Hopper (16 page)

Dennis's marriage also fell apart during the making of his movie. He finally granted Brooke the divorce she had filed for around the time he broke her nose (and the windshield). He'd never forget her acid remark the day he started
Easy Rider
—“You are going after fool's gold,” a line Brooke swore she never delivered.

“That didn't read too well with me,” said Hopper. “Brooke is groovy. We even have a beautiful little girl. But you don't say that to me, man, about something I've waited fifteen years—no, all my life—to do.”

Cast from the Fonda dynasty for good, Hopper came to believe that Fonda had plotted against him after Mardi Gras, in that Shakespearean-worthy conspiracy to take his movie away from him. He believed Fonda inched him out of percentage points of
Easy Rider
, movie points that were as valuable as any gold mine ever hit in the wilds of California.

Billy and Captain America had really tapped a vein with their
great
biker flick. Opening on July 14, 1969,
Easy Rider
made all its money back in the first week—“in one theater,” said Hopper—and it kept on flowing like manna from the heavens. The film that cost only $340,000 to make—in seven weeks—hit the scene by making upward of $40 million, with more to rain down.

Lines wound around the block at the Beekman Theatre in New York. Pot smoke wafted out of bathroom stalls, mingling with the smell of popcorn as young theatergoers lit up doobies in cahoots with Wyatt and Billy. Inspired by their epic American journey, seekers wanted to move to Taos and live in communes, and on the other side of all this peace and love, other types of thrill seekers were starting to score coke, because it was the hip new thing, because Billy and Wyatt dealt it. Businessmen began hitting the chop shops to buy customized Harleys. Scholars and academics wrote long treatises on the apocalyptic final scene when Captain America's chopper explodes in a fiery blaze on some nowhere stretch of highway after two rednecks blow Billy and Wyatt away—for having long hair.

An entire generation asked, “What did it mean when Wyatt told Billy, ‘We blew it'?”

“Tell me,” said British talk show host David Frost, interviewing the boys after
Easy Rider
became a megahit. “The film has become a sort of cause célèbre. Are you at all surprised by that? Or did you have a sort of germ of a thought that you were going to become a prophet,
p-h-e-t
, as well as
p-r-o-f-i-t
?”

“Profit
i-t
we figured because the price was so low,” Fonda said. “Prophet the other way I wasn't so sure of. But Dennis, he knew all the way.”

After winning the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, Hopper traded in his Baja seashell necklace for a glowing medal for the best movie by a new director. High off his phenomenal success, having spun what began as a chaotic shoot in the midst of Mardi Gras into one of the greatest box office smashes in moviedom, our hero embarked on his overdue masterpiece,
The Last Movie
.

A
fter his blazing success at Cannes for
Easy Rider
, Hopper left for London to meet screenwriter Stewart Stern and scheme about how they could make
The Last Movie
. Still wearing his leather and fringe like Billy, Hopper refused to take off his cowboy hat and wouldn't part with that Cannes medal hanging around his neck. Every morning, Stern arrived at Hopper's hotel room to work on the script. Having just woken up, the first thing Hopper did was fire up a joint and rant on about the movie. Smoking joint after joint, brandishing his medal and wearing his hat, he paced the carpeting while Stern tapped away at his typewriter.

In the beginning was Tex . . . Hopper's hero would be a stuntman cast in a lousy Western being filmed in Peru. At the climactic death scene at the end of this Western, Tex would be “shot” off his horse in the village's dusty plaza. The director yells, “Cut.”

Seconds later, Tex dusts himself off, walks away. All this would happen to the amazement of the real villagers, who'd never seen a movie before:
¡Un milagro!
How can a man get up after he's been shot? A miracle! They don't understand the concept of using cardboard wads instead of bullets. When the film wraps and the movie unit goes back to the States, Tex stays on in Peru to develop it as a location for Westerns.

“He's Mr. Middle America—he dreams of big cars, swimming pools, gorgeous girls. He's innocent. He doesn't realize he's living out a myth, nailing himself to a cross of gold,” said Hopper. “But the Indians realize it. They stand for the world as it really is, and they see the lousy Western for what it really was, a tragic legend of greed and violence in which everybody died at the end. So they build a camera out of junk and reenact the movie as a religious rite. To play the victim in the ceremony, they pick the stuntman. The end is far-out.”

Not being able to tell anymore where reality ends and fantasy begins, something strange begins to happen to the villagers as they mosey past the facades of a fake saloon, a fake gun shop, a fake church. Slipping into the setting, they begin to reenact their own version of the Hollywood movie and begin to “shoot” their own movie, using a camera made out of bamboo sticks. The camera is fake, but everything else is real: real bullets instead of cardboard wads, and real violence.

As much of a barbarian as Hathaway, the primitive “director” casts Tex as the hero, but this time really sentences him to death. Even the village priest is so caught between the fake and the real, he doesn't even know where to take the dying Tex, all bloody after being shot. The real church or the fake church?

“Where is that, where is that
coming
from? How did you
do
that?” asked Hopper, peeking at the typewriter.

“Well, while you've been talking, I've been writing the script!”

“That's
amazing
.”

Huffing and puffing, lighting up a new roach when the last had been misplaced, Dennis wasn't the same Dennis who Stern knew from their earlier years on
Rebel
. He was more unhinged.

Hopper saw his follow-up to the money-making machine of
Easy Rider
as the great American art film. He had originally hoped to shoot
The Last Movie
in Big Duke's Wild West town of Durango, but because corrupt Mexican officials were eager to censor the picture, he decided to go to Peru. Over Christmas 1969, he flew to Lima to scout for locations. Everything was closed in the capital because a left-wing communist military dictatorship had declared a four-day holiday to celebrate its seizure of American oil interests.

Hopper took a rickety cab to a town in the Andes on the shores of the largest lake in the world, Lake Titicaca. Despite its stimulating name, Lake Titicaca was frigid. Hopper hated the goddamn place, but as he walked down a street that was ragged with stray dogs, the sound of Bob Dylan playing on a jukebox wafted on to the lonesome path and led him inside a bar. In this watering hole, a couple of Peruvian kids were drinking beer and eating peanuts, tossing the shells on the floor. They agreed with Hopper. They all hated their town, too, but one of them told Hopper he must go to Cuzco, a city in southern Peru. Everybody knew the most beautiful women lived in Cuzco.

Yes, man, Hopper, the wild American,
had
to go to Cuzco!

On the way to this capital of the Inca Empire, the taxi driver had a curious habit of not letting anyone pass. It was very strange how as soon as Hopper arrived, he ran into a classmate from Helix High, a pretty far-out coincidence. A Helix Highlander living in Peru working as a travel agent? With his tendency toward paranoia, Hopper wondered who'd sent him. Was he an agent for the secret police?

“You're not going to find much here,” said the Highlander. “But in the morning, you should take a cab to Machu Picchu.”

The following morning, all the taxi drivers laughed when Hopper told them he wanted to go. Unless the crazy American wanted to hike up the Inca Trail for four days, the only way to get to Machu Picchu was by a train that had left three hours ago! Hopper slunk back to the Highlander. Tacked all over the travel agent's office wall, Polaroids featured the lush wonders of Peru, including the dreamy hillside village of Chincheros, where a stone fountain trickled in the middle of the dusty Spanish plaza with a gold conquistador statue.

That
was where Hopper wanted to go, that strange, magical place in the photograph.

So, surviving on beer and dark chocolate, braving muddy hills, he took a cab that bumped up a rough Jeep trail strewn with enormous boulders, over stones laid by the Incas. Looming in the distance, 20,500 feet high, was the majestic bluish snowcapped mountain Dennis had seen in the Polaroids. It looked just like the Paramount movie mountain, only the native Quechua Indians called their majestic mountain of dreams Mount Salkantay, or “savage mountain.”

The last days of the sixties were upon Hopper, and as the new decade approached, he proceeded to drag his movie bit by bit up the mountain, an epic undertaking. A pack of trained movie horses was flown into Cuzco via cargo planes. Fifteen thousand pounds of camera and lighting equipment arrived, along with eight containers brimming with Western wear. Cutting off his dirty, matted hair, Hopper secured it in a Polaroid box and gave it as a Christmas present to his seven-year-old daughter.

No longer the unshaven hippie of
Easy Rider
, never without his buckskins and a lost-somewhere-faraway expression, Hopper was now becoming a lean, rugged cowboy. To play Tex in
The Last Movie
, Hopper saw himself as Tex's alter ego and even took to calling himself Kansas. As the saying went, painted on the side of his muddy, red Ford pickup truck,
KANSAS—HOLLYWOOD, CALIF. BROKEN BONES BUT RARIN' TO GO!

In filthy Levi's, a couple joints stashed in the pocket of his work shirt, a hat mashed on his head, boot on the gas, Hopper wheeled his truck down the treacherous Peruvian mountain path, terrifying a
Life
journalist sitting shotgun, and commenced his far-out tale.

“It's called
The Last Movie
and it's a story about America and how it's destroying itself.”

The Movie Within the Movie

P
eru was a three-ring llama circus. Violent hailstorms bore down on Chincheros, beating Dennis's Wild West frontier town like a drum. It took three hours for a fleet of taxis to bring the production up the slippery slope of a mountain and back down to Cuzco. If one vehicle met another on the trail, whoever decided to pull over was in danger of getting stuck in the mud, a constant battle; often the road was impassable.

Melting in a sweltering Peruvian hotel room, the stench of failure lingered over the prophet of
Easy Rider
, who wore a silver coke spoon like a crucifix around his neck and reeked of marijuana and llama and funky body odor. The drapes were drawn and portraits of saints hung on the walls around him. Hopper had gone native and his indigenous lover was asleep in the bed. He took a sniff from his tiny coke spoon and continued ranting to one of the slew of visiting reporters from
Life
, the
New York Times
,
Esquire
,
Rolling Stone
, all hot to tell the story about what was next for Hollywood's rebel genius.

“Listen, everybody in Hollywood is saying that
Easy Rider
was a mistake and that I'm an undisciplined kook. Well, an undisciplined kook doesn't make
Easy Rider
in seven weeks. I am not a paranoid. I'm just protecting myself, man, against an industry that could care less about me! When Michelangelo was lying on his back, painting that ceiling, did the Pope give a shit about his welfare? All they care about in Hollywood is that the ceiling—the movie—makes bread. It all goes back to Kipling's ‘If,' one of my favorite numbers; it says something like, you can treat triumph and disaster the same, because they're both impostors.”