The maddening moment Dennis Hopper got high and accidentally stabbed a co-star: “They were doing lots of drugs”
If you’re at a pub, and someone asks you if you’ve heard the story about Dennis Hopper doing something completely mad, you may think you have, but the chances are you haven’t.
Because in the storybook of Hopper’s wild and hedonistic career, there seems to be a new tale that shocks even the most dedicated Hopper fans in history. Whether it was snorting a dead woman’s ashes or shooting an Andy Warhol painting, Hopper has seemingly done it all when it came to the game of debauchery.
But he wasn’t one of those actors who could compartmentalise his behaviour. He wouldn’t go on a 12-hour bender just to return to set the next morning, revitalised by a can of Coca-Cola and a paracetamol, ready to deliver his lines perfectly. Instead, he used his chaos as a fuel for his acting, for better or worse.
While filming Human Highway in 1980, it most certainly took a turn for the worse when Hopper’s co-star, Sally Kirkland, filed a civil suit for assault and battery against Hopper, Neil Young, and the companies involved for an injury that took place during production.
Asking for $2million in damages, Kirkland claimed that Hopper severed a tendon in her arm while acting with a knife during the scene. As an actor, Kirkland was initially open to acting in the scene with real weaponry, however based her later legal claim on the fact that she was made unaware of Hopper’s drug abuse, which ultimately fueled the maddened take.
Jeannie Field, who produced the film, recalled, “Dennis was jabbering chattering and driving everyone crazy because he was doing this little knife trick—he didn’t have a prop knife, he had a real knife.”
Hopper later said that Kirkland “couldn’t concentrate on her crying scenes, so she wanted me to be quiet— but in point of fact, she wasn’t in the fuckin’ scene. It was on me, and I was doing my thing. She grabbed the blade of the knife. I yelled ‘Cut! Cut! Cut!’ and Neil yelled from outside, ‘Only the director yells cut.’ I said, ‘No man, she’s cut.”
Despite intervening for the safety of Kirkland, it was clear that the injury was directly caused by Hopper’s maniacal state, which was allegedly fuelled by amyl nitrate, cannabis, and tequila, which, for Hopper’s standards, was a relatively meagre diet. Despite the allure of glamour that so many of Hopper’s debauched stories were steeped in, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh recalled a very different reality.
While playing recurring Devo character Booji Boy, Mothersbaugh noticed the darkness that existed beneath the mania. He recalled, “It seemed like an unhappy time,” adding, “They were all drinkin’ heavily, doin’ lots of drugs. Neil was the most grounded of all, they had attached their egos onto him.”
After rumbling on for five years, into 1985, Kirkland’s lawsuit eventually concluded in a rather unsuccessful end for her. Moreover, the film itself flopped massively, and any evidence of the blood-soaked scene can only be found in the dusty depths of old-school video stores, which is probably for the best.
