Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1029125
DGA QUARTERLY 51 PHOTOS: PHOTOFEST; (OPPOSITE) EVERETT CONTINUED ON PAGE 73 "The Last Movie was Hopper, in effect, trashing the Hollywood- meets-the-new-youth-generation alliance that he helped bring about," observed Gleiberman of the film that won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival and yet was neglected by the studio (Universal) that bankrolled it. It would take almost a decade for Hopper to be given the director's reins on another film, 1980's Out of the Blue. Out of the Blue, which vied for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, under- scored Hopper's predilection for telling polarizing stories about lives on the margins, in this case a nihilistic teenager (played by Linda Manz) drawn to Elvis Presley and punk rock, and her parents, an alcoholic, sexually abusive ex-con father (played by Hopper) and a junkie mom who can't protect her daughter. "He knew his topic," says Schnabel of Hopper and his approach to Out of the Blue. "He pushed himself. When you think of Linda Manz's dynamic with the father, and his relationship with his daughter, and the kind of loneliness [they experience], I think there was a narrative about the despondency of society, on what life in America is like." As a young actor Hopper idolized James Dean, with whom he worked on Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956), and inherited Dean's tendency to chafe at authority and insist on approaching a role in his own way. The most infamous case of Hopper clashing with the industry establishment was on From Hell to Texas (1958), when Henry Hathaway reportedly forced Hopper to do 80 takes of a scene before the actor acquiesced to his direction. (Hopper worked mostly in television for the following decade.) If Hopper could be stubborn, he was also capable of learning from his transgres- sions. "Henry Hathaway taught me a great lesson," he told journalist Edwin Miller in 1970, "a lesson I don't think I was able to accept until that point in my life, but one I've never forgotten: Don't fool around with the director! He's the man in charge and he gets what he wants. Just imagine what a mixture of styles and effects you would get if everyone was doing his own thing as an actor in a mov- ie. What confusion!" Hopper was also honest about his self-destructive ways. He once admitted to David Letterman that for a five-year period of his life he was drinking more than a case of beer and a half gallon of rum a day, "and about three grams of coke to sober up." Hopper did not conceal his substance abuse from journalists who visited the set of The Last Movie. Tom Burke's piece for Esquire magazine was particularly damning, confirming reports that the shoot was un- moored at the very least. And yet at the root of it all was a man who insisted that his excesses did not impede his creative progress, driven solely by a desire to make movies, and convinced that he was changing the language of cinema as he went along. By the time Penn collaborated with the director on Colors, Hopper was clean and sober, and eager to prove to Hollywood that Hopper, in cowboy hat, on location in Peru for The Last Movie, shot in and around Cuzco, where he was given free reign and a $1 million budget. The polarizing film won the Critics Prize at Venice. Opposite, with actor Sean Penn on the set of Colors.