Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Preparing for the arrival of this French guy—the president of the Cannes Film Festival, Robert Favre Le Bret, who was making a special trip to Taos just to evaluate the Easy Rider follow-up—they worked fifty-two hours straight. Finally, they got The Last Movie down to a five-hour version, just as Le Bret rolled into town with his gofers.

  “You talk about some pissed-off Frenchman,” said Todd.

  It wasn’t the story—because the story of The Last Movie was always brilliant. The frogs were offended that they had to sit through an unfinished film. It didn’t help that there wasn’t any wine to procure in Taos, seeing as it was a Sunday. How barbaric! Hopper managed to get some bottles out of the back door from a local merchant.

  As Hopper whittled his dream down to orthodox movie length, word spread further about his outlandish cinematic outpost in the West, a haven where a Hollywood outlaw like Jack Nicholson could raise hell unbothered. All sorts came—from presidential candidate Eugene McGovern to Big Duke, arriving on Hopper’s thirty-fifth birthday, pulling up a chair and sitting around the kitchen, entertaining the ladies. Bo Diddley was there one day, makin’ sweet potato pie in the kitchen, like a line from an old blues song. Everybody was curious to see what was cooking at the Mud Palace. Bob Dylan came through after hitchhiking across the country. He’d gotten a ride with some Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Sikhs, and was said to have written a song about it.

  Spring came, thawing the Mud Palace, bringing new life. The craggy Sangre de Cristo Mountains turned blood red. The giant cross stabbed into the Indian land behind the Mud Palace was for the rites of the Penitentes, a shadowy Inquisition-era sect that had been left to fend for themselves in the Southwest after the Spanish Empire fell. Surviving on raw belief, their members continued the ritual defacing of their backs, whipping themselves bloody to strengthen their conviction. One of Hopper’s artist friends, Ron Cooper, was driving on a mud road through the snow when all of a sudden he saw something that made him turn off his ignition and slide down in the front seat. He watched these cats come by carrying a cross. Someone was actually nailed to it. Crucified.

  The question at the Mud Palace was whether the Penitentes would actually “do their thing” on that cross come Easter. As the day approached, Hopper did his thing in the editing shack, watching over and over the decisive moment unfurl—Tex dies, Tex dies, Tex dies, sentenced to his terrific death scene by his native director.

  THE BLACK TOWER

  Ragged and unwashed, with long, greasy hair and a bandanna wrapped around his head, Hopper emerged from his year in the desert with a ninety-three-minute version shaped by mystics and madmen. It was 1971. Up went the elevator, taking him to the top of Hollywood’s Black Tower, a foreboding monolith of smoked glass and steel looming over Universal City.

  Bing!

  Sitting behind his desk in his office on the eleventh floor was Danny Selznick, David O.’s son, who’d been a fan of The Last Movie ever since it had been a screenplay sent down from his boss, Ned Tanen, the studio executive later to be the inspiration for the bully Biff Tannen in Back to the Future.

  “I don’t have a lot of patience for reading scripts. You read, don’t you?” Tanen had asked.

  Right off the bat, Danny could see this screenplay wasn’t your typical piece of Hollywood fluff. Danny, who admittedly wasn’t hip, had seen Easy Rider and thought it was really original and daring. He thought The Last Movie was a fascinating idea: a village that has this stuntman ritually sacrificed.

  “Heavy, you know,” he said, using the lingo, “but very interesting.”

  Once The Last Movie got the green light, Danny had thought about going down to Peru. He really wanted to see Machu Picchu, but he just knew, given the cast, they’d all be high as the Andes. He was a little intimidated.

  “Ned, you know, I’m gonna just come off as such a square. I will just feel like a fish out of water. Why don’t I just wait and we’ll see in the cutting room?”

  When the time came, Danny showed up at the Mud Palace, knocked on the door of the editing shack.

  “Come in, Danny,” welcomed Dennis.

  The log cabin, outfitted with three Moviolas, reeked of body odor. Seven horseshoes were still tacked to the wall, so was the Indian arrow stuck into the ceiling for good luck. But the six-foot metal shelves for stacking film canisters were completely empty.

  “Where’s the film?”

  “Gone. It’s gone.”

  “What do you mean it’s gone?”

  “You know, man, it’s in my head.”

  Bing!

  On the fourteenth floor, Tanen listened to Danny’s report. Broad-shouldered in his signature tan suit and sideburns, Tanen, who was hailed for his seat-of-the-pants savvy, played the part of the studio wunderkind as Universal’s counterpart to the too-cool-for-school Raybert Productions’ Bert Schneider, who’d financed and produced Easy Rider. Tanen was the head of a low-budget division connected to but independent of Universal, just like Raybert’s association with Columbia Pictures. Taking its cue from Raybert, Tanen’s division was charged with the mission of making movies for a million dollars and then raking in forty times that amount. The Easy Rider model. Easy-peasy.

  Tanen chuckled at Danny’s description. Ned was hip, he could dig it.

  “Whaddya expect from someone who’s on weed twenty-four hours a day?”

  Tanen had witnessed a fuckin’ orgy when he’d gone out to Taos, but, hey, that was just the deal that Hopper was doin’. Tanen had adopted the motto of his hipper Bert prototype over at Columbia: the filmmaker is always right. So nobody interfered. Even Lew Wasserman next door, the power-drunk chief executive of Universal, a.k.a. the King of Hollywood, had to stay out of it. Hey, Tanen was independent.

  Danny eventually returned to Taos. He sat at the El Cortez and watched a cut of the film. He thought Hopper gave a good performance as Tex. Or was his name Kansas? It was a little hard to tell.

  The movie was . . . well, it was really well made! It wasn’t necessarily a film for America, but maybe it could find an audience that appreciated its artistry—an international audience, perhaps? Any son of David O. knew it was critical to wow the audience with the ending. If you could wow them as the curtain closed, it didn’t matter what smaller missteps you had made along the way, you were golden.

  So the movie played on until Tex lay dead, crucified by the village. He was the victim of their misunderstanding, a grand critique of American identity seen through its most treasured genre: the Western. It was haunting and frightening. Powerful, especially if you knew the story going into the theater. Really, really terrific!

  And then . . . well, what was with that ending?

  “You’re not gonna leave that in? I mean, really, you can’t do that.”

  “Well, yeah, man, that’s what I wanna do.”

  “But Dennis, it’s so self-destructive. This is such a beautiful movie. Why would you do that?”

  “Well, it’s existential.”

  “To hell with existential, you know, it’s such a powerful story—so well made. You know, you’re harming its potential.”

  Bing!

  “You do know, Danny,” said Tanen—he’d been getting the part of the hip executive down—“the whole basis of our unit’s reputation is that we give filmmakers final cut. We don’t interfere. We don’t tell them. You’re not David O. Selznick. We don’t tell them how to edit their picture.”

  “You mean we let them sink publicly?”

  Tanen had a hell of a lot riding on this film—like his job with Universal. True, it made him antsy to have Dennis Hopper all the way out in Taos, beyond grabbing distance. And then there were all those magazines littering the publicity department, reports of monstrosities that had gone on in Peru. What the hell had Hopper been doing down there anyway? Rolling Stone had quoted him threatening to stick a rotating pineapple up Hollywood’s “giggie.”

  What the fuck was a giggie? Tanen had to play it cool. That was his role.

  “Well, we hav
e to give them a chance to expose it somewhere, where maybe he’ll get a public reaction and maybe your point of view will prevail.”

  “You mean our point of view will prevail.”

  “Okay, our point of view will prevail.”

  At last Tanen was about to see the results for himself as he took the elevator up to the private screening room of the venerable Dr. Stein, as underlings respectfully called Universal’s chairman of the board. The benevolent corporate sage had his own private elevator to transport him to the heights of his penthouse office.

  Bing!

  The doors opened to a palatial chamber lovingly filled with big band mementos. Dr. Stein had brought on Dennis Hopper in the first place. Unshaven and dirty, Hopper had showed up at his house one day during a luncheon. He was a friend of Dr. Stein’s daughter, Jean. Ordering an extra place to be set for him, Dr. Stein turned to the publisher of Time, or some major publication, and commented how this boy had just made $40 million for Columbia Pictures. Universal had lost $40 million in 1968.

  A former ophthalmologist, Dr. Stein had dedicated his life to seeing clearly, and with Dennis Hopper the writing on the wall seemed hard to miss. The old ways of Hollywood weren’t working anymore, saddling Universal with Thoroughly Modern Millie—about as modern as Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the swing band Dr. Stein had signed half a century earlier.

  “Give the kid what he wants,” ordered Dr. Stein.

  Now Dr. Stein sat down on a spindly chair in his French drawing/screening room. Joining him were his execs and Hopper’s weird-looking gang from Taos, including his editors Todd and Rol.

  Stepping into the projection room to help thread the film, Rol was amazed. Spotless. Meticulous. He could have eaten off the floor, walls, in this perfectly clean projection room. It was nothing like most projection rooms, typically holes from hell. Rol peered out at everybody sitting on the beautiful furniture. The gigantic oil painting they all were facing suddenly went away, revealing a pristine screen. More paintings came off the projector portals.

  The film began with Hopper as Tex riding through the lush Peruvian grassland. (Where was the simple plot line like in Easy Rider of two guys riding bikes across America?) It was dead silence for an hour and a half until Tex lay dead at the hands of the villagers. But in the interim the camera kept rolling. And rolling. Tanen got antsy. End the goddamn picture! All of a sudden, Tex got up from his supine position, brushed himself off, and turned into Hopper, saying, “Well, you know, here I am,” or some such nonsense remark, and that was the end of The Last Movie!

  The lights came on. The beautiful painting returned to position. Tanen swore he heard the projectionist say, “They sure named this movie right, because this is gonna be the last movie this guy ever makes.”

  Maybe it was Tanen’s fear talking, because other witnesses simply remembered dead silence with everybody watching Dr. Stein get up from his chair. He just shook his head.

  “Well, I just don’t understand this younger generation.”

  Baffled as he had been with that strange $40 million–making acid trip in Easy Rider that the kids seemed to like so much, he doddered off to his office, which was comforting with all of his mementos. He didn’t say he hated it, though anybody could see how the old man might be a little confused by the breast-milk scene, and the one where Hopper gets on his knees before a socialite so she can smack him around. They didn’t have strange Peruvian rituals with bamboo movie cameras back in Guy Lombardo’s day.

  “I wish we were dealing with him,” said Hopper, wistfully watching Dr. Stein go, but they weren’t dealing with him.

  They were now dealing with Lew Wasserman, and the King of Hollywood didn’t get this Easy Rider phenomenon. Why didn’t the kids like Thoroughly Modern Millie? It had Julie Andrews for chrissakes! Didn’t the kids like Mary Poppins anymore? Who was this filthy, unwashed, long-haired cowboy freak who’d been running around telling Hollywood he’d bury them, put them in chains?

  Well, nobody was gonna stick anything up Lew’s giggie, whatever the fuck that meant. He’d shove quality entertainment down the kids’ goddamn throats until they choked on it. What the hell was Tanen doing next door anyway? What the hell kind of show was he running independent of Lew Wasserman? Wasn’t The Last Movie a Universal picture and didn’t Lew run the show? What the fuck was Lew gonna do with this weirdo film? Lew had heard Selznick on the eleventh floor actually liked it—if only Hopper would’ve frozen the frame on the dead stuntman. Fade out. Maybe Selznick was right. The kid better die at the end.

  CANING

  Lew Wasserman’s office was decorated with a cane, the cane George Washington carried during that winter of suffering at Valley Forge, Lew told Hopper. Getting the screws put in him, Hopper ran out of the office, literally screaming in pain down the halls of Universal. Lew was killing him.

  Downing Scotch at the Chateau Marmont, Hopper couldn’t understand the insatiable bloodlust of the despot desperate to kill him off in the finale, too calcified by his evil Black Tower to even want to try to understand his vision. Why were the herds trying to stomp on him?

  A reporter sat before him at the Chateau. “They wanted me to kill the guy at the end. They didn’t care how I killed him, just kill him at the end.”

  The executive producer, Michael Gruskoff, tried bringing his director back to reality. He always tried to be straight with Hopper, ever since becoming his agent after Easy Rider. He adored Hopper. He’d never forget the night he went with Hopper and Fonda to see the Rolling Stones play at the Forum in LA. They had all dropped acid and stood on their chairs for the entire show. It was the best rock show Gruskoff had ever seen. At the end, Ike and Tina got onstage, invited up because the Stones really dug River Deep—Mountain High. Genius. Genius. After the show ended in the early morning, everyone went over to Fonda’s. Mick. Everyone. They hung out till the sun came up. When Gruskoff got home, his kids stared at him like, where the hell were you?

  Where the hell was he now?

  Hopper got his revolution, all right. After Easy Rider, a lot of studios started independent, low-budget divisions. It radically altered the Hollywood landscape. An entire younger generation of filmmakers now had an open field, old Hollywood practically served to them on a silver platter.

  Gruskoff had worked the angle. He got his client an extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime deal and final cut on The Last Movie. So long as Hopper kept within budget.

  Getting his client this deal was one thing, but Gruskoff always knew it was a dangerous proposition having Hopper do a movie. What you see is what you get, and you didn’t know what you were gonna get. But Gruskoff took the gamble and decided to become Hopper’s producer, too. Why did he have to get Hopper at the worst time?

  It was all those drugs. When you do all those drugs, you get very paranoid. And Hopper was paranoid to begin with. So paranoid that Gruskoff visited Taos every few weeks to hang out, see the editing, try to talk to him. Only Hopper was living such a chaotic life—walkin’ around with two holsters. Still, there was also just something so sweet about Dennis that even if he fucked with you, you had to love him. He knew how to get to you, no matter what. They’d have a little problem, then Hopper would just hug him and say, “Oh, Michael.”

  Why did he get Hopper final cut? That extraordinary deal came back to plague him.

  Hopper was fearless and didn’t give a shit about Lew Wasserman. But this was the King of Hollywood they were dealing with. Lew Wasserman could wreck a career in ways Hathaway couldn’t imagine—an honest-to-God blackball.

  “Let’s find a middle ground somewhere. Let’s keep the film that you want and you’ll have it. We’ll print your film, but let’s see what film they want, and see what it’s like. They can’t distribute it because you have final cut.”

  That’s the angle Gruskoff worked, but again, what he saw is what he got with Hopper.

  Rol worked into the early hours in the editing room they were using in LA, getting the print ready, laying in the trac
ks, syncing the sound. It was like setting up a complicated toy train—albeit one made of celluloid. He started feeling a glow about the film. Had Dennis Hopper been the Howard Hughes of his time? Rol could just imagine if Hopper were handed a billion dollars—the teams he would put together and the projects he would engage.

  Rol was very pleased. He thought they had created such a meaningful movie, one that finally fulfilled Hopper’s outrageous ambition of what a movie could be.

  All of a sudden, Hopper burst in. Rol could see from the look in his eyes, Dennis was charged with purpose.

  “I have a vision.”

  Oh no, not another one. Not now. When they were finally putting the baby to bed. Rocking it in its cradle.

  “Nothing led up to it,” Rol remembered years later, looking back to the strange night they finished editing. “Other than his frustration with Hollywood, and his fear that the movie would be taken away from him, and the way people related to his art and this film.”

  His friend Todd Colombo added, “It was a mind-bogglin’ cut to me. Somebody must’ve said something. We may never know who that was or what was said. Dennis respected people who had done something. He listened. He sought advice and counsel from people who had really done something in their lives. So perhaps some artistic person he respected said something. Anybody with a real creative heart can succumb to the pressures of the corporate world of the movies, but Dennis wanted to walk that fine line. He was sort of fearless.”

  It was the way he said, “I have a vision” that was spooky.

  “I want to put the end at the beginning,” said Hopper.

  On the director’s orders, Rol proceeded to lop off the last ten minutes of the film and surgically splice them onto the opening. It was very hard for Rol to make that cut. After that, it took people in Europe to appreciate the film.

  Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 1971, The Last Movie won best feature, about which Lew Wasserman could give a fuck. If Hopper wouldn’t reedit, Wasserman was going to show it for Universal’s contractually obligated time in New York and Los Angeles, then shelve it.