How Dennis Hopper failed to settle a lawsuit with Rip Torn: “We’ll go to trial”
Dennis Hopper was somehow always getting himself into situations. Silly ones, drug-fuelled ones, definitely illegal ones.
He also loved a good feud, embarking on an embittered battle with his Easy Rider co-star Peter Fonda for years following disputes over who actually wrote the film. The pair were an iconic duo when they appeared as Billy and Wyatt, riding on their motorcycles across America together, but soon they were rivals, with Fonda even banned from Hopper’s funeral in 2010.
Fonda wasn’t the only Easy Rider associate who found himself at odds with Hopper, though. Rip Torn was initially cast as George, the character that earned Jack Nicholson an Academy Award nomination, but he dropped out when the conflict between him and Hopper reached a fever pitch. Both of their personalities were simply too big to work alongside each other – it didn’t help that both were incredibly argumentative as well.
Torn had hit Norman Mailer over the head with a hammer while filming Maidstone just a year before, their fight resulting in plenty of bloodshed. Clearly, Torn was not someone you wanted to piss off. But of course, Hopper did.
During dinner, the pair got into an argument after Hopper began to rant about rednecks. Torn was not having it. Then, appearing on The Tonight Show in 1994, Hopper claimed that Torn pulled a knife on him as a result, and this altercation was the reason for Torn being recast with Nicholson, instead.
Torn was furious, quickly suing Hopper for defamation and even claiming that it was he who pulled the knife, not the other way around. What actually happened that fateful dinner several decades prior remains unknown, but Torn walked away with a total of $950,000 in damages. I bet he was glad to be accused after all.
But Hopper initially had another idea to sort out their beef. They could go against each other on screen. Apparently, Torn was considering dropping the lawsuit if he could land a starring role in the film Space Truckers – which seems unlikely – but the actor ultimately turned down the offer to appear alongside Hopper in the sci-fi film. Torn’s attorney, Robert Chapman, told Variety in 1995, “There was a proposal, but it didn’t make sense for us, and we’ll go to trial on Aug. 21.”
So, Torn avoided being part of the incredibly bad movie in which Hopper played an entrepreneur of space transport who accidentally ends up driving a load of killer robots to Earth. With absolutely abysmal low-budget special effects, it’s hard to believe that a movie this bad could rope in someone like Hopper – of course, Torn wasn’t going to agree to it.
Hopper found the director, Stuart Gordon, to be the worst he’s ever worked with, and I’m not surprised. It’s a good job Torn didn’t sign up to the project, then, and he probably laughed as he watched Hopper drain his bank account, only to then appear in a terrible sci-fi comedy that could hardly even be called a work of cinema. It was pure humiliation that should’ve been a lesson for Hopper to simply keep his gob shut.
