Hopper (20 page)

T
he idea to bring in a cinematic mystic to guest edit
The Last Movie
flashed before Hopper one day at the El Cortez Theater during back-to-back screenings of
The Last Movie
,
Fellini Satyricon
, and the unofficial world premiere of
El Topo
, an allegorical Western directed by Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky about a black-clad gunfighter on a quest for enlightenment. Ending on a shot of a grave swarming with ants,
El Topo
blew Hopper's mind. So he summoned Jodorowsky for a visit to the Mud Palace.

All ideas were welcome on the creative ant mound of the Palace, the editing taking place in a log cabin in the courtyard outfitted with three Moviola editing machines, seven horseshoes tacked to the wall, an Indian arrow stuck into the high viga-beamed ceiling for good luck, and six-foot metal shelves stacked with film canisters. Without a mother to force him to change his clothes, Hopper wore the same outfit for days on end, reeking of what hard-line Broadway musical directors call “flop sweat.” Jodorowsky lined up ten of the Hopper girls buzzing about the Mud Palace and made them smell “the perfume of Dennis Hopper.”

His only drug being a lack of sleep, Jodorowsky claimed that in two days he edited a version of
The Last Movie
into one of the greatest pictures ever. Only to have Hopper destroy it once he left.

The myth around
The Last Movie
grew to epic proportions. For Dennis, it couldn't just be a great picture anymore. It had to change the course of cinematic history. It had to live up to its title: an omega to the alpha of cinema, a Judgment Day of the screen. It had to be a searing projection of light exposing all the audience's accumulated delusions since the most famous early Western, 1903's
The Great Train Robbery
, starring traveling salesman-cum-actor G. M. Anderson, who put on a ten-gallon hat and shot his six-gun blanks at the camera. It sent audiences screaming and fainting and wanting more!

One of the herd of editors left to sweep up the editing shack floor was intense young Todd Colombo. Actually, after several particularly trying months, Todd was the
only
editor left hanging around the Mud Palace. With long stringy hair, glasses, and a quiet intensity that reminded one of the student revolutionary in
Dr. Zhivago
, Todd possessed the Zenlike patience necessary for exploring Hopper's constantly sliding vision about what
The Last Movie
should be. Willing to try out different possibilities, Todd would sit for hours, staring into his Moviola like a mad scientist over a microscope, reordering and cutting the scenes so Hopper could tell him what felt right. Todd was content to work late into the night just so long as Hopper kept his Irish coffee out of his trim bin.

Todd thought
The Last Movie
was truly magnificent. It was a living, breathing thing, and it evolved. Changes came in all different styles, making it sometimes hard for local hippies and commune kids to keep up with the screenings at the El Cortez. The work in progress had become something of a ritual social event in town. Dennis would invite his fabulous friends from Hollywood, as well as some of the hard-core commune guys who were a little off—just to see what their reaction might be. Like the local guy who never bathed and had supposedly pulled a Van Gogh, cutting off an ear to send to a girlfriend.

“That movie is just
soaked
in cocaine.”

“I just thought it was so self-indulgent.”

“A great idea, but that weird sex scene? Who could give a shit?”

So went some of the responses to scenes Hopper included, like Tex lapping up breast milk squirted into his mouth by this Peruvian woman. On another night it was:

“Fucking brilliant.”

“The Plato's Cave of cinema.”

“Get it?
The Last Movie
. This is a new dawn, man . . .”

One night, Hopper screened an eight-hour cut. He loved it at eight hours. On another, bent on making his audience suffer, he loved it at forty-two, his film spreading out before his dazzled eyes like an enormous tapestry. He hated to snip away a single frame. It got to the point where the movie was so big it couldn't fit through the projection room door. Editors gave up, split for other gigs, or were fired, leaving our hero to his mammoth vision.

Todd Colombo decided to call in a linchpin, his friend Rol Murrow, who hadn't worked on anything other than UCLA student films. Rol wasn't in the industry but promised to edit on the cheap. Besides, he had the mechanical DNA to make an albatross soar.

“My dad designed the Spruce Goose,” said Rol, speaking of the Herculean airplane Howard Hughes built, which the critics said would never fly. “He worked with Howard for two solid years from initial concept of the plane through the complete design.”

In the editing shack, the three—Hopper, Todd, and Rol—worked around the clock. Some of what the newspapers wrote about the editing process being total pandemonium and out of control? Maybe it was out of control in Hollywood terms, but Rol really just felt they were all working their asses off. There wasn't too much time to get into trouble.

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.

R
agged 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 have 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.