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10 Spotlight!: The Hollywood Scene Seventeen/1969 From Seventeen, October 1969. Reprinted by permission of Hearst Magazines. “I’ve always wanted to be a director,” Dennis Hopper declares, “ever since I walked onto a set when I was eighteen and realized that an actor couldn’t fulfill himself on film, that the director had complete creative control. But until Easy Rider, I didn’t have the chance.” Dennis was wearing a double-breasted striped suit, elephant-hide boots, a battered cowboy hat over brown hair falling to his shoulders. He is thirty-four now, and his face is gaunt. “It’s really hard to raise the money for a project in Hollywood. The film distributors have you in their grip, and a lot of those people don’t know how to evaluate material. The only way you can get them involved is through a name they think is commercial. “One of the things that has bothered me for a long time is the violence in films. I feel very strongly about violence. I don’t mind sex. If someone wants to watch a sexy scene in a movie, that’s his business. There’s nothing there that everyone isn’t familiar with from his own life. But I’ve been aware for years how violence on screen affects people. I remember after we made Rebel Without a Cause, there were hundreds of reports about cars with slashed tires in the places where the movie had played, areas in which they had never had slashed tires before. In high school after we saw Marlon Brando in The Wild One, we were all dressing in black leather jackets. When I was a kid on the wheat farm, I used to live for Saturday afternoons at the movies. I’d see a war movie, then the whole next week I’d pretend I was digging foxholes while doing chores on the farm, or I’d take a whack at a cow’s backside with a stick, pretending it was a sword. All our lives we’ve been shaped by movies. We watch the Bogarts and the Cagneys and see criminals made heroes and identify with them and have our principles shaped by them. The people who have made these movies have never taken the responsibility seventeen / 1969 11 for what they’ve done to us. They’re only concerned with the dollar. If it sells, they’ll make it, and that’s as far as their morality goes. “I have spent the last two years of my life on Easy Rider, working on the script, directing it, editing it for eight or nine months after it was shot. Because of that film, my marriage broke up. My wife didn’t think I could bring it off. I made it at a time when I felt America was burning. It’s a picture that shows the violence underneath everything. It shows how we talk freedom and democracy but refuse to recognize that we are a herd animal, and that we can’t bear anyone different from ourselves to come around. It might be a different way of dress, it might be long hair, it might be different ideas; whatever it is, the herd says, destroy outsiders. I think if we recognize that, we can try and fight against it and develop tolerance.” ...

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