The main narrative, according to Schiller, “was Hopper’s transition from first-time director to serious director. More than filming him working on The Last Movie, Carson and Schiller film Hopper not working on it: he’s firing rifles in the desert he’s offering philosophical pearls such as, “I don’t believe in reading” he’s baring his ass for a harem of 30 naked young women in a group “sensitivity encounter”. Meanwhile, in reality, his appetite for booze and drugs was tipping into addiction. He’d just come out of his disastrous eight-day marriage to The Mama’s And The Papa’s Michelle Phillips and was seemingly looking to sleep with every woman he could. That said, much of what we get is pure Hopper or possibly Hopper playing Hopper. “An actor playing an actor.” According to the director, there isn’t a moment in the film when his subject doesn’t understand he’s being filmed: In fact, Hopper is even credited onscreen as a co-writer. The American Dreamer presented a startling, candid portrait of a unique personality intersecting with a critical moment in cultural history: New Hollywood. It is not, however, a documentary – Schiller recently stated that although the style pays homage to the genre – especially the 1922 staged silent documentary Nanook Of The North – Hopper was always performing. Newman declined so Carson suggested Hopper, stating “Why don’t we go out and meet Dennis Hopper because he’s actually living the life of his character in Easy Rider, he can’t escape it.” It was then that Schiller realised he would be “making a documentary about an actor playing an actor in a movie”. He originally wanted to focus on Paul Newman, whom he’d worked with while producing a photo sequence for Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Schiller’s concept was “to do a story about an actor who had submerged himself into his own myth”. The directors followed Hopper around Los Angeles and Taos, New Mexico, and ended up with 1971’s The American Dreamer, a quasi-documentary and masterclass in meta movie making. Kit Carson made a film about Hopper’s creative process. It was critically praised yet financially disastrous, a toxic combination that set back Hopper’s Hollywood career for well over a decade.ĭuring the editing and post production of The Last Movie, photojournalist Lawrence Schiller and actor-screenwriter L.M. The film bombed, mainly due to its ridiculously high concept meditation on cinematic storylines. This next excursion would be a bizarre one, a 1971 passion project named The Last Movie – an anti-imperialist drama about a stunt coordinator who attempts to stop actors on the set of a Peruvian Western from killing each other for the camera. So, when it came to his next directorial outing post Easy Rider (a bona fide blockbuster, offering an enormous return on a not too hefty investment) the studio handed Hopper a blank cheque and free rein. He’d go on to write, direct and star in the film that became a totem for the counterculture – Easy Rider. He’d earned his acting stripes from his earliest appearances alongside the likes of Jimmy Dean, starring as a troubled teen in Rebel Without A Cause and had struck up friendships many of the fine art world’s hippest and best including Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol. In the ninth of our monthly counter-cultural musings from TSPTR, Dennis Hopper’s dreaming in AmericaĪt the tail end of the ’60s Dennis Hopper had it all. Actor, director, artist and provocateur.
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