by Tom Folsom
“Haven’t seen many people who know the town like he did—who knows how to use the town. He knew how to use those calling cards. He played the game. He played it as good as you can get—and had the rest of his life. You know what I mean?”
Hopper’s dramatic Hollywood comeback—one of the most awe-inspiring in industry history—was featured in Vanity Fair three years after he returned to Hollywood from New Mexico. On the cover, a sophisticatedly gray Hopper held a cigar and stared down America for the feature—“How the Mad, Bad & Dangerous Movie Star Came Back from the Dead & Took the Town by Storm.”
“I mean, what—when you sit here today”—even Charlie Rose stumbled to take in the full breadth of Hopper’s winding journey—“it’s the best of times for you? Right?”
“Yes, it is. But you know, I tell you very honestly, Charlie, I don’t feel I have done it yet. I mean I look at Anthony Hopkins, and I look at Remains of the Day, and I go, ‘Where is that part? Where is a movie like this that I could do?’ You know, why am I never even seeing these kinds of scripts? Why do they never even come close to me?”
CULL-UHS
In a tweed suit, Hopper moseyed through the land of the unwanted. Abandoned autos. Burned-down homes. Trash-littered sidewalks. He was accompanied by his female bodybuilder friend from Beverly Hills who’d recently appeared in Playboy and was a muse for fine art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. He climbed over a graffiti-littered wall at the end of a dead-end alley. Three silver futuristic bunkers loomed in the wasteland of Venice Beach, California.
“I loooooooove ’em,” said Hopper. “I just love ’em. Those are so amazing and genius.”
The trio of shacks seemed to have been built for Hopper. He felt as if he’d commissioned them, much to the delight of Venice artists Laddie John Dill and Chuck Arnoldi, up a creek financially on their artist colony sinkhole, in the ghetto, that they’d gotten budding architect Frank Gehry to design. Only the buildings were built backward because the blueprints were read that way.
One would-be tenant, a UCLA student, squinted at the graffiti and deciphered a death threat and split. The only takers so far were the cops, who’d been using the bunkers for surveillance to bust a crack house across the street. Hopper snapped one up in 1987, with plans to get the others when he could. In gangsta style, he rolled around his hood in a two-tone brown Cadillac Seville with gold-wire rims, surveying the turf for his new movie, Colors, starring bad boy actor Sean Penn.
The Gehry fortress, Venice Beach, 1993
MAGNUM/Thomas Hoepker, copyright © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos
“We’re here to learn about gangs,” announced Sean at a meeting of CRASH, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, the LAPD gang unit.
“Good fuckin’ luck, pal,” said Detective Dennis Fanning.
Detective Fanning was recruited as the technical adviser on Colors, and for three months, the LAPD stuck Sean Penn in the backseat of his squad car. “Sometimes when you’re with someone, a partner, they could be the greatest cop in the world, and you could be the greatest cop in the world, but you don’t have karma when you’re in a car together,” explained Fanning at an Orange County Starbucks: “It’s just you’re always ten seconds late. The bad guy just left. The shooting just went down.
“Other times, you get in the car with somebody, and boom, it’s right there. The karma’s there. You turn the corner; there’s the guy with the gun. You walk in the store; it’s gettin’ robbed. You pull up to the light; there’s the stolen car. That’s pretty much how it was with Seany. He got into the car and it turned into a shit magnet, which is nice because guys who consider themselves good street cops like to be considered shit magnets.”
Shit-magnet Seany wanted nobody else to direct Colors but Dennis Hopper, seeing as he and his wife, Madonna (“Mo” in cop talk), were big fans of Out of the Blue.
Colors was originally scripted to be about cough syrup abuse, but Hopper drastically recast it to explore the volatile LA gang scene, with Crips and Bloods killing each other off on the streets of South Central like cowboys and Indians. His subject was considered so outlandish at the time that some critics actually thought he’d made it up. Living in Venice Beach, homeboy Dennis got to know the local gang kids on a personal level. He thought it was such a waste of meaningful talent, thoughtfulness, and energy.
“Dennis told me his crazy stories when he left the hospital and of walkin’ down the road in his fuckin’ pj’s,” recounted Fanning of war stories Hopper told him about rehab and out-of-his-tree wanderings in the Mexican jungle. “Me and him had the same stories, just different sides of the fence. We got along famously. I got like ten or fifteen real cops into the movie. They wanted the realism. They used real gangsters, so that made for real fun breakin’ for lunchtime on the set. Real cops on one side. Real gangsters on the other.”
“It’s heavy, man,” said rapper Ice T. “You gotta think, okay he’s in Easy Rider—rocked-out white guy gettin’ high, riding motorcycles. You say, ‘Okay, he’s on some rebel white shit.’ Then to do a movie only about blacks and Mexicans?”
Hopper wanted Ice T’s “Yo Homeboy, Squeeze the Trigger” on the soundtrack, so T went to a screening: “Okay, the movie’s good. It had kind of a fictional line because the Mexicans and the blacks didn’t fight at that time, but overall, I was kinda like, pro it. Rick James had the title song, ‘Look at all these Cull-uhs,’ or some shit”—T doing his funkiest Rick James impression. “So without asking, I left the studio and we laid the song ‘Colors.’ Just submitted it. Cold.”
All of a sudden, this ripple effect happened and everybody was like, “Yo. Dennis Hopper wants to meet you.”
“Yo bro-tha, this song is the shit, it’s what the movie is, and it’s all that. Yo! This is the essence; this is what it is; this is like beyond what I meant.”
That was homeboy Dennis talking. Ice T suddenly thought he was in Apocalypse Now. He’d always been a fan of Hopper’s rap in the movie. “It’s like he’s talkin’ about Kurtz, you know, the way he just takes the words and jumbles ’em and spins ’em and drops ’em?” As a fellow artist, Ice T appreciated how Hopper always really felt whatever he was doing.
No stranger to controversy himself, Ice T thought it was unfortunate when the media lashed out at Hopper’s finished vision, calling Colors a disgrace and accusing him of fabricating a gang situation. Orion Pictures was afraid that if they distributed Colors in wide release, blood was going to run in the streets. So the studio offered to pay for security guards in all the release theaters, with protection outside and inside, but still a lot of theaters were too nervous to show the movie. When Colors opened in LA in ’88, cops arrested nearly 150 gang members. A gang member was shot to death outside a theater in Stockton.
Colors was hot! Unfortunately for the producers, nobody got killed in the second week, so the controversy died and Colors was buried.
If only the suits had put it in wide release more aggressively that first week, they could’ve made a fortune on Hopper!
In what felt like a flashback to his days under siege in the Mud Palace, Hopper was left to the pack of red-bereted Guardian Angels outside his compound, protesting his depiction of inner-city youth. Clearly he needed to fortify. Buying the Gehry shack on the vacant lot behind him, Hopper proceeded with phase two of his compound. Up went a silver futuristic fortress skin with a wavelike hyperbolic roof and an asymmetrical, windowless industrial corrugated steel facade. Hopper connected his original Gehry shack to the second he’d procured with a series of jarring heavy-duty catwalks. He bought a third a few years later.
Like a paranoid cocaine drug lord’s insane bunker, only sober, video monitors played for him an ongoing surveillance loop, which fed his paranoia and served as artful background footage. All the lights in his house flashed at any unauthorized footstep. The compound was buttressed by a handgun stuffed into one of Hopper’s socks and a backup shotgun tucked away on the premises.
Completing his American dream house, H
opper put up a white picket fence, like the kind at Auntie Em’s in The Wizard of Oz or along the streets of Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, separating him from Venice’s mean streets.
“There’s a little door on one side of the fence at the back with razor wire all around it,” explained Hopper of one of the compound’s secret features. “After I put it up, I went out. I came back and they’d just taken the door off and laid it down. It was still locked, just laid down. I’m living on their turf, you know. I mean it’s my turf, too. Because this is America.”
BIKER HEAVEN
When I was offered Koopa, I was quite excited. I thought it was a great opportunity to play a giant human lizard.”
Trapped in a dystopian nightmare, Hopper made the best of it in Super Mario Bros., the big-screen version of the Nintendo game. With a wicked long tongue that looked like a pointed flank of raw strip steak, he was King Koopa, evil despot of Dinohattan, a bizarro New York City filmed in the early 1990s in a vacant cement plant in the beach town of Wilmington, North Carolina. Searching downtown Wilmington for a studio in which he could paint, Hopper stumbled on an enormous sandstone Masonic temple in total disarray, about to be torn down.
Standing on the roof of his five-story shrine overlooking Cape Fear River, Hopper said, “I agree it’s a little weird, but I like it here.”
A vision of the future in perfect Masonic order unfolded for fifty-five-year-old Hopper. Buying the property for peanuts and putting a million into restoration, he planned to open an acting school, unleashing veritable hordes of Hopper-trained actors into the universe.
“Daddy, I think you’re probably a really good actor, but why did you play King Koopa?” asked his son, young Henry. “He’s such a bad guy, why did you want to play him?”
“So you can have shoes.”
“I don’t need shoes.”
Yet Hopper found himself hawking for Nike as Stanley, a deranged referee. In a trench coat, wearing an intense gaze and black backpack, Dennis rode the bus while ranting on about the Dallas Cowboys quarterback. Sneaking into the Buffalo Bills locker room, he sniffed the potent aroma of an enormous shoe belonging to the defensive end. He unwrapped Neon Deion Sanders’s shoe before a Christmas tree. “Can you imagine the career Jack Nicholson has had and he has never gone out on television to plug anything?” Hopper asked Charlie Rose in their continuing dialogue across several interviews throughout the years. “I’m not saying that I’m doing wonderful work, and I’m not saying—I think Speed is terrific, you know. But the great role? I don’t feel I’ve ever really had.”
Performing for Charlie in a yellow-and-brown houndstooth sport coat and green paisley tie, Hopper offered more about his addictions, and regret, anything to prove himself a good clean boy—sober and ready to work again. He wanted Hollywood to see he was the kind of upstanding actor who could be entrusted with the role of a megablockbuster maniac who holds a city bus hostage with a plan so sick, he’d created a bomb that would blow up if the bus went under fifty miles an hour!
Concluding his night of talk show magic, Hopper did much better on Charlie Rose than he had a few months earlier in 1994 on The Tonight Show, when he told Jay Leno an anecdote about how actor Rip Torn, who had once been considered for Jack Nicholson’s part of the Southern lawyer in Easy Rider, went after him with a knife:
“Rip and I had a little, uh, problem—”
“What kind of a problem?”
“Well, at dinner he pulled a knife on me. It was one way for me to say we’re not working together.”
Actually, as the courts later ruled, it was Hopper who had gone for the steak or butter knife, according to various memories of the fateful night.
“Well, that’s supremely ironic, isn’t it, that he should tell it exactly backwards?” remarked Terry Southern.
Terry had hung around trying to be a friend to Dennis even after he was given the cold shoulder. After Easy Rider hit like a winning lottery ticket, Hopper argued that he himself had written the script and denied Fonda and Terry’s role in it. This was particularly difficult for Terry, seeing as he was the writer among the brain trust, the only one among them who knew what he was doing when he got behind the typewriter and plowed.
Hopper claimed Terry was just a flashy name to get the production financed as, backed by a high-powered legal team, he tried wrenching from Southern his deserved writing credit on Easy Rider.
“Terry never wrote one fucking word, not one line of dialogue,” Hopper claimed.
So what about all those heated sessions in the Clark Cortez? And those in Terry’s lawyer’s office on West 55th Street that the brain trust appropriated as their story conference room, hashing out the tale of Billy and Captain America over cigarettes, joints, and martinis?
Hopper claimed it was all in his head. He embellished, saying that after dinner with Rip Torn, he stayed in New York and locked himself in for two weeks and emerged with a screenplay. This was the Hopper friends described as being unable to sit still for a moment. He couldn’t get himself to pick up the pen and write his memoirs, despite the multiple high-figured book deals he collected over twenty-plus years, only to have to give back his advances because he hadn’t written a single word. Meanwhile, Terry had slaved over a letter he hated to write and sent it to Hopper in 1970, hoping the spirit of the sixties was still alive.
Dear Den:
I’m very sorry to bug you, Den, but I’m in a terrible bind—completely strapped, an inch, maybe less, from disasterville . . .
In view of such circumstance, and of our (yours and mine) solid ancient friendship, and of great success of ER, could you please put a single point of action my way?
I’m aware there may be a difference in our notions of who contributed what to the film (memory flash highly selective in these cases), but the other day I was looking through a copy of the original 55th Street script that we did together, and was amazed at the amount and strength of material which went from there intact to the silver-screen.
Please consider it, Den—I’m in very bad trouble. Thanks.
Hopper never responded. Terry stuck around anyway with Hopper, trying to make William Burroughs’s beatnik classic Junkie into a film. Patti Smith was slated to star alongside Hopper. It was shelved, especially after Hopper dabbled with heroin as part of his research.
The idea for a sequel to Easy Rider—Easy Ridin’ in Biker Heaven—came right around the time Terry accompanied Hopper to the Big H Motors Speedway, where he offered his friend moral support while he flirted with self-annihilation in the Dynamite Death Chair act. The sequel was also shelved, and Terry had no problem with Dennis trying to inch in on his credit on that one.
Set in a postapocalyptic America in the year 2068—a hundred years after that fateful day the duck hunters gunned down Billy and Wyatt—the Leader of Biker Heaven comes down to earth to get the two back on their hogs for a ride through the wasteland to burned-out Washington, DC. They are delivering to the president the real American flag, the badass Revolutionary War–era DON’T TREAD ON ME Gadsden flag with a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike, later used by Nike.
Occasionally Hopper would summon Terry to cool happenings, where Terry was good to have around—“Man, you’re going to dig this scene.”
Dennis called him to come to Hustler publisher Larry Flynt’s mansion, where Hopper was a guest photographer shooting a “Celebrity Porn” feature with hot lesbo action. Hopper was really excited because he thought there was going to be real sex—only to discover it was fake: he just had to get the shot.
In March 1992, Hopper’s people faxed over a memo instructing Terry to relinquish any rights to Easy Rider.
“Vicious greed,” Terry called it.
Following Hopper’s appearance on The Tonight Show, Terry was to give a deposition on behalf of Rip Torn, who was suing Hopper for defamation because he was fed up with Hopper’s recurring telling of the knife story. Torn felt it had done a hatchet job on his career. Speaking under oath, Terry said he had stopped consider
ing Dennis a good friend after asking for his help on numerous occasions. Collapsing on the Columbia University steps, where he was teaching screenwriting, Terry died penniless, without his point, but with a piece of paper in his pocket scrawled with his thoughts about the significance of Easy Rider.
He mourned for America and bemoaned a culture so ravaged by hatred and paranoia that the movie’s “grotesque inevitable resolution” was for the two free-spirited protagonists to be blown away—“for no better reason than a Newt Gingrich type objecting to their long hair.”
In December 1995, Hopper sued Fonda for a greater share of Easy Rider profits, in a breach of contract suit that claimed he’d only gotten 33 percent of the film’s proceeds when he should have received 41 percent. Those eight extra points would’ve compensated for the screenplay Hopper claimed he had written all by himself, which he swore until the last day of his life.
Terry was dead by the time Hopper was called to testify, but when the matter had come up at the Rip Torn hearing, for which Torn was eventually awarded $475,000 in defamation, Hopper accused Terry of committing perjury when Terry said he was the author of Easy Rider.
“I did it myself,” said Hopper.
“What about a copy of the screenplay?”
“I don’t know that one exists,” said Hopper, still creating nimbly in the moment like Cocteau.
A preshooting draft was produced in court. By the end of the hearing the judge decided that Hopper was an unreliable witness. All arrows pointed toward Easy Rider being a collaboration. It was the ultimate case of: Who wrote that story?
Perhaps the most revealing evidence open to anyone who has the time to spend an afternoon at the New York Public Library is not just an Easy Rider screenplay, found in Terry Southern’s stack of embalmed papers, but also a thirty-eight-page partial screenplay that scripts the entire Mardi Gras trip, cemetery acid scene, and even includes the movie’s iconic line, “We blew it.”