Hopper contends that his last five-year bender involved a daily intake of more than a half-gallon of rum, 28 beers and three grams of cocaine to keep him awake and drinking. "The Last Movie" shoot was wrought with the violent and self-destructive behavior Hopper would exhibit throughout the rest of the '70s and into the '80s. "I figured, probably, that Universal hired me again in case anything went wrong," Hopper joked. Though it ultimately won an award from the Venice Film Festival, the incoherent fantasia proved virtually unreleasable, even at the height of the hippie era.Īnd it was bankrolled by Universal Pictures, the same outfit that sank a fortune into "Waterworld." Hopper's next directing effort, semiprophetically titled "The Last Movie," was a $1 million fiasco shot in an extended psychedelic stupor in Peru.
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But the film's co-starring co-writers, Hopper and Peter Fonda, were fated for bumpier career roads-Fonda's paved with poor choices, Hopper's with herculean excess. It was the ultimate counterculture movie, and it made supporting player Jack Nicholson a star. "Easy Rider," a drug-drenched motorcycle odyssey Hopper co-wrote and directed for a mere $340,000, went on to gross nearly $45 million worldwide. And in 1969, he did so-and in the process upended the film industry he'd never quite adjusted to. A five-year stint at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in the early '60s cooled Hopper down sufficiently, and he appeared in "The Sons of Katie Elder" and "True Grit."īut Hopper, still determined to do things his way, was itching to direct.