Dennis Hopper: The Hopper Agenda

When Dean died in a head-on collision days after completing Giant, Hopper's reputation as a hellraiser spiraled. He kept Dean's ring as a talisman (and has it still on his Taos, New Mexico, ranch), and seemed compelled to be the keeper of the Dean flame. Stories circulated that Hopper, offered a contract by Harry Cohn, advised the reigning bull of Columbia Pictures to commit an unnatural act. Hopper raised enough Hollywood hell for two, without being charismatic or beautiful enough, like Dean, to get away with it.

Perhaps on the hunt for another exemplar to replace James Dean, Hopper hung around the set of Sayonaia for "the opportunity of seeing Brando work." He also took up with Steve McQueen, who had begun his career emulating Dean, too. Though he was setting a fast pace on an unmistakable path to self-destruction, Hopper was, in his own mind, clearly creating a personal heroic myth. It is instructive to watch him, circa 1957, in The Story of Mankind, high-blown, hilarious hash boasting turns by Chico Marx as a monk who advises Christopher Columbus ("You would sail right off the oith into a dark abyss--boom!--no more ship!"), Virginia Mayo as Cleopatra, and Hedy Lamarr as St. Joan. Playing Napoleon, glum and Method-y in a sub-Brando way, Hopper strokes a bust in his likeness and lusts to be emperor, muttering, "A man is only as great as his fellow men will allow."

A certain kind of myth was indeed in the making. In one of Hollywood's celebrated ego confrontations, Hopper reached flashpoint with cigar-smoking, epithet-spewing director Henry Hathaway, on From Hell to Texas in 1958. "I came in at seven a.m. to do this ten-line scene that might have taken a minute to go through," says Hopper. By 11 a.m., Hopper and Hathaway were still at it; the director, a tyrant who, according to the actor, owned 40 percent of 20th Century Fox, wanted the scene done his way. Hopper refused. "I was difficult, man, but I was fighting a schoolmarm approach to directing," Hopper says. "Some actors have all these built-up [conceptions] about themselves, their image, and they're difficult because they're a star. But that's all bullshit. My baggage was just the work. It had nothing to do with anything else. [Hathaway] would give you directions for very strange, uncomfortable movements. But he had everybody moving like that, so if you weren't doing that, you were in another movie." The director pointed to stacks of film cans 15 feet high and told Hopper, "That's enough film to shoot for four-and-a-half months. You're going to stay until you do this scene my way."

Studio president Jack Warner himself finally phoned Hopper and bellowed, "Good God, what are you, nuts? Just do what f*cking Hathaway wants." At ten p.m., Hopper recalls, "I finally cracked." After Hopper did the scene Hathaway's way, the director said, "Kid, there's one thing I can promise: you'll never work in this town again."

Hopper went to New York, studied at the Actors Studio, tried his hand at poetry, painting and making assemblages, haunted the Museum of Modern Art, and ran with the Beat pack that included Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. To pay the rent, he shot fashion layouts for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. He did a brief stint on Broadway in 1961 in Mandingo with Franchot Tone.

But "movies were what I wanted to do," says Hopper. With MGM's signing of Hopper to a contract in 1960, he donned--for the first time--the face of The Good Citizen. But, publicizing his first effort under his new contract at MGM, Key Witness, a j.d. epic so cheesy that classy producer Pandro S. Berman removed his name from the credits, Hopper blew his shot at public redemption: "After Jimmy was killed, a lot of people in this business who didn't like him took their anger out on me," he told an interviewer. "Stories were circulated about me that just weren't true and they hurt me when I wanted a job." MGM dropped Hopper. (Hopper believes to this day that what he said then was true: "They really couldn't do anything to Dean. When he died, whether it was conscious or unconscious, they could do to me what they couldn't do to a major star.")

By 1961, the best Hopper could scrounge up was Night Tide, an aquatic Cat People that's now a cult classic but at the time was just a horror oddity made on the cheap by Curtis Harrington, a director of avant-garde shorts. Not until Henry Hathaway reclaimed Hopper from exile four years later-- with roles in The Sons of Katie Elder and, four years later still, True Grit--were "A" movies reopened to him. "Hathaway thought I was good and wanted to do something with me," Hopper explains. "What he wanted to do with me and what I wanted to do were different things. He still gave me line readings and gestures, but I did what he asked." At Hathaway's funeral in 1985 ("There were about 17 people there," Hopper says), the director's wife told Hopper, "God, I'm amazed you're here, but Henry loved you so much and talked about you all the time." Says Hopper, "I learned more from him than from any other director."

If the fire that raged between Hopper and Hathaway was Oedipally-fueled, the director's death seemed to bank the flames. Shortly thereafter Hopper learned that his father had cancer, and he decided to take him on a trip to France. "I thought, 'This is our chance,' " says Hopper quietly. " 'He's going to tell me something.' " Then, exploding in a horse laugh that rings the rafters: "He didn't tell me a fucking thing. Whatever secrets he had, he died with. The most interesting thing about him was that he wasn't interesting at all."

It is nine a.m. at a photo session at a soundstage days later, and Hopper is in his element. Jokey and professional, he sings along with a Roy Orbison album on the stereo, obviously meant to put him in mind of his role as Frank, the amyl nitrate-inhaling psycho of David Lynch's Blue Velvet. While the camera shutter clicks, Hopper strikes poses, cracking blue jokes while juggling prop balls and spewing gales of manic laughter, playing to the makeup and lighting crew. The previous day, Hopper had watched with his editor the earliest assemblage of The Hot Spot, his second directorial effort for Orion after Colors, the financially-successful cops-vs.-gangs movie that starred Robert Duvall and Sean Penn. He calls the movie, based on a racy 1951 dime novel Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams, "The best I've ever made," and describes it as "hot, way overboard, and one step from soap opera." Almost filmed once before in the early sixties with Robert Mitchum, the project came to Hopper in a new incarnation from director Mike Figgis (Internal Affairs), who dropped it last year. "We did some rewrites, but I preferred the Williams screenplay to the one by Figgis," Hopper says.

When Hopper's cast for the latter-day film noir--Sam Shepard, Anne Archer, and Uma Thurman--dropped out, he recast the female leads with Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly (Some Girls). Finding a new stud was another matter. "One thing we're light on these days is male and female sex symbols," growls Hopper, who was rejected by such usual suspects as Dennis Quaid, Patrick Swayze, and Richard Gere. Someone brought up the name Don Johnson. "I'd heard a lot of stories about how [Johnson] carries so much baggage that it's almost impossible to talk to him," says Hopper of the star whose film career could use a jump-start after Sweet Hearts Dance and Dead Bang. "But he was right for this part: he is an amoral used-car salesman who's led around by his cock. He knows women are his downfall and he'd like to stop, but he can't. Ingmar Bergman said 'Actors are objects and should be treated that way. If you have the right object for a part, you have the right actor.' I did."

Hopper invested some time getting what he wanted from his star. "[Johnson] has a lot of mannerisms and things that make me uncomfortable," says Hopper. "He acts smoking cigarettes. He acts drinking drinks. But I got him working real. He doesn't over-amp. I'm not saying he's going to be great in other films or whether he'll ever be good in a film again. But I took a lot of painstaking trouble making sure that he was good in this film. It was a lot of work that I wouldn't do for a lot of people. Because I care that much. He should have a healthy career for a while because of this movie. Everybody on this movie has something to prove. I just want a hit movie."

A hit is not what Hopper expects to have with Backtrack, assuming it is ever released. Of the tale of a hit man (Hopper] who kidnaps and falls in love with an eye-witness to a mob murder he is sent to kill (Jodie Foster], Hopper says, "I did a beautiful fucking movie. Strange, intense, slow--not Antonioni, but with a lot of wonderful, unspoken behavior between Jodie and me. But Vestron, being a schlock outfit, totally re-edited and rescored the movie to go for the meat, the action." Although Hopper cannot say enough good things about his Backtrack--as opposed to theirs--to date, Vestron, the film company which went under last year, has failed to find a distributor.

Hopper's career as a director began back in the wild days when he'd alienated Hollywood and was acting in psychedelic and biker movies for Roger Corman (The Trip). "The sixties aren't interesting or easy for me to think about," he says, referring to a decade in which he stalked his neighborhood, armed for Feds he thought were after him, fathered a daughter, and broke his wife Brooke Hayward's nose in a brawl. "It's just a miracle that I lived through it." In 1968, Hopper accepted an invitation by Peter Fonda, to whom he had been introduced by Hayward, to direct Easy Rider, a freeform road movie, which he and Fonda would co-write (with Terry Southern) and shoot for about $375,000. Hopper's state of mind at the time is the stuff of legend. A cinematographer on the picture hurled a TV set at him; dozens of crew members defected; Fonda tried shutting down production, and then, when the producer urged him to tough it out, he hired a bodyguard and packed a gun. The box office and critical success of Easy Rider turned Hollywood inside out. On the heels of a Cannes Festival award to Hopper for Best New Director, the press crowned him a tie-dyed genius.

Taking on the persona of The New Orson Welles, Hopper demanded from Universal full artistic control over his next project, The Last Movie, about a movie crew shooting a crummy Billy the Kid saga in Peru.

Screenwriter Stewart Stern (Rebel Without a Cause) created for Hopper the role of a mythic, terminally hip cowboy, "Kansas," after Hopper's birthplace. And, for his "allegory concerning the destruction of innocence," Hopper even offered to Henry Hathaway, that destroyer of innocence, the role of a warhorse director. (Hathaway declined; Sam Fuller filled in.) After shooting enough footage for a 40-hour movie (while tales of drug-and-sex binges floated from the Andes to the studio boardrooms), Hopper announced that he wanted a year to edit his magnum opus. "This is the big one," he told the press. "If I foul up now, they'll say Easy Rider was a fluke."

Bursting with hubris, Hopper made the cover of Life, turning himself out nattily in a Stetson, holding a dandelion and a football. The Last Movie won top honors at the Venice Film Festival but was greeted by less impressionable critics as a full-on, pretentious shambles. Hopper berated Universal for refusing to widely distribute his award-winner and retreated to Taos, New Mexico, where he bought the Mabel Dodge Luhan house, safe harbor to D.H. Lawrence, John Reed, and Robinson Jeffers. There he packed away unused miles of footage from his would-be epic, and sought moral support from fellow outcasts, actors Russ Tamblyn and Dean Stockwell. But Hopper's private and public selves were in disarray. He married ex-Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips, whom he planned to star in his next film, Me and Bobby McGee. The singer's father refused to attend the ceremony, writing instead: "Happy Halloween." The marriage ended after eight days.

At this point Hopper was on the skids as actor, director, and human being. In 1975, two years after his last acting job in a woefully unhip comic western, Kid Blue, Taos police busted him for allegedly running wild in a public square packing a loaded .357 Magnum. Hopper pleaded guilty to counts of verbal abuse, disorderly conduct, and possession of a deadly weapon. Throughout the seventies, his Drunk and Disorderly decade, Hopper veered into self-parody in indifferent movies (Mad Dog Morgan, Tracks) until, in 1977, Wim Wenders used his spacey menace to counterpoint Bruno Ganz in the title role of the spidery thriller, The American Friend. Francis Coppola tapped into a more manic Hopper for 1979's Apocalypse Now.

In 1980, while playing the ex-biker father of Linda Manz in Out of the Blue, Hopper took over the directorial reins from another helmer fired by the producers. It was a minor comeback, a universe apart from his days of final cut and magazine covers, despite Jack Nicholson's radio blurb: "It should do for the eighties exactly what Easy Rider did to kind of make the transition from the sixties to the seventies. It has everything you can get behind in a movie."

In 1983, Hopper arrived at a movie location in Cuernavaca and ran naked until the Mexican police caught him. He was shipped back to Los Angeles and was checked in to a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital. For months, he was virtually zomboid and paralyzed. "I was a guy the head doctors wheeled in to show the interns: 'See, this is what happens with drugs,' " says Hopper, who likened his condition to advanced Parkinson's disease. Part of his therapy hooked him up with Alcoholics Anonymous. The cure took and, by the next year, Hopper, again The Model Citizen, was back to work in everything from Rumble Fish for Coppola and The Ostetman Weekend for Sam Peckinpah, to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II and My Science Project.

By 1986, Hopper had clinched his resurrection by playing a wacko biker in Tim Hunter's River's Edge, a wacko sadist in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, and a wacko boozer in David Anspaugh's Hoosiers. Hopper won an Oscar nomination for Hoosiers (though he deserved it for playing Lynch's slithery gargoyle), and the Best Actor Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Three-week, ten-film Hopper movie retrospectives and photo exhibits in Minneapolis and Manhattan inspired the publication of a book of 75 Hopper photographs, Out of the Sixties. He also did a few cameos that were toney window-dressing for directors who've done better: Bob Rafelson's Black Widow, James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, and Alex Cox's Straight to Hell.

When we talk, Hopper has yet to see himself in the new Chattahoochee, starring Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, and M. Emmet Walsh. "I was there for three weeks." Hopper says, referring to the Florida locations for Mick Jackson's quirky dramedy about a pair of inmates who escape the bughouse, "for something that should have been eight weeks. I had no idea what I was doing. I would suggest that we rehearse something and Mick [Jackson] said, 'No, I have three cameras on you right now. You must stay right where I put you.' I mean, what are you going to do?" The old Dennis Hopper, the one who locked horns with Henry Hathaway, might have pitched a scene. "When I think about running into an actor like I was," Hopper observes, "it scares me. He'd have to be some kind of fucking actor or I wouldn't work with him. All I know is that the scenes that Gary Oldman and I had together are wonderful. You can't lie to an actor who isn't lying to you."

Of Flashback ("My first comedy and it's a lead"), with Kiefer Sutherland, Hopper says, "Kiefer and I are really wonderful together. I play Abbott and Costello in it and I'm fucking funny. It would sure mean a lot to me if it's successful." Hopper knows he is at a critical stage in his comeback. While awaiting word on whether he might star opposite Diane Keaton in a comedy, he bided his time by taking his mother to Baton Rouge to visit his in-laws for Christmas. ("I still don't like her," he says. "I'm just giving her one more chance.") He also flew to New York to lecture on the impact of the sixties on contemporary art. "It's alarming that nothing of importance has really changed in music or the visual arts since the sixties," he notes. "I find it hard to believe that we did everything in the sixties." Hopper traps himself in his own irony. Unless he directs a film that has as much impact on audiences of the nineties as Easy Rider did in the sixties, he can never reclaim his place in the pantheon.

In fact, he has not given up on finding financing for Kilo, a spiritual successor to his signature sixties film. The project tracks the last days and nights of a young, world-class surfer who, as a sideline, ounces out coke to everyone from downtown Los Angeles gangbangers to movie and record hot shots in Beverly Hills, but dreams of getting out. "An Easy Rider can't be made by a committee company that keeps watering things down," Hopper says. "Here's a movie that shows what this time is about and, when I bring it up to executives, they change the subject."

So, what's ahead for Hopper? Leading man status in "A" pictures after 35 years in the trenches? More directorial jobs-for-hire? Consignment--along with Robert Mitchum--to the rank of former hellion? "It'd be nice to have more time for golf," he says, laughing, a guy who once marched for civil rights with King and protested 'Nam with Jane Fonda, but is now a registered Republican who champions Reagan and Bush. "This business is so strange, so fickle. Very often it has nothing to do with how talented you are or what images you're evoking on the screen. It's about who's hyping whom. But work is very satisfying right now. And it's easier, the more you do it." Maybe too easy? Hopper seems to read my thoughts and adds, "I'm a sensualist, not a well-balanced person on any level. My moral ideas are totally confused. And I'm a womanizer, which is not popular right now. But that doesn't make me unhappy." Dennis Hopper's next phase could be his most intriguing yet.

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Arthur Miller for Movieline's February issue.

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