The song Neil Young wrote for Dean Stockwell
Much of the publicity surrounding Dean Stockwell is of his work as a child actor contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer when he performed in several films throughout the 1940s. However, in his later years, Stockwell became involved in the late 1960s – early 1970s Topanga Canyon scene and a turn of events led to Neil Young writing a song for him.
By the time the 1970s rolled around, Stockwell, like many of his contemporaries, had turned into a full-time hippie and essentially walked away from his acting career. He would knock about with the likes of Russ Tamblyn, Dennis Hopper, George Herms, Wallace Berman, and Neil Young during that time, smoking pot and having a laugh at any opportunity.
Stockwell had helped out Hopper in Peru in making his flop film The Last Movie. During that time, Hopper had suggested to Stockwell that he write a screenplay. Stockwell later told Neil Young’s biographer Jimmy McDonagh, “I was going to write a movie that was personal, a Jungian self-discovery of the gnosis. It involves the Kabbalah; it involved a lot of arcane stuff.”
The film was to be called After the Gold Rush, and while the actual script has now been lost to the annals of time, some details have emerged through Neil Young’s then-girlfriend, Shannon Forbes. She said, “It was sort of an end-of-the-world movie. At the very end, the hero is standing in the Corral parking lot watching this huge wave come, and this house is surfing along, and as the house comes at him, he turns the knob — and that’s the end of the movie.”
Young was interested in the screenplay, so much so that he wrote a soundtrack for it. And now, of course, we know that at least some of the film lived on in Young’s track of the same name – not to mention that he named his 1970 album After the Gold Rush too.
However, Universal were not keen on Stockwell’s film, and it was eventually scrapped. Young was not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the excellent song he had written for Stockwell has become one of his most beloved.
Young said of Stockwell after his death, “Dean was a great old friend. He was a true artist of many hands. I am so fortunate to have known Dean, whose screenplay After the Gold Rush was the reason I made that record and wrote many of the songs for the film. Rest in peace, my fellow traveller.”
