How Dennis Hopper single-handedly corrupted an entire country: “Things got fairly excessive”
This week, The Rolling Stones released yet another new, and admittedly very good, album. And while the fact that Jagger and Richards are still pumping material out at the age of 82 is impressive enough, perhaps the most impressive thing is that they’re still around at all, because as Dennis Hopper showed, the entertainment world of the 1970s was not a simple one to survive.
Keith Richards is an anomaly, of course, because by rights anyone who did that much heroin should have been dead several times over, but Hopper, as we know, didn’t make it past the age of 74, passing away in 2010. In many ways, though, the fact that he, too, made it to a pensionable age is something of a miracle, because of all the Hollywood actors who liked a substance or two, Hopper was on a completely different scale.
What the higher echelons of the music and movies industry meant in the 1970s was, as Fleetwood Mac and Martin Scorsese will attest to, cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine. A veritable blizzard of high-end Colombian marching powder disappearing up beautiful nostrils and convincing the snorter that they had superpowers or were creative geniuses.
And Hopper’s relationship with the stuff was legendary. At the height of his addiction, the actor was doing at least 3g of coke a day, mostly in order to allow him to knock back a couple of dozen beers and half a gallon of rum at the same time. On Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola reportedly regularly provided him with an ounce of cocaine in order to help him stay in character. And when Iggy Pop once found himself on a psychiatric ward, Hopper and David Bowie managed to smuggle the drug in for him dressed in spacesuits.
If there’s one place that anyone with something of a predilection for disappearing Class As up their nose probably shouldn’t ever go, it is South America. So perhaps it’s not really that much of a surprise that in 1970, when Hopper was flush with the success of Easy Rider and got the chance to direct his own film, he decamped with a load of his mates to Peru to make it.
The ironically titled western The Last Movie would prove to be such a chaotic production that it put Hopper in exile for several years. And at the centre of it all was the drug of choice for the acting elite. Russ Tamblyn, one of the supporting characters in the movie, understated things somewhat, saying, “There was a lot of cocaine down there, a lot of cocaine. Every time you turned around, somebody had a spoon.”
And it wasn’t like the film was full of wannabes without reputations to uphold. The cast included Peter Fonda, son of screen legend Henry, Academy Award nominee Sylvia Miles, and Kris Kristofferson, who recalled, “Suddenly, you’re 33, in Peru, with a gang of guys who are living up to their reputations…I love Dennis, but back then, he was the most self-destructive guy I had ever seen! He antagonised the military and all the politicians. It was crazy.”
The Last Movie, which was about a leading stuntman staying behind on a movie location to see how filming affected the locals, caused outrage in Peru, where it sparked a dramatic spike in drug busts from the country’s military, especially on anyone with long hair. The producers of the film at one point invited journalists to document the filming, only for the whole thing to descend even further into carnage.
As Hopper himself admitted in 2005, “It was shot in seven weeks. The first two weeks were just hard work, getting everything prepared. Then the rest of the cast and a mob of journalists came to join us, and that’s when things got out of hand. Things got fairly excessive those next few weeks. Everything imaginable went on. It was one long sex-and-drugs orgy.”
Concluding, “Wherever you looked, there were naked people out of their fucking minds on one thing or another.”
