The biggest betrayal of Dennis Hopper’s career: “He has made my life so miserable”
Making a film with one of your friends sounds like a dream that many filmmakers and actors would surely love to achieve. Having one of your closest companions by your side as you write, act, and direct sounds ideal, but for Dennis Hopper, this led to the souring of one of his best friendships that was sadly never resolved.
Hopper, who had begun acting in the 1950s – featuring in small roles in movies like Rebel Without A Cause and Giant, both starring James Dean – made his first short film, Mary Jennifer at the Beach, in 1964. A few years later, he acted as second unit director on Roger Corman’s The Trip, which was written by Jack Nicholson. The psychedelic film paved the way for Easy Rider, with both Hopper and Peter Fonda starring in it. It was here that the pair met and became good friends, opting to work on Easy Rider together, which would be Hopper’s feature debut as a director.
The pair recruited screenwriter Terry Southern and began thinking of ways to make a motorcycle western. With their nihilistic and acid-fuelled story, they signalled the demise of the 1960s era of hippie optimism. Hopper and Fonda decided to play the two protagonists, while Nicholson earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as an alcoholic lawyer whom the pair meet during their travels.
Despite the film’s incredible success, Hopper, Fonda, and Southern have all argued about each other’s involvement in writing the script, with Fonda once claiming, “It was just my vision and voice writing it at the Lake Shore Motel in 1967.” However, Southern once told The Paris Review, “If Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting-room floor, he’ll put in for screenplay credit. That’s the name of the game for Den Hopper. Now, it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film—but, by George, he manages to do it every time.”
He added, “So they came to my place on Thirty-sixth Street in New York with an idea for a story—a sort of hippy dope-caper. Peter was to be the actor-producer. Dennis, the actor-director, and a certain yours truly, the writer.” It seems like no one will ever know who was responsible for most of the story and how collaborative it really was, and unfortunately, Hopper and Fonda let this dispute destroy their friendship forever.
In 1992, Hopper sued Fonda for sole credit for the film, but the pair managed to settle the issue out of court. The pair feuded for the rest of their lives, and Fonda was even banned from attending Hopper’s funeral. Reflecting on their ruined friendship, Hopper once said: “Peter and I will never patch anything up. He has made my life so miserable. He tried to take away the one thing I created – Easy Rider. The story is partly his, but I wrote the screenplay, and Terry Southern didn’t write any of it. He even gave me his percentage of it.”
Setting the record straight, Hopper concluded, “Peter and I talked out the script on a tennis court, and he and Terry were supposed to go off and write the screenplay. I went out with Paul Lewis and scouted locations, and when I called and asked, ‘How’s the script?’ they had three pages. I went to New York, kicked them out of the office, hired a woman, dictated the script in 10 days. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was something so we could go make the movie.”
