The director Dennis Hopper tried to murder over a threesome: “The poor guy had many demons”
There aren’t many things Dennis Hopper did that will surprise anyone even partially familiar with his antics, and it speaks volumes about his reputation as Hollywood’s ultimate hell-raiser that threatening to murder a director for spurning the opportunity to join him for a threesome may not crack the top ten.
That’s absolutely nuts in microcosm, but that’s the life that Hopper led. After all, this is the guy who tried to blow himself up with dynamite, was caught wandering naked through the jungle, shot a tree while out of his mind on LSD, and snorted a dead woman’s ashes, which is merely the tip of the debauched iceberg.
The late 1970s were a particularly tricky time for the Academy Award nominee and counterculture icon, who’d found himself exiled from the mainstream for a second time after a combination of The Last Movie‘s what-the-fuckery and his increasingly erratic behaviour rendered him persona non grata.
Seeking to rebuild his career overseas, that didn’t go to plan when he was deported from Australia almost as soon as he’d wrapped shooting on 1976’s Mad Dog Morgan, and for the next several years, almost all of his movies would be filmed outside of the United States, with domestic studios considering him too much of a risk.
One of the few homegrown and home-shot pictures he made during those lean years was Henry Jaglom’s Tracks, in which he played a Vietnam War veteran who returns to escort his friend’s body ahead of their funeral. Travelling by train, where he suffers haunting flashbacks to his time in combat.
It was a passion project for the writer and director, who’d spent years developing the project, and there was some guerrilla filmmaking involved, with Jaglom not always having permission to shoot on the trains that were so integral to the narrative. Compared to the standards of the time, Hopper was relatively well behaved, but he was still prone to the odd fit of madness.
The most egregious came when the actor approached Jaglom and casually asked if he’d be interested in participating in a threesome with Hopper and a female companion. Unsure whether or not he was being serious, the filmmaker laughed it off, which sent his wayward leading man into a fit of rage.
According to Peter Biskind, Hopper wrestled Jaglom to the ground, “threatening to stab him in the neck with a broken ketchup bottle,” all because he wasn’t interested in the menage a trois. Is that insane? Yes. Is it out of the ordinary for Hopper, especially during his peak wild-man years? Unfortunately not.
After the near-death incident, they finished Tracks, and after wrapping his final scene, Hopper said to Jaglom, “Now you won’t give a shit about me because you don’t need me anymore.” That was technically true, and they never worked together again, but Jaglom felt sorry for him more than anything else: “The poor guy had many demons,” which is selling it short.
