Dennis Hopper: Interviews

Citizen Hopper: Chris Hodenfield / 1986

121 Citizen Hopper Chris Hodenfield/1986 From Film Comment, November–December 1986. Reprinted by permission of Film Comment. Sure, Dennis Hopper says, he really did once sit in a circle of exploding dynamite. It was all part of a retrospective of his life’s work, called, fittingly enough, “Art on the Edge.” It happened about four years ago, shortly before he had himself committed. After an exhibition of Hopper’s movies and photographs at Rice University in Houston, culture lovers expected to see Hopper make an appearance . But those filing into the auditorium found instead a barrage of images being flashed on the screen, and sound booming from the seats and walls. A closed-circuit hookup beamed the image of Hopper, speaking from elsewhere on campus. The only way they would see him in person , Hopper told them, was to get on the bus for the Big H Speedway, a racetrack outside of town. There, surrounded by a race-night crowd, they would see Hopper blow himself up in the Russian Suicide Death Chair. He had seen the stunt done once when he was a child in Kansas. The reasoning went like this: Someone surrounded by dynamite would be in a safe vacuum, as if in the eye of a hurricane. If three sticks did not explode, it would, however, mean death. Hopper had heard the stunt was once used after the Russian Revolution by Bolsheviks who wanted to ceremoniously “execute” noblemen whom they really wanted to save. Hopper originally wanted to incorporate the idea in his movie Easy Rider, but it was never filmed. So he did it in front of a crowd of university students and race car fans in Houston. All his friends flew in for the party, too, expecting to see Hopper finally kill himself. Besides acting on the artist’s urge to make a statement. Hopper delivered a perfectly symbolic statement of his life at the time. “People,” he concurs now, “were worried about my sanity.” 122 dennis hopper: inter views When Hopper was a boy in Dodge City, he came across a book that would change his life. He read it over and over until he almost had it memorized. Young Hopper, who had known since the age of seven he was destined to be an actor, had not picked out some noble testament of the theatrical life. He had found his truth in Gene Fowler’s Minutes of the Last Meeting, a recounting of Hollywood’s mad, drunken bohemia of the thirties and forties. Providing potent images for the Kansas youth were gaudy drunks like John Barrymore and W. C. Fields. Barrymore had descended from his status as America’s greatest Shakespearean actor to a legendary sot who would, on occasion, rise before the microphones and portray himself as a legendary sot. But brightest of all in this book was a man called Sadakichi Hartmann, a German-Japanese art critic, poet, and “fuming savant ,” who, Fowler says, “pranced like an accelerated zombie among the easels and the inkpots of the elite, entering the ateliers without knocking , stepping on the toes of his apostles, heckling his personal benefactors , drinking on the cuff, dancing with gargoyle attitude, and mumbling his own weird rondels over the briskets of dowagers slumming in Greenwich Village. . . .” It was a hell of a blueprint for the artist’s life. Hopper, now fifty and being pursued by publishers for his own wild autobiography, still recalls the book with warm fervor. ‘This was not sentimental!” he said the other day in his explosive cackle. “Somebody leaves Sadakichi Hartmann this big mansion in Beverly Hills while they go to Europe. When they come back he’s turned out all the lights and painted ‘Let there be light!’ all over the ceiling. He’s torn down this very elaborate bannister and used it for firewood. He decides he’s going to die, so he takes this coffin out in the desert and takes a bunch of liquor with him. He lays out in the desert for two days and he doesn’t die. I mean, it’s great stuff.” And if this book was read over and over? “Then you knew what an artist was. A drinker. A drinker-drugger.” You can hire a living legend. He’ll come to your movie set and be a noticeable presence. He is short and not physically imposing, but his head is large and striking, and, through the usual indefinable cinemaphotographic alchemy, he does cut a...