The most devastating moment of Dennis Hopper’s career: “It’s really unfortunate”
Dennis Hopper’s career was so eventful and featured so many triumphs and failures that it seems more like the career of three men thrown into one. After all, this man acted with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, changed Hollywood forever with Easy Rider in 1969, and became an in-demand action movie villain in the ’90s with Speed and Waterworld.
On the flip side, though, Hopper often struggled with addiction and had more than one movie taken away from him by a studio to be reshaped into something he didn’t recognise. In fact, when it happened to a 1990 thriller he directed, it was one of the most devastating moments of his lengthy career.
When Hopper wasn’t acting or taking an inhuman amount of drugs or terrorising his neighbours in Taos, New Mexico, he occasionally found time to direct the occasional motion picture. After the debacle that was The Last Movie, which scared him off directing for a decade, he returned behind the camera with Out of the Blue. Then, in 1988, he directed an honest-to-goodness hit with Colours, a Los Angeles cop movie starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. The success of that film helped him attract a stellar cast for his next movie, a romantic thriller, Catchfire.
Hopper cast Jodie Foster in the lead role of a witness to a mob assassination on the run for her life from a terrifying hitman. However, no matter how many times she changes her identity, he manages to find her. There is a twist in the tale, though, when he falls in love with his prey. Hopper played the hitman – naturally – and the supporting cast was filled out with the likes of John Turturro, Joe Pesci, Vincent Price, Charlie Sheen, and Catherine Keener.
To Hopper’s dismay, the movie was a disaster. Before it even came out, he was already dissatisfied with how the studio Vestron Pictures had cut the film to ribbons, so much so that it wasn’t his vision anymore. He, therefore, insisted his name be removed from the film, and it was credited to the fictional director Alan Smithee instead. Unsurprisingly, upon release, the movie was lambasted by critics as mediocre, borderline incomprehensible rubbish, with the only performance that received any acclaim being Foster’s.
Two years after Catchfire flamed out at the box office, though, it reappeared on cable television under the title Backtrack, with 18 minutes of additional footage reinstated. This version restored some of Hopper’s pride, but the overall experience was still harrowing for the maverick filmmaker – and he wasn’t going to go quietly into that goodnight.
“Backtrack was caught in a vortex of a Vestron cesspool,” Hopper colourfully explained in an interview a few years after the movie’s release. “It was a victim of bankruptcy and greed. I considered Backtrack to be one of my finer films.”
Hopper claimed that Vestron was going bankrupt in 1990, and it saw the film as a way to make enough money that it could “maybe save the pictures that were sitting there, waiting to die”. So, the studio took his baby and re-edited it into a palatable, mainstream 90-minute thriller. “That was the first time that ever happened to me,” Hopper grumbled. “I had trouble with The Last Movie, but I won the Venice Film Festival, and nobody ever touched it.”
Fascinatingly, Hopper revealed that he was disgusted with Vestron’s edit because it was more than simply 18 minutes shorter. Instead, he claimed the studio took 30 minutes out of his original cut and added 30 minutes that he had deemed surplus to requirements. Thus, it featured an hour of material in a 99-minute film that Hopper didn’t want to include. “Then they took all the music out,” he continued, “Put in this incredibly big love score under Jodie and I. So, the nuances aren’t there.”
Ultimately, all Hopper was left with was a theatrically released film that he hated so much he didn’t want to be associated with it and a director’s cut that few people saw. Even worse, though, it proved that he was still subject to the vagaries and whims of meddling Hollywood studios even after nearly 40 years in the business.
“It’s a drag,” he commiserated. “I hate the idea that, after The Last Movie and all I’ve gone through, that this has to happen. It’s just another negative in a long series of bullshit. It’s really unfortunate.”
