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23 Dennis Hopper Makes The Last Movie in Peru Edwin Miller/1970 From Seventeen, July 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate. Dennis Hopper stands in a cobblestone alley in Cuzco, ancient sunbleached capital of the Inca, over eleven thousand feet high in the Peruvian Andes. Wearing a cowboy’s Stetson over shaggy brown hair, a crumpled chambray work shirt with a bandanna, blue jeans, and scuffed boots, he looks as if he has just stepped down from his motorbike in Easy Rider, that burning vision of contemporary violence in which he costars with Peter Fonda. Directing and starring in his new film, which he calls The Last Movie, Dennis ignores a swarm of curious ragged Indians with swarthy brown faces and coal-black hair, mestizos (people of mixed blood), a scattering of pale Caucasians. They stare with open mouths as the Yankee stranger, with red makeup spattered over his hands, tries to quiet a skittish horse while his cameraman waits for the right cloud formation to appear overhead. Now in his final week of shooting, after four months of work, Dennis’s eyes are red-rimmed with fatigue and sleepless nights, the tensions of carrying a million-dollar movie on his back; his angular face has a remote, brooding air. Watching Dennis, you would never recognize in him the sweet, shy teen-age actor from Dodge City, Kansas, who in the 1950s played an epileptic in a TV series called Medic with such passionate conviction that his own eleven-year-old brother ran shrieking with horror from the TV set. Dennis earned three hundred dollars for that performance. By the next morning, five movie studios had offered contracts and soon after he apprenticed himself to Warner Bros. for seven years. Jagged mountains surround Cuzco, their peaks a fierce study in black and white. The valley in which the city stands is a mosaic of irregular 24 dennis hopper: inter views patches of soft greens and warm browns, carefully cultivated by Indian farmers who blend into the landscape. Poor, illiterate, they are separated by a social and economic abyss from those Peruvians who trace their descent from the gold-hungry Spanish conquistadores who seized the country some four hundred years ago. Locations for the movie ranged all over the high sierra, from the city itself to an Indian village called Chinchero fifteen miles away, which it took the company cars two hours to reach over mud-filled roads in the rainy season. Some days Dennis appeared wearing a dark brown Stetson, on others he wore white. “There are no good guys or bad guys anymore,” he explains, while being made up in the bar of the hotel, sipping pineapple juice and staring with disbelief at scrambled eggs and coffee discolored by bits of clotted milk. A young artist listens while sketching his movements. “The world isn’t divided up that way and it’s wrong to show things in such simple terms. It leads to violence as a way of solving problems. “When I was a kid and went into Dodge City on a Saturday to go to the movies and saw John Wayne pick up an ax handle and smash somebody’s head in, what he did was all right because he wore a white hat. There were the good guys and the bad guys and whatever the good guy had to do to straighten things out—hit, shoot, whatever it was—it was okay. I was a good guy—nobody thinks of himself as a bad guy—there was no reason why I shouldn’t take up an ax handle myself and beat someone if I thought it was the right thing to do. John Wayne had shown me the way. For fifteen years in Hollywood the only role I was able to play was that of a neurotic killer. Kill my mother, kill my father, kill them in bed while they were asleep. Kill strangers, kill somebody all the time in one TV show after another. All the producers were concerned with was: Does the picture have enough violence? If there’s enough action, we can sell it. I’d rather a child of mine saw sex in a movie than violence. In a way, irresponsibility in the movie business reflects the irresponsibility of the country, and I feel I have to show the results. “When Elvis Presley first came to Hollywood to make a movie, he came to see me. He was twenty-one...

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