The 1973 movie Dennis Hopper tried to quit after hallucinating an armed revolution: “He was really shaken”
If you were asked to name which actor in cinema history would be the most likely to try to quit a movie under the threat of an armed revolution they’d entirely hallucinated after taking too many psychedelics, Dennis Hopper would undoubtedly be at the forefront of the list.
In that respect, he lived up to type, because that’s exactly what he did. The ‘New Hollywood’ icon ingesting enough drugs to kill a lesser man was nothing out of the ordinary, and tripping absolute balls was a frequent occurrence, too, but even by his high standards, this was fucking nuts.
Squandering every single ounce of goodwill he’d accumulated within the industry after Easy Rider, Hopper spent the next couple of years meandering his way through The Last Movie, a production that was every bit as chaotic as you’d expect from someone who seemed more preoccupied with getting high with his friends than actually making the motion picture he’d been paid to make.
By 1973, he needed a job, and he took one on director James Frawley’s light-hearted western, Kid Blue. The cast and crew pitched up in San Vicente de Chupaderos in Mexico, a fake town created as a backdrop to 1954’s White Feather, which eventually became a real, inhabited town once it fell out of filmic favour.
“About our first week down there, at a Saturday night party, Dennis came in with this really horrified look on his face,” screenwriter Bud Shrake recalled. “He was really shaken to his boots.” He gathered the film’s writer, director, and producer Marvin Schwartz, intoning that he was quitting Kid Blue, and they should follow his lead.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he told them. “Got to leave. If you guys have any sense, you’ll pack up and leave, too. You’ll be out of Mexico by tomorrow morning.” Naturally, that killed their buzz, and since they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, it was only fair that they try to find out what exactly had left Hopper quaking in his boots and ready to pack his bags.
“The revolution has broken out,” came the reply. “There’s gunfire in the streets. The streets out there are mayhem. I almost didn’t get here alive. It’s total panic and chaos and hysteria out there right now. People are getting killed right and left. The fucking noise, it’s like World War II out there!” That was news to his collaborators, but it didn’t take them too long to get to the bottom of the mystery.
It’s classic Hopper, really, with Shrake revealing that “Dennis had taken acid, and on his way over to Marvin’s house had stopped at a carnival.” The carnival, which featured fireworks, shooting galleries, and plenty of other loud noises, had left the actor and filmmaker “convinced that he had wandered into the Mexican revolution.”
The next morning, and with a significantly clearer head, Hopper was informed that he had not, in fact, been almost killed in the outbreak of a revolutionary war, but was simply off his tits on acid. With that cleared up, he reversed his decision to quit Kid Blue, and shooting went ahead that day as if the incident had never happened.
