Dennis Hopper - Name-Dropper Extraordinaire
Dropping acid with Jack Nicholson, eating pasta with Orson Welles and not having a single good word to say about Peter Fonda.
A version of this article appeared in Jack.
Jack Nicholson
Jack and I have been through a lot together. He's a real friend and a great actor. His drug intake used to be extraordinary. I could handle the drinking - I felt I could control that - but he could smoke joint after joint, and did so while we were making Easy Rider. The other thing that happened during Easy Rider was that we visited DH Lawrence's tomb, which was near my place in Taos, New Mexico, and dropped acid. The next morning, when we woke up, we found ourselves halfway up a tree. When you go through something like that together, it can't help but bring you closer.
Peter Fonda
Peter Fonda and I are not friends. We made a movie together, Easy Rider, and that's it. Fine producer that he is, he tried to get me fired from the picture! He also got the dates wrong for Mardi Gras which nearly threw the movie out of whack. One of the key sequences took place at the height of the carnival but thanks to him, I only had a week to put a crew together when what I really needed was a month. He's said all sorts of things about me over the years, calling me a fascist fuck and whatnot. I'd get more worked up about him but, you know, life's too short.
Kris Kristofferson
Kris has talked a lot about shooting my film The Last Move in Peru, saying it was one of the toughest shoots he was ever involved with. Well, it was certainly tough for Kris because he broke his arm halfway through making the picture! He was wrangling a horse and it kicked him and snapped his arm like a twig. I'd taken him down because I loved his music - he performed the score on the set - but he asked to do a few stunts and do a spot of acting and wound up getting a little more than he bargained for. So for him, yeah, it wasn't a walk in the park. Was it hard for me? Sure, but I didn't end up wearing a cast.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
The original idea was for Crosby, Stills & Nash to score Easy Rider, but I had a big falling out with Stephen Stills. We were driving back to my offices in his limo and I said, 'Stephen, this simply isn't going to work.' He asked why and I shouted, 'Because I've never been in a limo before and anyone who drives around town in a limo can't understand my movie! Fuck off! I see you around here again, I'll fucking kill you!' So that was the end of that.
Bob Dylan
In the end, I decided to pack the Easy Rider soundtrack with all the hit songs of the time. It was a pretty far out idea - no one had done it before. I thought it would so so cool if my movie ended with Dylan's 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'. The problem was Dylan didn't like Easy Rider or the song so much. He thought the track was pretentious, and he had a real problem with the end of the movie - "Peter should go back and blow those guys away!" Eventually he said I could use it as long as I didn't play it over the credits - "Man, it's depressing enough as it is." Then he did something amazing. He got out a pen and paper and started to write, 'The river flows, it flows to the sea, wherever that river flows, that's where I want to be...' He then handed it to me and said, 'Give this to Roger McGuinn, he'll know what to do with it!' So Roger added his magic to it and there it was, 'The Ballad Of Easy Rider'. I think Dylan could do anything if he put his mind to it. He's a really good actor - I think he's very good in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. Genius is such an overused word but, you know, he's the real deal.
Andy Warhol
I bought Warhol's first Campbell's soup tin painting, It cost me all of $75. Warhol was one of the most original people I ever met. He could be boring and brilliant all at the same time. A decade after he died, I got to play his manager in the movie Basquiat. So there I was having conversations with David Bowie who was playing Andy, which were just like the conversations I'd had with Warhol. It was weird - well, maybe not so weird in the context of my life but it was definitely strange. Do I still have the picture? No, I lost it in a divorce. I'm still pissed off about that actually.
Paul Newman
I met Paul Newman making Cool Hand Luke. I had a small part in the picture playing a guy called Babalugats - I don't think I have a line in the whole movie. It was a great experience, though. Me, Paul, George Kennedy, we all stayed in our chains and our prison fatigues throughout shooting. We smelled terrible but we went out on the town with Paul dressed like that!
Orson Welles
I made a movie with Welles which was never released called The Other Side Of The Wind. I was editing The Last Movie at my home in New Mexico when Orson called and asked me if I'd like to come to Los Angeles to shoot a scene. So he flew me to Hollywood, took me to his house, cooked me pasta and filmed me talking about movies and filmmaking all night - the character I was playing was a young director. It was fascinating, kind of like a one-night film school. Orson shot in a way that would allow him to tie in other footage easily - because he had no money, he was making the picture a bit at a time. Orson knew his movies and he knew his foo, although I guess most people could figure both of those things out for themselves.
James Dean
Working with Jimmy was incredible. The man had real dynamite - no one else had his power. He could literally do Hamlet standing on his head. After he died, I got fired from a movie because I had an argument with the director Henry Hathaway and I was blacklisted. To go from making Rebel Without A Cause and Giant with Dean to not being able to get a date in Hollywood, that was really depressing. It is true Dean wanted to direct movies. He wanted to make a movie called The Actor which was about the pressures of being a movie star. He found acting for film very difficult. Because he gave so much of himself to his parts, he couldn't stand it when a director would interrupt him mid-flow. It was because of that that he wanted to stop acting in films and be a director, but he died before any of this could happen. But we had seen the end of James Dean on the screen, even if he had lived.
Sam Peckinpah
I worked on Sam's last movie, The Osterman Weekend, which was a trip because Sam and I worked together right at the very beginning of our careers. Back in the 1950s, I starred in the pilot of The Rifleman which was a western series Sam had written. He was an incredible guy. When we were making The Rifleman, he'd be on set every day, telling me how my character would behave, how he'd hold his gun, what he'd eat and drink. He knew his characters inside and out. He was a good guy to know back then because, before Steve McQueen came to town, he was the only person I could always go and smoke a joint with. Was he a spent force when he made The Osterman Weekend? Well, he wasn't very well during the shoot but his mind was still very sharp. He was even trying to clean up his act - giving up the booze and the coke. He didn't drink a drop during the whole shoot, although I don't think he was too happy about that. Make no mistake though - he was a great director and a real force of nature. Look at The Wild Bunch - it doesn't get much better than that.