The movie that ended Dennis Hopper’s career: “I never really got back to mainstream Hollywood”
If Dennis Hopper was involved in the making of a movie, you can only guess what went on behind the scenes. Known as a Hollywood wild child, the actor got up to all sorts of no good during the heyday of his career. Establishing himself in the 1950s, he spent the following years engaging in copious amounts of drinking, drug-taking and other forms of reckless behaviour.
From being paid with cocaine for starring in Apocalypse Now to participating in the Russian Suicide Chair experiment, Hopper certainly lived a crazy life on his own terms. Say what you want about the actor, but it is hard not to admire Hopper’s lack of inhibition and total surrender to all of life’s chaos.
Hopper enjoyed an interesting career as an actor and filmmaker, although his efforts as a director are considerably less appreciated. After making Easy Rider, which he directed and starred in, Hopper seemed like one of Hollywood’s most promising new directors. The film became a staple of the New Hollywood movement; its cynical nature and violent destruction of the American dream was a monumental entry into the cinematic canon at a time when mainstream audiences were being introduced to greater forms of experimentalism.
The movie used unconventional editing techniques, as reflected in the nightmarish LSD graveyard scene, singling it out from many contemporary releases. A few years later, Hopper directed another project, The Last Movie, which proved to be the reason for his directorial fall from grace. It seemed as though Hopper’s significant substance abuse issues were acting at odds with his ability to adequately edit the film, leading him to deliver something that many critics believed to be a terrible piece of work.
“I became a total failure,” Hopper told The Talks, citing a dispute between him and Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal Pictures, for contributing to his lack of success. Interestingly, The Last Movie initially fared well when it debuted at the Venice International Film Festival, but Universal was not satisfied with Hopper’s film.
The filmmaker explained, “Universal Pictures wouldn’t distribute my movie, and that whole fight was the reason that I didn’t direct another movie for twelve years. That is unfortunate, and I never really got back to mainstream Hollywood.”
He added, “They wanted me to re-edit it and I refused to re-edit it after I had won in Venice. Wasserman said, ‘Look, if you don’t re-edit it, I am only going to show it for two weeks in New York, two weeks in Los Angeles, three days in San Francisco, it will never be seen in Europe, and then we are going to shut it down.’”
In 1980, Hopper returned to directing with Out of the Blue, an underrated tragic coming-of-age tale about a young girl experiencing a troubled home life. The heartbreaking movie sees Hopper play her father, and it has since been awarded cult status, although, upon its release, it faded into relative obscurity.
It was his part in Blue Velvet that helped him get back to Hollywood, leading him to star in movies such as True Romance, Speed, Waterworld and Basquiat before his death. Still, Hopper never returned to the level of success he had experienced in the earlier days of his career when he seemed to have the whole film industry at his fingertips.
