The success of his directorial debut, Easy rider (1969), admitted actor Dennis Hopper to shed his character from Hollywood’s Golden Age as the boy relegated to the edge of the frame in John Wayne’s close-ups of Westerns like The sons of Katie Elder (1965), or the close-ups of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor Huge (1956) – even James Dean is involved Rebel without purpose (1955). Despite his brief heyday in the early 1970s as the eminent hippie filmmaker Hopper, he would one day look back on his career with an air of disappointment, tell Charlie Rose in the 1990s:
I don’t feel like I’ve done it yet. I don’t feel like I’ve ever really done the big part. I don’t feel like I ever really directed the great movie. I’m watching Anthony Hopkins [in] Remains of the day. And I go, ‘Where’s that part? Where’s a movie like this I could do? Why don’t I even see these kinds of scripts?” They never come near me.
Like many promising filmmakers of the New Hollywood era, Hopper’s career also saw a number of failures. In his case, this may have something to do with his legendary alcoholism and substance abuse. For decades, Hopper had developed a bad reputation for constant drunkenness and erratic behavior on set.
While Hollywood has long had its own reputation as a haven for those who partake in alcohol and illegal substances, such as a leper cast out of a den of other lepers, Hopper nearly blacklisted himself from the movie industry for several years as a drug-crazed lunatic. Like Heath Ledger’s Joker The dark knight (who was influenced by Hopper’s Frank Booth character in Blue velvet), Hopper was a true ‘cop of chaos’. So let’s “participate” in five of Hopper’s most chaotic movies.
5 Blue Velvet (1971)
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Hopper’s newfound sobriety in the mid-1980s gave his career a second wind, beginning with a career-best performance as the insatiable Dionysian “Frank Booth” in David Lynch’s Blue velvet (1986). The story goes that Hopper begged Lynch for the chance to play his villainous underworld maniac, assuring the writer-director that Cinephilia and beyond tells:
You gotta let me play Frank! Because I’m Frank.
Although Hopper’s reputation preceded him, Lynch couldn’t deny that the laughing gas-addicted character fit like a glove. But it raised a pragmatic question that Lynch posed to Laura Dern (who plays innocent love interest Sandy in the movie) during pre-production:
Do we really want lunch? with Frank?
Ultimately, Lynch put his fears aside, and in return Hopper gifted Lynch with an on-camera version of himself that many directors recognized as the actor’s uncontrollable former self. Main character of Kyle MacLachlan Jefferey on the same wild-looking trip he tormented his colleagues with for decades. Luckily, Lynch got old drug-crazed Hopper on the right side of the camera.
4 Easy Rider (1969)
Hopper took a road trip from Los Angeles to New Orleans in 1969 with fellow actor Peter Fonda, a small crew, and a trailer loaded with motorcycles, camera equipment, loaded weapons, and a large portion of psychoactive drugs. The result was his directorial debut, Easy rider, which somehow not only made sense given the context, but went on to become one of the best counterculture movies ever made. In conversation with Peter Biskind for his book Easy riders, angry bulls (1998), the film’s sound engineer Peter Pilafian said:
There was disagreement over what the movie was [was actually about] and what stage [the story] would be when the characters came to Mardi Gras [in New Orleans]. Dennis was this semi-psychotic maniac. There would be a couple of pistols, loaded, on the table. He liked that kind of atmosphere.
Baird Bryant, one of the cameramen easy rider, Biskind said that on the first day of filming, Hopper gathered the crew together and barked like a dictator:
[Hopper told us] he had heard a lot about how many creative people were in this crew: “But there’s only one creative person here and that’s me. The rest of you are all mercenaries, slaves.” [Hopper] was totally crazy…just excited.
Despite the tense atmosphere and the lack of a script, the quasi-documentary feeling remains Easy rider captured the zeitgeist of the hippie movement in general and proved to be just coherent enough to become a huge hit at the box office. The film would terrify Hollywood’s old guard, as its massive critical and commercial success helped catapult the “New Hollywood” movement.
3 Human Highway (1982)
Human highway is a little-known musical comedy starring Devo (yes, the band with the funny red hats) as a group of nuclear waste collectors trying to warn the residents of a town with a power plant about an impending outbreak of radioactive pollution. It was directed by and starred Dean Stockwell – known for his supporting roles in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) and the David Lynch films — as well as singer-songwriter Neil Young who was known as “Bernard Shakey,” a pseudonym as bizarre as the movie itself.
Despite all the rock and roll madness that coalesced into making Human highway there was one artist who even made “Bernard Shakey” seem sane. Speak against Rolling stone in 2010, Devo keyboardist and vocalist Mark Mothersbaugh said:
We were a little put off by the whole experience [on Human Highway]. I thought Dennis Hopper was retarded when we met. He couldn’t say his lines. He couldn’t utter a sentence. He just ignored any direction he was given [from Stockwell and Young]. He was a short cook in the movie and he played with a knife and ended up cutting Sally Kirkland really badly.
In December 1985, Kirkland filed a $2 million lawsuit against her old Human highway co-star Hopper, who is seeking additional damages from Young for failing to keep the “Easy Rider” on a shorter leash. Kirkland claimed that Hopper was under the influence of amyl nitrate, cannabis and tequila while shooting a scene with her character involving a knife act. Instead of the dummy prop he had to use, Hopper grabbed a real knife and accidentally cut a sinew in Kirkland’s finger during a take.
Although Kirkland would eventually lose her case, the court transcripts gave the press the best review Human highway would ever get. When a witness was asked what the movie was about, they replied, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
2 Waterworld (1995)
Though Hopper had been sober for nearly a decade by the time he landed the villainous role of “The Deacon” opposite Kevin Costner’s leading man “The Mariner,” Water world (1995) can hardly be described as a dry set. The film was conceived by screenwriters Peter Rader and David Twhoy as something of an oceanic film crazy max to take off.
Water world is set during a post-apocalyptic future where the polar ice caps have melted, causing sea levels to rise (bit long right?) and Earth to be submerged in seawater. After barely surviving the shoot Jaws (1975), warned Steven Spielberg Water world director Kevin Reynolds in a phone call, narrated here by Yahoo:
Doing not shoot at water! You’ll need a few shots on the water, so use a second unit for that. Do all you [filming] in a tank or a stage.
Spielberg’s advice fell on deaf ears as Reynolds and Costner went full steam ahead and headed out to shoot Water world “real” on the real Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii. Not long after shooting began, a hurricane destroyed the giant floating set that was critical to the film’s first half.
Even after the set was rebuilt, the ocean winds were constantly spinning it until the Hawaiian landmass would poke its green head into the background of the camera’s shot. The troubles kept coming, though the remorseful and level-headed Hopper was the least of the production’s concerns.
To complete the huge production feat of building an entire movie about water, the filmmakers eventually abandoned the Pacific Ocean in favor of an artificial seawater fence like the one James Cameron would later use for Titanic (1997). But with a grueling 166 days of shooting, it was too late to salvage the production budget, which exploded from an already large initial $100 million to $175 million, breaking records at the time for the most expensive film ever made.
Water world‘s disastrous production and budget reports were easy meat for Hollywood tabloid sharks and film critics who tore the film to shreds when it finally hit theaters, nearly costing Kevin Costner his career along with The mailman (1997).
1 Apocalypse Now (1979)
Hopper and Marlon Brando might share a few scenes in the climactic moments of Apocalypse now, since Hopper’s unnamed photojournalist practically worships Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, but behind the scenes, the two actors almost threw punches over a simple misunderstanding. During a heated day of filming in the jungle, Brando thought Hopper had accused him of not reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).
Brando had read the novella (or script by John Milius for Apocalypse now) and was already tired of director Francis Ford Coppola harassing him for not understanding Conrad’s original story, let alone their idea of updating the novella’s setting from nineteenth-century Congo to modern-day Vietnam. Little did Hopper know he had struck a chord with the accusation and was surprised by Brando’s reaction. Speak against The Hollywood ReporterHopper said:
[Brando] stands up and says, “I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t have to take this!” And he screams and screams, “Why do I have to hear it from him? I need to hear from this punk!” And he storms out.
Hopper spent the rest of that evening playing with Brando and salting the wound until the two nearly came to blows. For the rest of his time in the Philippines, Brando refused to be on set with Hopper at the same time.
While Hopper somehow managed to find a way to make an already grueling production even more difficult, it seems the actor found a home away from home in the Philippines when he was on the set of Apocalypse now drunk and high late in production.
From Coppola to the lowest level production assistant, the cast and crew of Apocalypse now virtually all were high on their own supply. It was one of those rare moments when a guy like Hopper found the place he belonged: a set filled with brain-baked hippies on the exact same ego trip he’d been on for years.