Dennis Hopper and the “groovy” comment that caused Peru to revoke freedom of the press
During the self-inflicted reign of terror that saw him come perilously close to destroying himself on countless occasions with drugs and alcohol, Dennis Hopper was always one step away from disaster.
Admittedly, most of that misfortune he brought upon himself, with Hollywood’s foremost hell-raiser finding himself exiled from American cinema for the second time and retreating to South America, where he continued doing what he did best: namely, getting high as fuck and living a hedonistic lifestyle.
The making of The Last Movie was an odyssey unto itself, with the overwhelming recollections from most of the actor and filmmaker’s friends, peers, and collaborators who were involved at one time or another predicated mostly on drugs, drink, and debauchery, more than anything to do with actually shooting the thing.
At a base level, Hopper and South America seemed made for each other. He liked to ingest an unhealthy amount of narcotics, and at the time, there was nowhere else in the world to acquire them for less money and with more purity. Needless to say, the two got on like a house on fire, but not in a good way.
However, the Easy Rider mastermind did manage to cause a national incident, which doesn’t sound all that surprising, considering that this was the late 1960s version of Hopper we’re talking about, but still, causing an entire country to revoke its freedom of the press based on a single soundbite is nothing if not impressive, even if it wasn’t exactly helpful.
The star touched down in Peru in late 1969, a year after the Revolutionary Junta had staged a coup to seize control, installing Juan Velasco Alvarado as the resident dictator. During a visit to Lima, Hopper conducted an interview with La Prensa, and his answers didn’t go down too well with those in the corridors of power.
The reporter asked for his opinions on marijuana and “homosexualism,” which were illegal. Naturally, Hopper was smoking a joint at the time, and Brad Darrach, who was on the scene, recalled him saying that “he thought everybody should ‘do his thing’ and then allowed that he himself had lived with a lesbian and found it ‘groovy,'” which was all the regime needed to hear.
The interview left politicians and religious figures equally enraged, and within 24 hours of its publication, the government had officially denounced Hopper’s comments and issued a decree that repealed the freedom of the press, a fundamental right designed to guarantee the reporting of information that’s completely free from governmental oversight.
In one fell swoop, Hopper had cost every Peruvian that right, all because he said it was “groovy” living with a lesbian. By 1974, Alvarado had seized control of every national newspaper and sent their publishers into exile, so it was hardly an out-of-left-field decision for a dictator to make, although you could argue that Kansas-born wildman toppled the first domino.
