The unmade movie that was derailed by Dennis Hopper’s demons: “He was just higher than a kite”
Since cinema’s inception, there have been many great potential projects thrown in the bin, forever remaining an unrealised dream that could’ve been something truly special.
One of these was a movie involving Dennis Hopper, the daredevil actor and filmmaker who made his mark on Hollywood with Easy Rider, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. The film encapsulated the end of the 1960s with its grim yet psychedelic exploration of freedom, and soon Hopper directed his second feature, The Last Movie, which was nearly his final outing as a director.
The issues that Hopper faced as the director of The Last Movie, which included his drug-fuelled obsession with re-editing the film, ultimately resulted in his self-imposed exile from Hollywood. He couldn’t get enough of knocking back drink after drink and doing endless lines of cocaine; he was in a terrible state. Hopper was in no position to act or direct films during this period, but it was an urge he couldn’t fully suppress, and by the late 1970s, still constantly drunk and high, he started to conceive an idea for another film.
The movie would be an adaptation of William S Burroughs’ first novel, Junkie, a brutal and experimental tale of drug addiction that surely would’ve hit a little too close to home for Hopper. The whole production was heading towards substance abuse-induced disaster from the very beginning, and it wasn’t long before this came to halt the film’s creation entirely.
Burroughs and Terry Southern (who was involved in the creation of Easy Rider) were on board to write the screenplay with Hopper. He told Interview Magazine, “[Jock] Stern wanted to make a movie of it, so I got him to give Burroughs $45,000, Terry Southern $45,000, and me $45,000 to write a screenplay that I would direct. And so I wrote about three screenplays, Terry about six, Burroughs about five. There was a year that we were together in New York, in the late ’70s. I got to spend a lot of time with Bill; he’s an incredible man.”
Ironically, heroin and cocaine were the main reasons for Junkie never materialising as a film, with Burroughs finding Hopper’s drug-fuelled ramblings about the project too much to deal with. Hopper needed to immerse himself in rehab, not a project about drug addiction.
“I did a lot of experimentation with heroin at that time,” Hopper said, admitting that his substance abuse certainly tainted that era of his career.
According to Southern, via The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel by Peter L Winkler, Hopper “was just hanging out and hoping to direct it, but at the time, he was just higher than a kite.”
Thankfully, Hopper managed to get clean and threw himself back into acting with full force. Roles in the likes of Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet, plus a cracking directorial turn with Out of the Blue, showed he was well worth the wait. Junkie might have fallen through, but looking back, that might’ve been for the best.
