Hopper (17 page)

The problem was if he spent too much and went over budget on
The Last Movie
, the studios could contractually take away his right to final cut. Maybe even send another director down to Peru to take his fucking movie away from him. He'd fought tooth and nail to get final cut of his movie so he wouldn't end up like Orson Welles on
The Magnificent Ambersons
, butchered by the studio.

“Well, that's not gonna happen, man! No way! This is my picture, nobody else is
gonna
get it!”

The whole production was threatening to collapse at any moment. Actors started throwing up from altitude sickness. One of the Mexicans attempted suicide after he was told there weren't any more rooms for him to stay with the Hollywood guys in the hotel. The star and director of
The Last Movie
, Hopper was saddled with the knowledge that, according to Peruvian law, if the suicide died, the production would be responsible. Hopper could probably take a night in a dank Peruvian jail cell, but it now seemed that the FBI was closing in on him on account of a “situation” in a chartered plane hired to fly actors into Cuzco. Some burly ding-a-ling in Hopper's cast had forced a Catholic stewardess to smoke a joint. She totally freaked out. The pilot had informed the head of the airline, and the Peruvian police threatened to arrest Hopper's entire company.

“Now there is an investigation going on, and I will probably be busted the minute I set foot back in the States,” Hopper told a hip journalist from
Esquire
. “Can you imagine what's going to happen to me, if the government decides my actors were offensive, smoking on that airplane? And what could happen to the
movie
?”

Fortunately, the police hadn't discovered the big carry-on duffel bag full of drugs, which shouldn't have been a problem because the cops were supposed to be paid off.

“For all I know,
man
,” said Hopper, “they're telling the chief of police, between sessions, about how the hotel is full of junkies.”

Hopper was getting paranoid in this room decorated with saints. Their innocently knowing eyes seemed to watch his every wrong move, pleading with him to stay sane—for the sake of his great movie.

“They didn't even leave me a joint, man,” he complained of his stolen pot stash. Another day, the hotel manager, who had become a familiar face to the production, informed Hopper to get ready because the police were going to make a big bust and everybody's room was gonna be searched. Everyone had already split, so Hopper had to scoop up all the drugs floating around in the various rooms. Hiding them away only led everyone to suspect Hopper was doing most of them himself. Anyway, the real problem wasn't those drugs brought from Hollywood.

Peru was nose-deep in cocaine, and Hopper, with visions of his cast and crew smuggling home coke in film canisters, could already picture how this one would go down. Their director would be the prime target to be busted by the FBI for an international smuggling conspiracy. Certainly there were those among his production who had the idea they could make a fortune by smuggling out the pure snow-white Andes shit. And that would
really
set back his grandiose film.

“Wow, whew! I don't care for myself, man, but I've got to edit this picture when I get back,” Hopper told the
Esquire
scribe. “I mean this could affect the picture! Even before I get out of Peru, there could be a bust with all the ding-a-lings running around loose.”

Local authorities had already questioned him. If this wasn't enough, one of his actors, a persnickety type, was threatening to send a complaint letter to the Screen Actors Guild detailing the abominable conditions of his dressing room pigsty, literally full of pig and
llama
shit.

As a director, Hopper could feel himself slipping into the part of Henry Hathaway. He'd actually cast his old nemesis as the director of the Western—“the movie within the movie”—that kicks off
The Last Movie
. It was a fair exchange, seeing as Hopper brought the
Easy Rider
multitude to see Hathaway's
True Grit
, which Dennis acted in after
Easy Rider
, the two films coming out around the same time. Even though he just played a bit part as a bad guy who gets his fingers chopped off, Hopper got equal billing with Big Duke. As for flying down to Peru to be in a Dennis Hopper movie? Hathaway backed out at the last minute. Hopper instead cast Sam Fuller, a real gun-toting wild-man director.

“Whaddya want me to do here?” asked Fuller, wearing a Civil War cavalry hat.

“You're the director, Sam, don't ask me. I'm doing
my
film. You do
your
film.”

“Whaddya mean?”

Before Sam was an antiquated movie camera Hopper had acquired in Buenos Aires for the scene. Over
there
with Hopper, the real director, was a state-of-the-art 35mm movie camera expertly guided by his Hungarian cinematographer László Kovács. Hopper had yet to shoot the part about the camera the villagers make out of bamboo sticks.

“You see, Sam, that is
my
camera. This is
your
camera. You do whatever
you
wanna do.”

Hopper's directing style was the complete antithesis of Hathaway's bulldozing. For now.

“Action!”

The movie within the movie starred Hopper's buddy Dean Stockwell as Billy the Kid riding in with his gang and getting shot off his horse. Dean had one line of dialogue, which he improvised. “Rose, my heart is burning!” Rose was the name of Dean's girlfriend at the time.

Dennis didn't direct Dean at all, but just went with the flow. As time on the shoot began to run out, new headaches arose hourly, the resounding theme being, “Who do I have to fuck to get
off
this picture?”—or this picture within a picture.

Take this ding-a-ling actor suddenly stalling the production by mumbling his lines like a fake James Dean. The guy was asking all sorts of questions that had no place in a goddamn Western!

“Cut! Now you listen to me, man!”

“Wait a minute, Dennis.”

“Wait a minute for me, man! For me! I'll tell you one more time. If you elaborate on anything in this shot we are dead! Just do what we rehearsed, Mr. Actors Studio, or I'll cut off your cocaine supply. Now,
get it together
!”

On top of the multitude of problems threatening to blow his production over budget, Hopper had the local priest to deal with. The priest was becoming a problem. Not the actor who was playing the
fake
priest, Cuban-born Tomas Milian, who had made his name as an Italian film star playing the Mexican in spaghetti Westerns. Tomas was terrific. Hopper thought the
real
priest was the problem.

Most recently the real priest had complained to the archbishop that some of the scenes being shot violated church doctrine. Of course it hadn't helped that Hopper had held a special mass dedicated to James Dean.

“Here we go again,” said the fake priest, Tomas, rolling his eyes. “Jimmy.”

James Dean's presence haunted the set of
The Last Movie
down to one of the fake Wild West facades named Jimmy's Place.
REMINDS YOU OF YOUR DESTINY
was painted on the window. The
Life
photographer who'd taken those iconic rainy Times Square portraits of Dean, which essentially created his existential image, was strangely down in Peru, shooting Dennis. And acting
in
the movie, too. Throughout the production, there were all these kinds of coincidences and symbols pointing to Dean somehow being part of the production, or at least keeping an eye on it from above. Hopper showed off his talisman ring, “Jimmy's Aztec death ring,” and he rubbed it raw. One night the ring broke off his finger. At the same exact moment, Hopper saw a comet soar overhead.

The fake priest, Tomas, had his own Dean hang-ups. Dean's
East of Eden
performance changed his destiny, inspiring him to leave Cuba and go to New York to the Actors Studio, where he had met Hopper. Lonely at times, away from his family, Dean regularly spoke to Milian from beyond the grave via a Ouija board, advising him to switch agents, going so far as to give him the name of a big shot Tomas had never heard of—and reminding when the struggling actor was feeling low and unwanted, “You are my Cuban Hamlet.”

Milian had always done exactly what Jimmy told him to do and now fate brought him here to Peru, to play the fake priest for Jimmy's friend Dennis.

“I want you to meet the real priest that is a son of a bitch,” Hopper told Tomas when he first arrived. “This is the type of priest I want you to play.”

Visiting the
real
priest inside his little hut, with its two beds divided by a table with a smoldering oil lamp, Tomas couldn't help but share something personal weighing heavily on his heart. He confessed to this priest. Before leaving Italy for Peru, Tomas had gone to church in Rome to get into a spiritual state. Confessing his sins, he asked the Roman priest to forgive him. The priest refused. Tomas had wanted only to play a good priest, but came to Peru feeling damned.

“Tomas, you are more of a priest than
I
am,” said this real priest in his hut. “I
give
you permission to walk the town with your priest costume. I will tell the Indians that you are Padre Tomas that has come from Rome, Italy. This is a rosary that I give you as a present.”

So the villagers greeted Padre Tomas from Rome. “
Buenos días, padrecito. Buenos días, padrecito. Buenos días. Buenos días.
”

Sitting one night in his black alpaca poncho at a ceremony at the mayor's home, Tomas was presented with a heavy tome with a leather cover. He ceremoniously entered in the words
PADRE TOMAS MILIAN FROM ROME
into its thick pages. A complete falsehood but there now for eternity, one more level of the production's mixing of fantasy and reality.

Meanwhile, and unaware of this latest impiety, the archbishop of Cuzco was getting ready to close down Hopper's entire blasphemous production. He summoned Hopper to him.

Sitting before the archbishop, Hopper laid on the charm. “We're not doing anything. We're really trying to . . .”

He hoped the archbishop didn't know anything about that letter from the pope, who'd declared him persona non grata for offensive and blasphemous imagery in
Easy Rider
. Hopper wasn't even Catholic.

“You know,” interrupted the archbishop, a twinkle in his eye, “I wanted to be in showbiz myself once. I was gonna be a stand-up comic.”

Really?
Working the angle, Hopper managed to win over the archbishop and pull everything together to shoot the final grand processional scene, in which the village priest relocates his congregation from their original church (built by conquistadors) to the fake movie church (built by Dennis Hopper).

Bamboo microphone booms? Check. Bamboo movie camera? Check.

Everything was ready for Tomas, the fake priest, to lead a gaudy religious procession in which stuntman Tex would be sacrificed. Starting at the original village church altar, Tomas, in flowing robes, walked holding the traditional processional monstrance adorned with a golden sunburst. The villagers walked in Padre Tomas's wake, playing harps and flutes and throwing rose petals in his path, innocently giving up reality for the fantasy of the movies.

“Cut,” yelled Hopper, but nobody cut.

Something even more far-out had happened. While shooting the scene, Tomas truly believed he was Padre Tomas, leading a real procession. The villagers followed him, the camera was rolling. Setting the monstrance atop the fake altar, Tomas proceeded to consecrate the fake church and exited the set with a feeling of reverence and a holy glow. Hopper totally flipped out.

“Wow, man! I mean
wow
! Beautiful. You know, oh
wow
!”

“Oh my God,” said everyone. “Tomas is gonna be
nominated
. Tomas is gonna get the Oscar!”

The camera operator looked as if he'd seen a miracle. “You don't know what
happened
,” he told everyone. Apparently, while he zoomed the lens around the sunburst monstrance Tomas was holding, there was a sheep farmer with his herd in the distance; he passed right into the shot and everyone thought that was very groovy.

“Oh
wow
, man. Yeah,
wow
!”

The camera operator might win an Oscar! Tomas was going to win an Oscar! Hopper was definitely gonna win an Oscar and save the movies!

It was time for Padre Tomasito to return to Rome. On his last night, he got drunk off of
chica
, the deathly local brew, and lashed out at the actor playing the “native director” of the villagers' movie shot with a bamboo camera. The native director had been nasty to Tomas, not liking it one bit how people were saying that Tomas was going to get an Oscar instead of him. That night Tomas was so provoked that he bonked the man on the head with a bamboo cross. The Indian villagers laughed like crazy at their irreverent Padre Tomas. But the next morning, after sleeping off his hangover, a very embarrassed Tomas gathered his flock.

“I confess. I am not what you saw yesterday. When I hit the guy in the head, I did that because I am not a
real
priest. I'm an actor playing a priest.”

“Ohhhh, you are an
actor
priest!”

“No, no, no, no, no, I am an
actor
. A priest
actor
.”

This was obviously going nowhere, so Tomas slipped back into his role.

“Yesterday I was drunk,” Padre Tomas confessed. “It was not the priest who was drunk; it was the actor who was drunk. A priest should
never
do what I did yesterday, but the actor in me betrayed my character.”

Tomas flew back to Rome and his spaghetti Westerns and thought the whole matter was over and done with, until a letter arrived from Peru addressed to Padre Tomas. It was from the real priest.