The day in 1971 when Dennis Hopper “fucked with the most powerful man in Hollywood” and paid the price
Although there are always whispers about which Hollywood actor might secretly be ‘difficult to work with’, there is no secrecy when it comes to Dennis Hopper, who was notorious for causing chaos on sets and burned a lot of bridges due to his wild behaviour.
He may have eventually cleaned up his act by 1986, when he received an Oscar nomination for Hoosiers and delivered an all-time great villain performance in Blue Velvet, because he had gotten sober, but Hopper infuriated a lot of people, even if it was in the service of great art.
Although he is often best remembered as a character actor who would show up in everything from Apocalypse Now to The American Friend, he first made a name for himself as a filmmaker when his debut feature Easy Rider became one of the most important films of the New Hollywood movement, proving to studios that there was a reason to invest in independent productions.
The acclaim and success that Easy Rider received led Hopper to develop an even more ambitious project as his second feature, but The Last Movie ended up being a far more complicated process than its predecessor.
The film was far more experimental and avant-garde about the lasting repercussions of a film shoot, but it was received warmly when it debuted at overseas festivals. Although it won a Critics Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1971, The Last Movie faced difficulties getting released in the United States because MCA head Lew Wasserman had requested that Hopper make edits to the film.
According to Hopper, the exchange became bitter, as he recalled, “He wanted me to re-edit The Last Movie after it won the Venice Film Festival, and I said, ‘I refuse’. So he said, ‘The only good artist is a dead artist’. Wasserman had this cane, which was George Washington’s cane at Valley Forge, but I wasn’t going to re-edit the film. How can you re-edit a movie that won at Venice? I don’t know. I didn’t know at the time. I’m still not sure how you do that.”
Wasserman was the former agent of Ronald Reagan and became one of the most powerful conservatives in the entertainment industry. He had helped to earn Reagan his role as the representative of General Electric, which kick-started his political career, eventually leading him to the White House. Given that Hopper’s films often featured anti-authoritarian and progressive themes, he was destined to get into a feud with Wasserman.
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Despite the fact that The Last Movie had also picked up an award at the Cannes Film Festival, Wasserman ensured that it would only play briefly stateside in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and would not play at all in Europe, a move so destructive to Hopper’s career that he would have to wait nine years before releasing another film he directed with Out of the Blue.
Although Hopper had a fascinating career as an actor in the years between the releases of The Last Movie and Out of the Blue, it’s unfortunate that he was not able to direct more films during that apex, but thankfully, The Last Movie has enjoyed a better reputation in recent years after being re-released by the Criterion Collection.
