In ”Blue Velvet,” David Lynch`s macabre, erotic, highly controversial 1986 film, Dennis Hopper appeared as a psychotic, foul-mouthed, drug-dealing killer named Frank Booth-a character Time magazine called ”maybe the vilest sadistic creep in movie history.”
”I called David, who was starting to shoot down in North Carolina,”
Hopper is saying, ”and told him, `I know we`ve never met, but thank you for hiring me.` And then I said, `Don`t worry about a thing. Because I am Frank.` And David said, `Oh, really?` Then he went off to see Isabella (Rossellini), Kyle (MacLachlan) and Laura (Dern), and said, `God, I just got off the phone with Dennis Hopper. I don`t know what we`re going to do when he gets down here. He said, ”Don`t worry about Frank-I am Frank.” Well, that may be great for the picture, but how are we going to have lunch with him?”`
Good point.
For years, Hopper had the reputation of being the Hippie from Hell. Informally blacklisted for a time by Hollywood for forcing a respected director to shoot endless takes during a legendary feud, he went on to create a film the movie-making establishment absolutely hated, and was blacklisted again. There have been breathless accounts of his sullen, self-destructive slide through the `60s and `70s: Hollywood orgies, gunplay on the commune in Taos, endless rum and tequila binges, cocaine mainlining, psychedelic tripping, violent rages, spooky hallucinations, rampant paranoia.
The lowest of the lows, the 53-year-old actor remembers, came in 1984 when he was committed to the psychiatric wing of Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. ”I`d lost my mind. I was actually hearing voices, and thought my friends were being killed in the next room, and that they were being tortured and executed for something I had said. The hospital people said they were going to keep me for, like, two years. And if Bert Schneider (producer of
`Easy Rider`) hadn`t found out I was there and hadn`t come and gotten me, I`d probably still be there.”
Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous` 12-step program, Hopper says he has been clean and sober for six years now. At the moment, the onetime commune commander is looking shockingly natty in a gray pin-striped business suit, dress shirt and black tassled loafers; only a wildly colored necktie gives glimpses into the flamboyant corners of his soul. Soft-spoken, he periodically flashes a sly, knowing smile, and during an hour`s conversation, doesn`t once address his interviewer as ”man.”
The reason he is sitting in a hotel suite in Chicago is to bang the drum for his latest film, ”Flashback,” in which he plays-how about this?-a bearded, long-haired `60s hippie named Huey Walker (”court jester of the radical left”), who, after two decades underground, has been arrested by the Feds. (His ”malicious-mischie f” crime was pulling a prank on then Vice President Spiro Agnew.) Assigned the job of taking him by train from San Francisco to Seattle for his court appearance is a straight-arrow FBI rookie agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland, son of Donald.
The film, which opens Friday in Chicago, was directed by Franco Amurri, onetime assistant to Federico Fellini, who is making his American directorial debut. Perhaps of more significance is that it is Hopper`s first stab at comedy since he and Natalie Wood appeared in a TV anthology series in the mid-`50s.
”Initially, I was told Huey was an `Abbie Hoffman type,` but I knew Abbie through the years and I didn`t see any similarities, really,” he says. ”Then, in the middle of filming it, the news came that Abbie had committed suicide. So that put sort of a downer on things. I started thinking, this is a comedy, but how sad these guys are. They have obvious natural leadership capacities and they get involved in the free-speech movement or anti-war protest, and when these things are over, suddenly they find themselves celebrities. And yet they`re really sort of curiosities that you have a dinner party for every once in a while.”
Hopper grew up in Kansas and Missouri, and when he was in high school, his family moved to San Diego, where he won a scholarship to the National Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe Theatre, and later signed a seven-year contract with Warner Bros. His first major assignment, as a character called Goon, was Nicholas Ray`s ”Rebel Without a Cause” (1955).
Before working with the legendary James Dean, he had thought that he himself was the best young actor in America. ”I was a very good technician, but Dean was, like, so loose, creating all these wonderful things. So I grabbed him during the `Chickie-run` scene, and threw him into a car, and I said, `I thought I was the best, and now I see you, and I know you`re better, and I don`t even know what you`re doing. He said, `Well, you have to do things, not show them. You have to take a drink from the glass, not act like you`re drinking. Don`t have any preconceived ideas. Approach something differently every time.”` Hopper laughs. ”That was the beginning of a lot of problems for me with directors.”
After George Stevens` ”Giant” (Hopper was the son of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson), he went to work on a Western, ”From Hell to Texas,” with crusty veteran director Henry Hathaway-which led to one of Hollywood`s all-time battle of wills. One scene took 87 takes, starting at 7 in the morning and finishing at 10:30 at night.
”Hathaway was a charming man over dinner, and a screaming, cigar-smoking maniac on the set. It was a 10-line scene, and he just kept saying, `Do it again.` He wanted to give me every line reading, every gesture, the exact way he wanted. What he wanted, actually, was a Marlon Brando imitation. At one point he said, `Do you know what those are?` I said, `Yeah, those are film cans.` He said, `Do you know I own 40 percent of this studio?` (It was 20th Century Fox.) Now, that`s enough film to shoot for four months. But I can send for more. We`ll sleep here.`
”Lunch arrived, and we had it on the sound stage. At 3 o`clock, Jack Warner called-I was being loaned out-and he said, `What in the hell are you doing, trying to ruin us? Do it.` Then they sent out for dinner. At 10:30, I finally cracked. I said, `What was it you wanted?` And then we left. I didn`t work again in the film industry-I did a lot of television, and went off and studied with Lee Strasberg in New York-until Hathaway himself hired me, for some reason, seven years later for `The Sons of Katie Elder.”`
After appearing in ”Cool Hand Luke” and Hathaway`s ”True Grit,” he got a further boost in 1969 when he directed, co-wrote and co-starred in that incredibly successful, innovative ode to the counterculture, ”Easy Rider,”
in which he wore his Kit Carson biker`s outfit as he traveled on his chopper alongside Peter Fonda`s Captain America.
Made for less than $400,000, it grossed more than $40 million. It also was the springboard for Hopper`s personal downward spiral, which began with the egregious failure of his notorious ”The Last Movie,” a film-within-a-film in which he cast himself as a stuntman with an American company shooting a stock Western in an Indian village in Peru. Reports began to circulate about violence on the set, orgies and what one writer called ”drug- induced pandemonium.” Back in Taos, it took the substance-abusing director almost a year to edit the film, and although it won the top award at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, Universal Pictures was outraged, and pulled it after only a cursory showing in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Again, it was blackball time.
By the early `80s, he was still locked into substance abuse, but managed to play an alcoholic father in ”Rumble Fish” and an abusive father in ”Out of the Blue” (also finishing up for the sacked original director). In 1986, now in the hands of A.A., he experienced a dramatic resurgence as a performer with ”Blue Velvet,” followed the next year by three films: ”Hoosiers” (as an alcoholic assistant basketball coach), ”River`s Edge” (as another demented drug dealer) and ”The Pick-Up Artist” (as another alcoholic dad). He also received his first full-dress directing assignment since ”The Last Movie” with ”Colors” (1988), which starred Robert Duvall and Sean Penn as two cops assigned to the L.A. gang division.
”Everything I`ve done in Hollywood, I did,” Hopper now reflects. ”A lot of it was very foolish, and a lot could have been handled in another way, but I didn`t handle it in another way. I`m very happy where I am right now. I think you should be allowed to work inside the corporate system.”
Say what?
Actually, where he is right now looks pretty good. Awaiting release are two films he directed-”Back Track” with Jodie Foster, and ”Hot Spot” with Don Johnson (”It`s sort of a `Last Tango in Texas”`)-and ”Chattahoochee,” in which he stars as a convict who gets himself transferred to a corrupt Florida mental institution in the `50s. And in April, he is scheduled to begin ”Running Mates,” a comedy with Diane Keaton in which he plays a senator running for president.
No question, his has been quite a story. A while back, he was approached about writing a book about it. ”I was offered a lot of money, but I turned it down. Because I felt I couldn`t be honest enough yet. If I`m going to do it, I want to be at least as honest as (Elia) Kazan was.
”There are some things,” says Dennis Hopper, ”I just can`t talk about yet.”
