The “pitiful” movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “A wasteland of cinematic wreckage”
By their very nature, passion projects are always made for an audience of one. They only exist because the person creating them willed them into existence, often making them incredibly divisive. As far as Roger Ebert was concerned, one notorious example was better off staying unseen.
Not every auteur-driven passion project is a navel-gazing exercise in self-importance, but it’s also fair to say that many of them are. There’s a middle ground that the best ones hit where they manage to both appeal to a broad audience and reflect the creative intentions of their originator, but it’s frustratingly rare.
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and the ‘Golden Age’ was permanently consigned to the history books in favour of the ‘New Hollywood’ era, filmmakers were given more creative control and influence than ever before, which saw Universal make the mistake of handing Dennis Hopper a million dollars to fund The Last Movie.
As one of the new generation’s most important voices, Easy Rider was all the evidence the studio needed to think Hopper could make lightning strike twice. Instead, he vanished into the Peruvian wilderness with his friends, where they consumed a mind-boggling volume of drugs and shot a largely improvised film that barely followed the screenplay written by Stewart Stern.
Armed with over 40 hours of footage, Hopper spent over a year editing The Last Movie, and when it was finally released, not many people liked it. The reception was so dismal that the actor and filmmaker went into self-imposed exile, and Ebert didn’t hold back when he bore witness to the metafictional mindfuck.
“Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie is a wasteland of cinematic wreckage,” he wrote in a one-star review. “There are all sorts of things you can say about it, using easy critical words to describe it as undisciplined, incoherent, a structural mess. But mostly it’s just plain pitiful. Hopper hasn’t even been able to cover his tracks; the failure of his intentions is nakedly obvious. Near the movie’s end, there’s a pathetic scene in which he sits, half-stoned, dazed, confused, and says the hell with it. It feels like he means it.”
Completely baffled by what he saw, Ebert’s theory was that Hopper’s preference for improvisation meant there was no workable narrative left by the time he entered post-production, resulting in a staggered and scattershot mess that was occasionally nice to look at but completely bereft of any substance.
“The fancy photography, the fragmented editing, the series of expensive performers and high-royalty songs, is just an elaborate rescue attempt,” he suggested. Unfavourably comparing it to “the counterculture’s Around the World in 80 Days,” the critic hardly believed that Hopper’s friends joined the cast in the name of art, with a jungle jolly at the forefront of their thinking instead.
The Last Movie had a disastrous effect on Hopper’s immediate prospects as a filmmaker and viable actor, and the arduous process of following up Easy Rider sent him even deeper into a substance-fueled stupor. It was a mistake Hollywood would never make again, which was likely music to Ebert’s ears.
