here we go again,” said the fake priest, Tomas, rolling his eyes. “Jimmy.”
James Dean’s presence haunted the set of The Last Movie down to one of the fake Wild West facades named Jimmy’s Place. REMINDS YOU OF YOUR DESTINY was painted on the window. The Life photographer who’d taken those iconic rainy Times Square portraits of Dean, which essentially created his existential image, was strangely down in Peru, shooting Dennis. And acting in the movie, too. Throughout the production, there were all these kinds of coincidences and symbols pointing to Dean somehow being part of the production, or at least keeping an eye on it from above. Hopper showed off his talisman ring, “Jimmy’s Aztec death ring,” and he rubbed it raw. One night the ring broke off his finger. At the same exact moment, Hopper saw a comet soar overhead.
The fake priest, Tomas, had his own Dean hang-ups. Dean’s East of Eden performance changed his destiny, inspiring him to leave Cuba and go to New York to the Actors Studio, where he had met Hopper. Lonely at times, away from his family, Dean regularly spoke to Milian from beyond the grave via a Ouija board, advising him to switch agents, going so far as to give him the name of a big shot Tomas had never heard of—and reminding when the struggling actor was feeling low and unwanted, “You are my Cuban Hamlet.”
