Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Milian had always done exactly what Jimmy told him to do and now fate brought him here to Peru, to play the fake priest for Jimmy’s friend Dennis.

  “I want you to meet the real priest that is a son of a bitch,” Hopper told Tomas when he first arrived. “This is the type of priest I want you to play.”

  Visiting the real priest inside his little hut, with its two beds divided by a table with a smoldering oil lamp, Tomas couldn’t help but share something personal weighing heavily on his heart. He confessed to this priest. Before leaving Italy for Peru, Tomas had gone to church in Rome to get into a spiritual state. Confessing his sins, he asked the Roman priest to forgive him. The priest refused. Tomas had wanted only to play a good priest, but came to Peru feeling damned.

  “Tomas, you are more of a priest than I am,” said this real priest in his hut. “I give you permission to walk the town with your priest costume. I will tell the Indians that you are Padre Tomas that has come from Rome, Italy. This is a rosary that I give you as a present.”

  So the villagers greeted Padre Tomas from Rome. “Buenos días, padrecito. Buenos días, padrecito. Buenos días. Buenos días.”

  Sitting one night in his black alpaca poncho at a ceremony at the mayor’s home, Tomas was presented with a heavy tome with a leather cover. He ceremoniously entered in the words PADRE TOMAS MILIAN FROM ROME into its thick pages. A complete falsehood but there now for eternity, one more level of the production’s mixing of fantasy and reality.

  Meanwhile, and unaware of this latest impiety, the archbishop of Cuzco was getting ready to close down Hopper’s entire blasphemous production. He summoned Hopper to him.

  Sitting before the archbishop, Hopper laid on the charm. “We’re not doing anything. We’re really trying to . . .”

  He hoped the archbishop didn’t know anything about that letter from the pope, who’d declared him persona non grata for offensive and blasphemous imagery in Easy Rider. Hopper wasn’t even Catholic.

  “You know,” interrupted the archbishop, a twinkle in his eye, “I wanted to be in showbiz myself once. I was gonna be a stand-up comic.”

  Really? Working the angle, Hopper managed to win over the archbishop and pull everything together to shoot the final grand processional scene, in which the village priest relocates his congregation from their original church (built by conquistadors) to the fake movie church (built by Dennis Hopper).

  Bamboo microphone booms? Check. Bamboo movie camera? Check.

  Everything was ready for Tomas, the fake priest, to lead a gaudy religious procession in which stuntman Tex would be sacrificed. Starting at the original village church altar, Tomas, in flowing robes, walked holding the traditional processional monstrance adorned with a golden sunburst. The villagers walked in Padre Tomas’s wake, playing harps and flutes and throwing rose petals in his path, innocently giving up reality for the fantasy of the movies.

  “Cut,” yelled Hopper, but nobody cut.

  Something even more far-out had happened. While shooting the scene, Tomas truly believed he was Padre Tomas, leading a real procession. The villagers followed him, the camera was rolling. Setting the monstrance atop the fake altar, Tomas proceeded to consecrate the fake church and exited the set with a feeling of reverence and a holy glow. Hopper totally flipped out.

  “Wow, man! I mean wow! Beautiful. You know, oh wow!”

  “Oh my God,” said everyone. “Tomas is gonna be nominated. Tomas is gonna get the Oscar!”

  The camera operator looked as if he’d seen a miracle. “You don’t know what happened,” he told everyone. Apparently, while he zoomed the lens around the sunburst monstrance Tomas was holding, there was a sheep farmer with his herd in the distance; he passed right into the shot and everyone thought that was very groovy.

  “Oh wow, man. Yeah, wow!”

  The camera operator might win an Oscar! Tomas was going to win an Oscar! Hopper was definitely gonna win an Oscar and save the movies!

  It was time for Padre Tomasito to return to Rome. On his last night, he got drunk off of chica, the deathly local brew, and lashed out at the actor playing the “native director” of the villagers’ movie shot with a bamboo camera. The native director had been nasty to Tomas, not liking it one bit how people were saying that Tomas was going to get an Oscar instead of him. That night Tomas was so provoked that he bonked the man on the head with a bamboo cross. The Indian villagers laughed like crazy at their irreverent Padre Tomas. But the next morning, after sleeping off his hangover, a very embarrassed Tomas gathered his flock.

  “I confess. I am not what you saw yesterday. When I hit the guy in the head, I did that because I am not a real priest. I’m an actor playing a priest.”

  “Ohhhh, you are an actor priest!”

  “No, no, no, no, no, I am an actor. A priest actor.”

  This was obviously going nowhere, so Tomas slipped back into his role.

  “Yesterday I was drunk,” Padre Tomas confessed. “It was not the priest who was drunk; it was the actor who was drunk. A priest should never do what I did yesterday, but the actor in me betrayed my character.”

  Tomas flew back to Rome and his spaghetti Westerns and thought the whole matter was over and done with, until a letter arrived from Peru addressed to Padre Tomas. It was from the real priest.

  You don’t know how many problems you have put me in. There was a strike here with the Indians. They didn’t want to do anything because they wanted Padre Tomasito to come back. So the diocese in Lima had to put somebody else in my place and send me to a university to teach Quechua because the Indians wanted Padre Tomasito.

  Miraculously, Hopper left Peru in early 1970. He had his footage, his film canisters were full, and he felt he had done right by the village.

  “They thought we were going to destroy their village,” said Hopper. “They thought we were stealing Inca stones and looking for gold, but we got all that straightened, man, and now the people are beginning to groove, man. They’re gonna get their town together, man. They’re gonna break with that priest, stand on their own. It’s going to be gorgeous, man!”

  PART 4

  The Savage Journey

  Academy Awards after-party with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Phillips

  Getty Images

  TAOS

  I come from Kansas,” said Hopper. “All my uncles and my grand-uncles, when they made it, they got a Stetson.”

  At the Academy Awards in 1970, held just after he returned from Peru, Hopper hoped to jump onstage and accept an Easy Rider win for the best original screenplay and story, for which he’d been nominated along with Terry Southern—and, of course, Fonda.

  “You know, I’m suing Peter Fonda now,” Hopper told the New York Times. “Because we started out equal partners on Easy Rider, and he ended up seven points ahead of me. Seven points at $150,000 a point. The movie cost $340,000, and it may end up being the fourth-biggest grosser of all time. This year alone, I’ll make a million and a half on it—seventy percent of which will go to the government. The thing is I wrote the screenplay in two weeks and I never got paid a penny for it. At the time, I didn’t care. Peter said we could straighten out the financial details later.”

  None of this raised our hero’s estimation in the eyes of Peter’s father.

  “He’s a total freak-out,” retorted Henry Fonda, “stoned out of his mind all the time. Any man who insists on wearing his cowboy hat to the Academy Award ceremonies and keeps it on at the dinner table afterward ought to be spanked. That is not off the record. Dennis Hopper is an idiot! Spell the name right: D-e-n-n-i-s H-o-p-p-e-r!”

  “We’re a new kind of human being,” Hopper told Life, spreading the word about his people. “We’re taking on more freedom and more risk. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries. I think we’re heroes. I want to make movies about us.”

  First, of course, he had to finish the movie he was working on. Armed with forty-two hours of uncut footage from Peru, he was a
bout to stake his fortune on a compound, where he planned to edit The Last Movie. He’d originally thought of putting his monthly $100,000 Easy Rider installments toward buying Bing Crosby’s ranch in Elko, Nevada.

  “Best yearlings in the United States come off this ranch,” said Hopper.

  But he decided on Taos instead upon stepping into the sprawling three-story, twenty-two room adobe Mabel Dodge Luhan House, once owned by this wealthy heiress and doyenne of the arts who’d lived there like Gertrude Stein of the West. Mabel had christened her compound Los Gallos after the ceramic chickens dotting its clay roof. Behind the house stretched a dusty swath of Indian land with a large and mysterious wooden cross stuck into its earth like a conquistador’s sword. Thirty-three-year-old Hopper felt the vibes fit his mood.

  “A lot seems to happen to people at thirty-three, man,” figured Dennis’s friend country-and-western singer Kris Kristofferson, who’d been down in Peru acting in his first film role in The Last Movie. That’s where he wrote his song “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33,” a biblical ballad about Hopper. “Me, I’m thirty-three. Dennis is thirty-three. He has a real Christ thing goin’—pictures of himself everywhere. Christ was apparently thirty-three when he got wiped out.”

  All the same, Hopper didn’t intend to be sacrificed like poor Billy the biker, blown apart on his chopper after the Mardi Gras trip in Easy Rider. Bob Dylan had been furious with Dennis about the ending. He hated to think that the two rednecks who blasted Billy and Captain America off the road at the end of the movie for having long hair got away with it. Dylan wanted revenge.

  “Why can’t a helicopter come down and blow those guys right off the road?” he suggested to Dennis.

  Couldn’t Fonda pull out a machine gun and go after them? How could Billy die in the end?

  “What I want to say with Easy Rider,” Hopper said to his flock, “is don’t be scared, go and try to change America, but if you’re gonna wear a badge, whether it’s long hair, or black skin, learn to protect yourselves. Go in groups, but go. When people understand that they can’t tromp you down, maybe they’ll start accepting you. Accepting all the herds.”

  A certain set of Taos locals were ready to crucify their newest citizen. After all, somebody needed to be blamed for all the hippies who arrived in droves to live in communes like the one in Easy Rider. Hopper decided to bring some backup on what should have been a peaceful literary pilgrimage to the El Salto waterfalls above the little village of Arroyo Seco, just north of Taos.

  In this waterfall cave, the ancients had long ago performed human sacrifice, it was said, inspiring D. H. Lawrence to write a chilling fable warning against tampering with primal forces. The caves lay on land claimed some 370 years before by pockmarked Hernán Martín Serrano, whose seed still flourished centuries later here in Arroyo Seco, a hotspot of the so-called Chicano-Hippie War plaguing the region.

  Not long before, this clash resulted in a few Chicano kids jumping a smelly hippie invader who was on his way to his crash pad. When the proprietress of a local weaving shop ran out to help, the Arroyo Seco kids told her to go back to Russia, then beat up her son and blasted her window with a shotgun.

  Strolling through Arroyo Seco with his posse—his brother David and two burly Last Movie actors—Hopper found himself facing off against a couple of Hispanic kids. On behalf of thirteen generations swearing allegiance to King Philip II of Spain, the kids called the international man of cinema a filthy hippie.

  Hopper had no intention of drowning in the local murk. His plan was to remake Taos into a countercultural Hollywood with his Alta-Light Productions movie company. His list included Dean Stockwell’s original screenplay After the Gold Rush, a script that inspired Neil Young’s album, as well as Me and Bobby McGee, a movie to be based on the Kristofferson song. Maybe Dennis would do that film about his Kansas childhood he’d been dreaming about for practically his whole life. The future was limitless, but first Taos needed to be tamed.

  Rather than give his usual rap—“We only look different; we’re all part of the same herd”—Hopper trailed the kids back to one of their homes and drew out his gun for a citizen’s arrest. As Hopper put it, “When the police came, they arrested us and held us on eight thousand dollars’ bail.”

  “We’re going to let you out a side door,” said the cops before escorting Hopper out of the courthouse. “We can’t protect you, because of the lynch situation.”

  As they walked out, one of the Hispanic onlookers, wearing waders since he’d been fly-fishing earlier that day, lunged at Hopper because he couldn’t stop thinking about what his crying mother had told him when he came home: “Some hippies had your brother and his friends in a sitting position on the side of the road with guns pointed at them.”

  Hopper remembered there were sixty or eighty farmers outside the courthouse with pitchforks, and the story continued to grow.

  “And then five guys just back from Vietnam came and told me, ‘We’re going to kill you.’ I pointed out to the police that I’d just been threatened. ‘Shut up,’ they said. And then I went the next day and called all my friends, stuntmen, ex-Marines, to come to Taos and we went into town and bought every rifle and semiautomatic gun we could find.”

  Packing a submachine gun and flanked by the Mabel Dodge Luhan House’s ceramic chickens, Hopper stood watch on his roof in case any Chicanos wheeled across the land in a horde of tricked-out all-terrain vehicles. What would happen to his movie if they dynamited his editing shack?

  In an attempt to let the town know he meant business, he stormed a school assembly at Taos High School, which the boys on his watch list attended. Hopper addressed the students from the podium—an impromptu motivational speaker.

  “Look, we know what you’re doing and that may be fine for now, but there’s a lot of people coming back from Vietnam and they’re going to have long hair and they’re going to look like me in this poncho and so on. But understand they’re going to have one of these—”

  Whipping out a machine gun from under his woolly poncho, he calmly walked out, leaving the local Chicanos and hippies to weave tales of their own about the gringo loco, Dennis Hopper.

  “Hopper went to Seco and went into a bar, and I believe they threw him out,” swore one hippie. “Then a bunch of local Chicanos came up and started fuckin’ with him, hard. Hopper went back to his house and got his guns, strapped them on, came back, and walked into the bar. This dude that was fuckin’ with him? Hopper shot him. Bam! That’s a true story. The Hispanics didn’t know what to do, piss or shit, but Hopper made it very clear up in Seco—their turf—that there was a new boy in town and they’d better not fuck with him, and they’d better not fuck with the hippies, or he’d come back with a vengeance and beat the living fuck out of them.”

  Free from the distraction of his movie getting blown up, Hopper breathed in the deep, pure high desert air of Taos, and began editing The Last Movie in the fortress of his Mud Palace, as he’d rechristened the Mabel Dodge Luhan House to the dismay of certain society matrons. He even threatened to put up a blinking neon sign.

  THE MUD PALACE

  Hopper would always remember the road trip he took back in 1956 to Las Vegas to see Orson Welles, who was performing a magic show at the Riviera Hotel. In a tuxedo, Welles sandwiched in recitations from The Merchant of Venice while making a woman float in midair and passing a hoop over her body to show the trick was real.

  A battered boy genius, Welles was broken in more ways than one after snapping his ankle under his three hundred pounds of girth. He’d scoured Europe for funding for his films and was devastated at his inability to make another film with anywhere near the grandiosity of Citizen Kane. He took the stage in New York and got a standing ovation as he launched into King Lear, but by the time the curtain closed he’d broken his other ankle. Escaping scathing reviews, rotund Welles limped off to Vegas to do his hocus-pocus.

  Taking a break from editing The Last Movie, Hopper made an appearance in one of Welles’s unfinished films, T
he Other Side of the Wind. In his cowboy hat, he played the autobiographical role of a “New Hollywood” director who wants John Wayne’s audience to see his films. When the shoot was over, Hopper and John Huston, who had starred as the grizzled old director, left to visit John Ford in a hospital in Palm Springs. With a black patch over his bad eye, Ford looked worse for the wear after a hip operation. He had only a year or two left in him.

  If Hopper was really a man, he’d get in bed with Ford for a photo.

  The shutter clicked on three trailblazing directors of the Western myth, all crowded into the same bed.

  Then came the torrential flood of articles from the media wave that had stormed darkest Peru, detailing Hopper’s self-proclamation that, like Welles, he was a genius who was going to save American cinema. At a certain point in shooting The Last Movie, Hopper had decided he didn’t need a script—the same script he and Stewart Stern had been crafting for five years.

  “It’s all dialectic, I either LOVE or I HATE,” Hopper jabbered on to the Los Angeles Times down in Peru. “There are no maybes or supposes. It’s one through nine. There are no fractions. There was no Inca Dinka Doo in the screenplay, but it’s there now!”

  Stern hadn’t talked to Hopper for some time when his phone began to ring. It was Hopper—calling from Taos.

  “You’ve got to look at the film,” Dennis launched in. “I don’t know what to do with it. I bought the local theater. The theater’s mine. You can sit in it all day and watch every bit of film.”

  In addition to moving into the Mabel Dodge House, Hopper had purchased the El Cortez Theater, a few miles away in Ranchos de Taos, Taos’s little sister community, so that he could screen his masterpiece-in-progress to a crowd of sycophants and locals, at least once a week. He pumped in thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, including a sync-sound system so that the community could experience the full effect of his vision.