by Tom Folsom
On weekends, when he took a break from screenings of the evolving Last Movie, he played free Disney cartoons for the kids and art house flicks at night—the new Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini. But he was not happy about the new Buñuel his theater manager had booked.
“You can’t show this in a Catholic community!” said Hopper, playing film god.
“Dennis, first of all, the Spanish people don’t come to art films! They don’t come to Buñuel. Who do you think you are, anyway, censoring movies?”
Obviously the young man hadn’t had the experience of being shuttered in a fortified compound, defending oneself against hordes of Chicanos threatening to completely waste Hopper’s precious editing time.
Sitting at the El Cortez, Stewart Stern watched the latest editing-incarnation of The Last Movie.
“Glorious stuff,” said Stern. “Heart-stopping.”
Tex, played by Hopper, was great. But those actor friends of his that he had improvising their lines in the film, probably high as psychedelic llamas? Not so good. Still, Hopper maintained that he didn’t need a script.
“I’m Fellini. I’m a genius. I just need notes. I don’t need a screenplay,” Hopper would say.
As a result, the film dragged, going here, there, and nowhere. Visually it was stunning, with lush greens set against the snowcapped savage mountain in the distance, and sometimes there were brilliant moments, but with all the input allowed in, the story structure of, say, Easy Rider was conspicuously absent. Hopper seemed unable to cut out anything.
Sitting in the darkened El Cortez as the forty-second hour of film approached, Stern was horrified. Where was the ending? That poignant scene in the screenplay Stern had typed out, illustrating how the villagers are so caught between their real world and this fake movie world, they don’t even know which was the real church anymore.
“Dennis,” said an exasperated Stern, “you never shot the ending!”
“I want the audience to be responsible for their part in it. They’re responsible for sitting through it. That’s what the movie’s about, man.”
Stern worried that Hopper had actually gone insane. Part of the problem was that after the phenomenal success of Easy Rider, Hopper had carte blanche to make any movie he’d ever dreamed about, the great American art movie with final cut! And what had he done with the opportunity? He’d turned Stern’s carefully crafted script on its head and willingly destroyed their vision. The six or so editors working with Hopper in his editing shack in back of the Mud Palace actually considered turning the forty-two hours of sprawling footage into a National Geographic special. With that much footage, it could have been anything.
“What you have to do is go back down and shoot it again,” said Stern. “First, get straight. Get sober. Get the way you were when you first submitted it to Jason Robards and Bobby Walker’s mother and they wanted to do it. Go back to that.”
By then it was too late for Hopper, preoccupied with other things like getting high almost continually and marrying that Mamas and Papas girl, Michelle Phillips. Dennis wanted her to star in Me and Bobby McGee.
They married on Halloween night 1970 with glowing orange candles burning in the courtyard in paper bags trailing the way up to the Mud Palace. A witness to the beautiful yet spooky occasion, Stern decided Hopper was definitely insane. And adorable. He couldn’t help loving Hopper, but Hopper was so crazy it was terrifying.
Inside the Mud Palace, by the flicker of 150 tapers in silver candelabra, Dennis stood before his half-moon peyote fireplace inlaid in the Palace’s cavernous red-and-brown-tiled dining room, filled with pumpkins and friends. He read his Gnostic Gospel—“Have you discovered the beginning so that you inquire about the end? For where the beginning is, there shall be the end”—to the gathered. The double-ring ceremony was officiated by artist Bruce Conner, dressed up this night as a reverend of the Universal Life Church in San Francisco.
The queen of the Mud Palace donned her crown—but not for long. She left after eight days of marriage.
To this day, wishing not to speak ill of the dead, Michelle Phillips remains silent as to what transpired on the final eighth day of her marriage to Hopper, only saying that he did something “excruciating.” A popular account puts Hopper firing guns in the house while accusing a handcuffed Michelle of witchcraft.
“Well, what am I going to do?” asked Hopper when she made her break. “I’ve been fixing up the new house for you.”
“Have you ever thought about suicide?”
Rather than strip the nursery he’d decorated for Michelle’s daughter, Chynna, Hopper left its flowered wallpaper to yellow as the autumn leaves fell on his courtyard. It was the witching season, and a deathly pallor draped over the Mud Palace.
The echoing adobe rooms filled like an overcrowded asylum with Dennis’s collection of friends and hangers-on, a lot of Hollywood types who also wanted to make their own Westerns, psychedelic ones featuring their cowboy Jesus, Hopper. Flying in to join the decadent feast one day was the famous psychic to the stars, Peter Hurkos, ready to give extrasensory insight into Hopper’s movie.
“You’d better stop,” Hurkos warned Hopper’s dinner guests, who tried to expose him as a fraud. “Or I’m gonna tell you when you’re gonna die.”
Holding court over the candlelit Mud Palace dining room, Hurkos talked about the Sharon Tate murders. Hopper claimed to know about some weird S&M videos recorded three days before the killings. They’d been filmed, Hopper heard, at the home of Mama Cass, where twenty-five people had been invited to witness the whipping of a drug dealer from Sunset Strip who sold them bad dope.
Hurkos had visited the scene of the Tate murders, 10050 Cielo Drive, and kneeling down on the bloodstained carpet watched in his mind a replay of the killings that shook Hollywood and caused everyone to lock their doors. He envisioned Sharon and her friends tripping on LSD in a violent bacchanal inspired by what he called “goona-goona,” a black magic ritual.
“I see pictures in my mind like on a television screen,” said Hurkos. “When I touch something, I then tell what I see.”
Holding on to the enormous Florentine dining room table that had been at the Mud Palace since Mabel’s days, Hurkos started talking to himself, claiming to experience through the wood grains all that had ever happened at that table—for wood holds the vibrations of everyone who handles it.
The chocolate-brown wood harnessed visions of Mabel’s long-ago esteemed guests: Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence, struggling to create his utopia. Hopper had heard from the sole survivor of Rananim, the lady with the ear trumpet, how one night D. H., in the midst of a heavy peyote trip, thought he had turned into a coyote and that someone—perhaps his art patron, Mabel—had to chain him up in the Mud Palace courtyard.
Come winter, Hopper sat by the fireplace in his lodge-like living room held up by two giant spiral carved wooden pillars, and chatted with a visiting Playboy bunny while a spacey-eyed girl perched behind him like a Cheshire Cat. The bunny admired Hopper’s art collection, one he’d been rebuilding ever since Brooke won his first collection in their divorce. Luckily for Hopper, he had managed to keep his Easy Rider profits. Brooke claimed she didn’t even try to get a cut because she was scared he’d go after her with a shotgun.
Found among the Roy Lichtenstein comic strip fighter jet painting and “atomic artist” Tony Price’s set of hydrogen bomb casings, rescued from a nearby Los Alamos scrapyard and transformed into a set of Tibetan peace gongs, was Hopper’s own Bomb Drop, a huge seven-foot joystick that moved hypnotically back and forth, perpetually destroying the world in a mushroom cloud. Grotesque Peruvian masks grimaced on the wall near Andy Warhol’s Kiss, featuring a still from 1931’s Dracula, with fanged Bela Lugosi going for the throat.
Hopper turned to his bunny, telling her about a visit he’d made to meet Charles Manson in prison a few weeks before. He described it as casually as if he had gone to see a long-lost relative. There were some eerie similarities. After all, both Ho
pper and Manson had recently appeared on covers of Life. As their features revealed, their recent activities had both included their own strange B-movie fantasies played out on Western movie sets.
Manson’s set was the Spahn Movie Ranch in the rolling Simi Hills outside LA, a historic movie ranch once used during Hollywood’s golden age for filming Western movies and television shows. Amid the dilapidated fake Western facades—the Longhorn Saloon, the Rock City Cafe—Manson, like a lunatic director, had ruled over his hellacious Manson girls, riding around the ranch on armor-plated dune buggies, readying for the apocalypse. On trial for the Sharon Tate murders, Manson summoned Hopper to prison for the purpose of discussing a biopic, a dark and depraved American dream that he wanted Hopper to direct. Perhaps Manson saw Hopper as an outlaw brother who would be able to see beyond the conventional jeer of “madman.”
“Did you see the newspaper? Did you read it last week?” Manson asked Hopper during their visit, explaining how he had stood up in court and started reciting the Declaration of Independence.
Hopper told Manson that he hadn’t read about it. Manson seemed very excited.
“Oh? You don’t read either?”
Hanging among the art in the Mud Palace was a poster from a Warhol exhibit with one of Andy’s famous quotes.
I Never Read
I Just Look at Pictures
Hopper bragged to the bunny how Manson had told him all about what had really gone down at Spahn Ranch.
“He said that, like, you know, he was a big star and like his whole life, he’d been acting out a movie, but there hadn’t been any movie cameras there.”
The whole time Hopper spoke to his bunny, a camera was filming them for a documentary titled The American Dreamer. Self-proclaimed “idea man” Lawrence Schiller and his partner, Kit Carson, were down in Taos to film Hopper editing The Last Movie. The cameramen followed Hopper to the El Cortez Theater, where Dennis delivered lines while watching himself ride his horse through the grasslands of Peru.
On-screen, Hopper as the stuntman Tex looked clean-cut and sexy in his cowboy hat.
Off-screen he appeared feral with Manson-length hair and sex-crazed eyes. It was Hopper’s reputed wild sexuality that Schiller was interested in exploring in the doc, which he figured would be like Nanook of the North, in a way. Everybody considers it a first-rate documentary while in fact it was staged because Nanook the Eskimo was an actor.
“Every guy wants to have an orgy,” admitted Hopper to the doc guys, so they decided to stage one, even bigger than the champagne bubble bath Dennis once had with Natalie.
Where do you find horny, available, adventurous girls? The doc guys figured the Santa Fe Airport was a good place to start. Girl after girl after girl walked through the Pueblo-style terminal. Schiller went up to them one by one and asked very politely, “Do you know Dennis Hopper?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to have an orgy with him?”
“Oh, yes.”
A few hours later, a station wagon pulled up to the Mud Palace, and the curious girls came out, followed by another car. Assembled inside the living room, two dozen or so girls, picked up at airports and restaurants, began to disrobe. A few minutes later, a prepped Hopper walked in fully clothed.
“What do we have here?” He smiled at the boobs and buttocks, pretending to be surprised.
Going upstairs to Mabel’s old bathroom with its windows painted by D. H. Lawrence, each pane adorned with different symbols—stars and sunbursts, Indian feathers and totems, swans and roosters—Hopper lowered himself into the bathtub with two chicks. The scene was terrific. Great stuff. The highlight of the documentary. But after shadowing Hopper for weeks fumbling through his editing of The Last Movie, something gnawed at Schiller.
Here’s an actor who’s making a film for Universal, who’s on the upswing of his career, and he’s letting it all hang out over the edge, letting the camera capture him wriggling in the bathtub with these two chicks. Why? But on a more serious level, why was Hopper willingly destroying his career? It wasn’t the acid. Nobody was forcing him. Nobody had a gun to his head. The doc guys, Larry and Kit, were certainly not holding a check and saying, “Do this scene and we’ll give you ten million dollars.” Hopper appeared to be doing it because it was the image that was right to lead to a glorious, spectacular failure. Perhaps a work of art in itself.
“I can sleep on a mattress again. I have friends,” said Hopper, watching himself in the latest cut of The Last Movie at the El Cortez. “And if it’s nothing more than, like, you know, The Magnificent Ambersons, which was Orson Welles’s second film . . . I can become Orson Welles, poor bastard.”
The way he talked about Welles and The Magnificent Ambersons, Schiller thought Hopper knew what his end was gonna be. Hopper was really fucking smart. He was consciously using his ability as an actor—a movie man—to play the role of an artist who was going to spectacularly, gloriously, magnificently fail. As the doc guys filmed Hopper watching The Last Movie in his own theater, Schiller knew that the end of their doc was going to be Hopper’s failure. The only question was: How was Hopper gonna get to his end?
THE SPRUCE GOOSE
The 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. Denni
s 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.