Christian Slater: The Hollywood Flasback Interview

Christian Slater: The Hollywood Flasback Interview

Winona Ryder  

I interviewed actor Christian Slater in November, 2008 for Venice Magazine. Having long had a reputation as an "enfant terrible" in his youth, Slater surprised me somewhat with his calm, measured demeanor and thoughtful outlook. He was promoting his well-reviewed, but ultimately short-lived, TV series "My Own Worst Enemy," which we discussed a bit, but Slater was eager to reflect on his entire career and life, which he did with aplomb. My other memory of the chat is that during our dinner, the power went out in the restaurant or hotel where we met (the location of which has been lost to time) and the halogen streetlights outside casting our talk in a strange, other-worldly glow for a good 30 minutes. All these factors made our meeting a memorable one. Slater can currently be seen on the new USA Network series "Mr. Robot," which is also being lauded critically, and will hopefully be gifted with a longer run than "My Own Worst Enemy."


CHRISTIAN SLATER IS HIS OWN WORST ENEMY
By
Alex Simon


Christian Slater first entered the public eye with his turn in the genre-shattering classic Heathers in 1988, playing a teenage rebel who evolves from smokin’ in the boys room, to bumping off his sadistic classmates, to becoming a homegrown terrorist by the film’s conclusion. Slater was instantly dubbed “the new Jack Nicholson” by press and public alike, and soon found himself to be not only in demand as an actor, but also fodder for the tabloids, a fate that hasn’t been kind to many young actors throughout Hollywood history, particularly in the past year. However, Christian Slater decided he was a survivor somewhere along the line, and has grown into an actor of range and skill after successfully navigating the rocky road of early success.

Born Christian Michael Leonard Slater on August 18, 1969 in New York City, Slater is the son of actor Michael Slater (aka Michael Hawkins), and casting director Mary Jo Slater. Growing up surrounded by the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd rubbed off on young Christian, who was discovered by veteran Broadway director Michael Kidd and cast in a revival of The Music Man in the late ‘70s. He scored his first major film with The Name of the Rose in 1986, and has also appeared in such lauded titles as Tucker, Pump Up the Volume, True Romance, Interview with the Vampire and The Contender. Slater was part of the ensemble cast of Emilio Estevez’s critically-acclaimed Bobby in 2006, and has kept busy doing stage work recently, including a heralded turn as McMurphy in the London revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Christian Slater brings his unique brand of talent to television this Fall with NBC’s new series My Own Worst Enemy, where Slater does double-duty as Henry Spivey, a seemingly-ordinary suburban dad and husband who also leads a secret life as intelligence operative Edward Albright. The catch: neither personality knows about the other, until both find their single life very much in danger. The show premieres October 13th on NBC.

Christian Slater sat down recently to discuss his career past, present and future. Here’s what was said:

My Own Worst Enemy marks your first TV series as a star. Is it a different process than working on a feature?

Christian Slater: Well, the primary difference is the speed at which you work. You work much faster in television. We took 14 days shooting the pilot, and we’re creating this whole new world here, so it was just this incredibly creative environment. When the pressure is on, great ideas tend to spring forth, and I think they have in this case. We’re close to finishing the second episode now, and I’m just having a great time, one of the best times I’ve had in my career, actually. It’s edgy, it’s interesting, and they’re delving into some really interesting areas. We’re all getting comfortable around each other, and becoming creative together on the set. It just feels like there’s a real focus, and the train is rolling out of the station now. It’s just going to be crazy. It’s a crazy, crazy show.

A lot of the actors I’ve spoken with in the past who have gone from features to television, say that the idea of doing a weekly series is really comforting, because you never lose that little voice in back of your head that every job could be your last.

You do have that fear and anxiety, no question. But being part of this particular show with this network (NBC), their support has been amazing. The Olympics alone gave us such amazing publicity that it really helped put wind in our sails. I should thank Michael Phelps for keeping it all so interesting, and keeping people tuned in as they were! So when you have that kind of support from “management,” so to speak, going into it, it lessens the anxiety—a lot!



Not only is shooting a television episode more time-constrained, but you’re playing two completely different characters who are in virtually every scene. It must be exhausting as well as exhilarating.

I never stop, and there’s not much time to myself, that’s for sure. It’s me talking to myself from one angle, then me talking to myself from another. We should also be clear that it’s not two different guys. It’s just me! (laughs) There’s sometimes some confusion that there’s a twin, or a clone or something. It’s all me: two guys in one body. There’s a microchip in my brain that separates the two personalities.

I’d imagine one advantage from an acting and a writing standpoint is that since with TV you’re really making a series of short films, rather than a single feature, it allows you to go much deeper into the characters and situations than you would in a traditional movie.

God, yes! Each episode really ends on a cliffhanger, and goes into the next episodes. I hope they keep that formula going. The other great thing is that I get to live in two worlds: one normal world, and then this world of incredible adventure.

You’re basically living out every boy’s fantasy: what boy didn’t grow up wanting to be James Bond?

Exactly! And some of the scenarios are really wacky and out-of-control, where I get to live out some of those fantasies.

It’s kind of like the ‘60s all over again: James Bond gave birth to great shows like Man From UNCLE, I Spy, Mission: Impossible, and now the reinvention of the Bond series and the Bourne films have really given new life to the whole spy genre, that’s transferring over to television.

Yeah, we’ve been talking about that quite a bit on the set, especially I Spy because Robert Culp and Bill Cosby had such great chemistry. We really let ourselves sort of go crazy and play. This is definitely one of the more fun sandboxes I’ve ever gotten to be in.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in New York.

Yeah, my dad’s an actor, he was the first Jack Ryan on Ryan’s Hope and was a pretty big soap star. My mom’s a very well-known casting director. I would make my dad take me to work with him when I was little, and watch him do his thing. He was creative, and funny, and just this wild actor. He had a real command of the stage.

It’s in the DNA, you could say.

Yes, absolutely. I started auditioning for things and got discovered by the director Michael Kidd, who saw me on The Joe Franklin Show, and cast me as Winthrop in The Music Man.

Was there one particular moment you knew that you were an actor? Was there one play, or movie or performance you saw that crystallized it for you?

This might sound strange, but it was probably more recently that I realized I was really an actor, when I was doing some stage work in London, on the West End. As a result of making some choices to work with a teacher, it really brought a lot of things to light for me. For years, I felt like I was just kind of winging it, and that any moment this committee was going to show up and discover that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I worked with a great acting coach named Larry Moss, who’s just the best, and I learned a lot and rediscovered what a gift it is to be an actor, and that it really is a lot of fun. You get to escape from your own life for a couple hours a night when you’re doing a play.

The play was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, right?

Yeah. I played McMurphy, at the Gielgud Theater. It was like doing a rock concert for eight months, really amazing.

Slater (center) with the London cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

So you got to assume the mantle of McMurphy, the role which most people would argue made Jack Nicholson, whom you were often compared to right after breaking out in Heathers. Was it tough to play a part that’s so heavily identified with one iconic actor’s interpretation of it?

It was tricky, and obviously I was scared of unconsciously imitating Nicholson’s performance. So I stayed away from the movie. I’d seen it of course, but not in years. I read the book, and that really provided me with my own source material for that character, and it’s a great character. Plus the book and the play are quite different from the movie, in terms of it being from the Chief’s point-of-view. I realized after doing it that Jack Nicholson has built a career out of doing that character. And why wouldn’t you? The guy’s heroic, he’s funny, he’s incredibly smart, just a great character.

What was your interpretation of him?

I didn’t play him as a lunatic, certainly. I played it more like it was all a big misunderstanding, and he was in this situation and trying to make the best of it, but he was in a totalitarian scenario, and his passion and ability to rally the troops and get the guys on his side was the thing I really identified with, and his ability to take on the system created a great sense of passion. The guy just wanted to have fun, and there was someone constantly standing in the way. He’s also a Christ-like figure who’s got his disciples and has to be sacrificed at the end in order to get these guys to rally.

It’s especially topical for the times we’re living in.

Oh yeah! It’s a universally identifiable story, and you can’t help but get caught up in it. We’d have nights where the audience would get so caught up in it that they’d be cheering for us to watch the World Series! One night people got into fights in the audience. Everyone really got into it. There was a sense of reality. Once the lights came up, I think they all felt like they’d been in the asylum with us.

Slater and Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose.

The first film I saw you in was The Name of the Rose, where you got to play opposite the great Sean Connery. Heady stuff for a kid?

Sean Connery was great. I grew up watching the Bond movies, and working with him at 16 was like having a master class in acting, life, all sorts of things. He’s an incredible professional, a real gentleman, a man’s man. He also didn’t take any shit from anybody. He had earned his right to be who he was, and things moved along according to his plan. He was concerned about every element and how everything was treated on the set. He didn’t even want to see the horses mistreated. There was a horse wrangler on the set, and Sean didn’t like the way the guy had hit the horse with his riding crop. So he grabbed it from the guy and said (in Connery’s voice) “Don’t hit the fucking horses!” (laughs) I watched the film recently on cable, and really got emotional because it took me back to that time, and everything I was going through. It really is an absolutely astoundingly beautiful movie. The work that Jean-Jacques Annaud did…I don’t think I had a clue then what a special film it was. Every once in a while there’s a special project you get to be a part of, and that was one. I was always a sensitive kid, and I remember that wrapping that film was really hard for me. It was five months in Germany and Rome, and it was hard to say good-bye.

You got to work with Francis Coppola soon after on Tucker.

Another great experience. Francis was great, and Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen…God, those cars were amazing! I got to drive one of the Tuckers on this track where we were shooting. We were shooting on these stages at Paramount, and I walked around and saw some of the other things that were being filmed. I walked onto this one stage, and there was the Starship Enterprise! Only it was little. It was tiny. It was in a weird shape, and I was like “What the hell is this?” And it turned out they were building the ship for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Then they were filming the ending of Witches of Eastwick, and they had that animatronic Jack Nicholson there, which was really weird and scary to see, and just thinking “God, the movies are cool!” (laughs) I also remember working with Fred Forrest on Tucker. Fred’s got a real laid-back, kind of Nicholsonian drawl, and I remember being very aware of that, and really liking that. He was a big influence on me, Fred Forrest. Really interesting guy. The whole film was like a big family. Coppola sets that kind of mood. It was another instance of me looking around, age 18, thinking “Jesus, what the hell am I doing here?” (laughs) It still amazes me when I look at some of the films I’ve been a part of, and some of the people I’ve gotten to meet and work with. I also look back sometimes and realize that I was lucky to have lived through them and even to have survived them, at times. It’s certainly a testament to whatever I have in me that has that instinct.

I can imagine at that age, and through your early 20s, it was like sensory overload at times.

Yes, exactly. The overwhelm of being in these places, as exciting as they were, and dealing with different personalities, the intensity of this business, and the egos involved, dare I say it. It’s wild to be a kid and have those kinds of experiences.

Slater as pirate DJ "Hard Harry" in Pump Up the Volume.

But you also had two parents in the business who could help put it in perspective for you, certainly more so than if your dad had sold insurance and your mom was a schoolteacher.

Absolutely true. They certainly are passionate people, as well, and are colorful in their own ways, but they were always there to answer questions. As I said before, my dad was always the kind of guy who was willing to take me with him to work, and my mother being okay with that and with me being introduced to that life, it says a lot. My mother was casting Hair when I was about six, and I remember being downtown with that whole crew, and watching everybody rehearse, and just being involved in that world at that age was pretty rich. I remember that was the year of the big blackout, and we had to figure out how to get out of there in the dark…there were some really cool moments.

Heathers was the movie that changed everything for you. 20 years later you look at it, and you realize that nobody realized how fortuitous a film it was ten years before Columbine. It seemed so far out at the time, and now it plays much more disturbing than funny.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. As time goes on, perceptions change. Everything’s changed, particularly after 9/11. It’s scarier and sadder, and not that I claim to know anything about politics, but certainly the last eight years have been difficult for everybody, and confusing and scarier than they were the previous eight years.

When we were growing up, there were certainly bad things that happened in the world, but nobody ever thinks they’ll look back on their childhood as being times of innocence, and now I feel like we really did come of age in a more innocent time.

It’s true. It was pretty simple. Reagan was this sort of father figure, and the ‘80s were a fun time, and now we’re in this warmongering period. I can only have hope for the future, that things are going to move in a more positive direction.

Slater with Winona Ryder in Heathers, his star-making turn.

Did you all feel at the time that Heathers was exploring uncharted territory for a “teen” film?

I think we all felt that it was pretty interesting and unique, yeah. I think everything works in retrospect. You don’t really know what you’re working on when you’re working on it. You have ideas what you’d like it to be, what it could be, but you never know until the end result. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. (laughs) It was actually a really creative, fun shoot.

All the Nicholson comparisons started after that film. I’m sure it was flattering to an extent for you, but it must’ve gotten old eventually, especially considering I’m sure you were just being yourself.

Well look, if you’re going to be compared to someone…(laughs) Like I said, Fred Forrest has a lot of Nicholson qualities, as does my dad, so I’m sure a lot of that rubbed off on me. I’d seen Easy Rider and thought Nicholson was the coolest guy on the planet. When I saw Witches of Eastwick being shot, I just identified with Nicholson, and thought he was the greatest. When I read the script for Heathers, I guess I saw some qualities in the character of Jason Dean that I could identify with, and everything just kind of jelled into something that allowed people to make that kind of comparison. I was certainly playing a character. If they’d shot Jason Dean’s room in the movie, he probably would have had a poster of The Shining or Easy Rider because he was just that guy. So were there qualities in that character that were Nicholsonian? Absolutely!

L to R: Michael Rapaport, Patricia Arquette and Slater in True Romance.

Another groundbreaking movie we have to discuss is True Romance.

At the time I got the script, nobody had really heard of Quentin Tarantino. He’d made this little independent movie, Reservoir Dogs. I saw it with Patricia Arquette at the CAA screening room. It really affected me. I laughed, I was horrified, it was something new. I thought Quentin was great, and loved him and his passionate personality. The cast just kept getting bigger and bigger with more and more interesting people. The scene between Dennis Hopper and Chris Walken was one of the first scenes that was edited together, and Tony Scott showed it to us on the set, and we were all just blown away. So yeah, great experience, great script but again, you never know what a film is going to be until you see the final product. In this case, it was another one of those really special experiences that resulted in an equally amazing movie.

Slater in Interview With the Vampire, playing the role originally intended for the late River Phoenix. Slater donated his entire salary to charity.

In Interview With the Vampire, you took over the role that River Phoenix was originally cast. Did you know him at all?

Not really. We’d met before and I respected him, and his work tremendously. That was so tragic, and it was really awkward to be stepping into that kind of scenario. But I think I eased my own discomfort by not accepting money for it and donating my salary to his charities. It was great to work with Neil Jordan, and Brad Pitt was great, and that was the second time we’d worked together, of course, after True Romance.

Slater in John Woo's Broken Arrow.

You got to work with the great John Woo twice.

Amazing filmmaker. He’s a very cerebral man, very sweet, but very quiet, much in the same way Neil Jordan is. I don’t know where John’s English is today, but at that time, he didn’t speak English that well, so our communication was limited. Basically, he told me I was supposed to be playing Steve McQueen and I forget who he said John Travolta was supposed to be, but that was all the direction I really got. (laughs) But what a genius he is, a real master of the medium. Also, when I did Windtalkers, it was a real treat to work with Nic Cage. He’s one of our greatest actors. Everything he does, every choice he makes, it just blows my mind. I just watched Face/Off again the other night. What an unbelievable movie that is! And Nic and Travolta are amazing in it. I could watch that movie all day.

Slater and Heather Graham in Emilio Estevez's Bobby.

Recently you were in Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, which I thought did a beautiful job of capturing a time and place in history.

Yeah, it really did. Emilio did a phenomenal job and to be a part of that incredible group that he assembled…I mean Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy, Sharon Stone, Martin Sheen, Harry Belafonte. It was like a who’s-who of talent. Everybody showed up on that giving 150%, we were all so proud of Emilio who, in my opinion, knocked it out of the park. The audience reaction was amazing in Venice, where it premiered. There was a ten minute standing ovation. What’s even more amazing, is that the film wasn’t even produced by Americans, but by Russians! In terms of acting, it was fun to sort of immerse myself in that character, who was so part of another time, and another mindset. Being on the set of the film was like going back in time. It was really powerful, very realistic, especially recreating those last moments. It’s funny, we shot at the Ambassador Hotel, where it all happened, right before they tore it down, and I’ve shot a couple other things there, including True Romance, and it was a really creepy place. But I’m very happy we got to shoot the film there while it was still standing.

You mentioned River Phoenix earlier. In the past year, we’ve lost a couple talented young actors tragically. You’ve been through a lot professionally and personally in this business, and you’ve survived. Is there an outlook one has to adopt to be a survivor or is it just something you choose?

What can I say? It’s a wild world. It takes a certain amount of denial sometimes just to wake up and get through the day. (laughs) But we try to show up, do our best, do our job, and try not to be an asshole in the process. If you can do that, then you’re ahead of the game.

That’s the magic word, isn’t it?

Amen, brother.

Robert Evans: The Hollywood Flashback Interview

Robert Evans: The Hollywood Flashback Interview

Warren Beatty  

Producer Robert Evans, circa 1970s, in the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.

ROBERT EVANS: THE KID IS ALRIGHT
By
Alex Simon

I interviewed legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans in 2002 for Venice Magazine, in conjunction with the release of the documentary "The Kid Stays in the Picture," adapted from his iconic autobiography and audiobook. Our chat took place at Woodland, Evans' storied estate in Beverly Hills, in his equally famous screening room, which mysteriously burned down a couple years later. Evans was still physically frail, having recently survived a series of strokes, but his mind, his wit and his charm were sharp as ever, with near total recall for people, places and stories. Many, many stories. Here are a few of them.

It’s a widely-held belief that the years 1967-76 represent the “golden age” of American cinema. Just look at a few of these titles: Rosemary’s Baby, Medium Cool, Romeo and Juliet, True Grit, Catch-22, Love Story, The Godfather I & II, Don’t Look Now, Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Shampoo, Marathon Man, to name a few. These films, as well as others from the era, helped reshape our world, redefine us as people, and remain timeless touchstones to which millions born and unborn will return probably for as long as man continues to inhabit this crazy mess of a planet. If you were asked, “Who’s responsible for giving life to these masterpieces?” most would respond: “Uh, well, let’s see there’s Roman Polanski, Haskell Wexler, Franco Zeffirelli, Francis Ford Coppola…” Whoah. Slow down there, Shell Answer Man. You’re leaving one guy out. One guy who was responsible for giving all those titles life. One guy who refused to play by the rules. One guy who picked up the dice, had the prettiest dame in the room give them a lucky breath of air, and let them fly, outcome be damned. Hell, he knew it was gonna come up 7. His friends, both real and those who think they are, still call him “The Kid,” a moniker bestowed upon him by the legendary Darryl F. Zanuck. Civilians know him as Robert Evans.

Robert Evans was born Robert J. Shapera on June 29, 1930 in New York City, the second son of a dentist who had the first integrated practice in Harlem. The family later adopted the last name Evans as a tribute to their paternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Evan. Young Bobby Evans had a comfortable middle class upbringing, being bitten by the acting bug at an early age, finding work as a radio actor in his early adolescence, already blessed with a distinctive, adult-sounding voice. Forgoing college, Evans joined his older brother Charles in running the elder Evans’ highly-successful women’s clothing label Evan-Picone, making Robert Evans a millionaire before his 25th birthday.

While visiting the west coast to open Evan-Picone boutiques, Evans was discovered poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Norma Shearer, a silent, and early talkie, screen star and widow of the legendary boy mogul Irving Thalberg. Thinking him perfect to portray her late husband in Fox’s Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), Evans suddenly found himself playing opposite his childhood idol James Cagney, and voted “Most Promising Newcomer” by Photoplay magazine. His next role, as bullfighter Pedro Romero in the screen adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1957), earned Evans his ubiquitous nickname. So incensed were most of the cast and crew that this young upstart was cast in a pivotal role, a telegram was sent to studio head Darryl F. Zanuck demanding that Evans be replaced. It was signed by Hemingway, Ava Gardner, Tyrone Power and Eddie Albert. Furious, Zanuck flew down to Mexico. Arriving on the set the day a bullfighting scene was being shot, Evans displayed such panache in the sequence, Zanuck, all 5 foot 4 of him, stood up gripping a bullhorn, and intoned: “The kid stays in the picture, and anyone who doesn’t like it can quit!” At that moment, Evans realized it was Darryl Zanuck, as opposed to James Cagney, that he wanted to emulate. Thus a moniker, and a legend, was born.

A fair to middling actor by his own admission, Evans’ career as a thespian fizzled out as quickly as it started. Evans returned to “being in women’s pants,” as he likes to joke, running Evan-Picone with brother Charles, but he longed to try his hand at producing movies. In the mid-60’s, he saw his chance, optioning a novel by Roderick Thorpe called The Detective, attaching Frank Sinatra to play the lead. This led to a multi-picture development deal at 20th Century Fox. Evans was getting ink again on the entertainment page, most notably, a piece in the New York Times by a young scribe named Peter Bart. The piece caught the eye of Gulf + Western chairman Charles Bluhdorn. Impressed by Evans’ moxie, Bluhdorn summoned “the kid” to Gulf + Western’s New York offices, offering Evans the position of head of European production for Paramount Pictures, one of G+W’s subsidiaries. Paramount, which at that time was “ranked 9th out of 8 studios in town,” was in dire straits, most of its investors pressuring the board to sell the lot for a tidy sum to the Jewish cemetery that bordered it. Bluhdorn refused to let this happen, quickly recognizing Evans’ solid-gold instincts, and promoting him to head of production back in LA. Evans just as quickly hired Bart to be his right hand man. This was 1966. By 1972, Evans had taken Paramount from the basement to the penthouse: the top studio in town.

Among Evans' legendary accomplishments during his tenure at Paramount was during the production of Marathon Man, Evans was set upon getting Laurence Olivier to play the role of villainous Nazi war criminal Christian Szell. However, because Olivier at the time was riddled with cancer, he was uninsurable so Paramount refused to use him. In desperation, Evans called his friends Merle Oberon and David Niven to arrange a meeting with the House of Lords (the upper body of the British parliament). There, he urged them to put pressure on Lloyd's of London to insure Britain's greatest living actor. The ploy succeeded and a frail Olivier started working on the film. In the end, not only did he net an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but his cancer also went into remission. Olivier lived on for another 13 years and never stopped working.

Evans' other legacy has been his propensity for surrounding himself with the world’s most glamorous and desired women, a list of names that would make Hugh Hefner green with envy. His male friends included Hollywood stalwarts Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, statesmen like Henry Kissinger, and behind-the-scenes powerbrokers, like the legendary and secretive Sidney Korshak. Married and divorced five times (his exes including Ali MacGraw, and former Miss America Phyllis George), Evans personified the glamorous movie mogul of the 70’s: blessed with the looks and wardrobe of a male model, architect of some of the most groundbreaking movies in history, his Beverly Hills estate, Woodland, the site of glamorous parties, precedent-setting business deals, and storybook romances. By the end of the decade, Robert Evans was approaching the sort of Hollywood omnipotence that people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas achieved a decade later.

In 1980, however, everything came crashing down. Implicated in a high-profile cocaine bust (even though he was 3,000 miles away when it occurred), Evans name was tarnished almost beyond repair, in spite of never being formally charged with any crime. In addition to a worsening cocaine problem, Evans’ biggest professional debacle was the ill-fated film The Cotton Club (1984) a labor of love for Evans, which turned into a literal nightmare. To add insult to injury, the murder of Roy Radin, an acquaintance Evans met as a potential investor in the film, was dubbed “The Cotton Club Murder Case” by the press, further tarnishing his once-spotless image. By the end of the decade, Evans was virtually destitute, a pariah in the town he loved, and the business that he helped shape.

Deciding to pull himself up by the bootstraps in 1990, Evans embarked on what would be his comeback project. The Kid Stays in the Picture was Evans’ life story, a Hollywood memoir that not only became an international best-seller, but also became required reading for a new generation of filmmakers and studio execs. The audio version of the warts-and-all tale became even more legendary, with Evans himself reading from the book, and acting out his life. Soon the phone started ringing again. Old pal Stanley Jaffe, now head of production at Paramount, offered Evans a place back at his old home, setting up a production deal. “The Kid” was back in the picture…with another hurdle around the corner.

In 1997, while hosting a party for filmmaker Wes Craven at Woodland, Evans rose to toast his guest, then dropped to the floor, the victim of a massive stroke. Once hospitalized, two more strokes followed, paralyzing the right side of Evans’ body. Doctors told him he would be wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life, if he were lucky. Determined to prove them wrong, Evans spent the next two years undergoing painful physical and speech therapy, rebuilding himself and his life.

Meanwhile, the book and audio of The Kid Stays in the Picture just kept growing in popularity. Approached by old pal Graydon Carter, Editor of Vanity Fair, Carter suggested turning Kid into a film, a self-narrated documentary about Evans’ surreal, rollercoaster of a life. The result: Nanette Burnstein and Brett Morgen’s documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture. A huge hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Kid the movie is a fascinating, sad, hilarious, thrilling self-portrait of a man who refuses to be anyone but himself. The Focus Films release is currently playing in LA and New York, with a wider release planned for late Summer and early Fall. As Evans himself said, “I got to have a third act, and it’s been the greatest of my life.”

Robert Evans sat down with Venice recently in the screening room at Woodland, a place where more Hollywood history has been made than all the boardrooms at Paramount, telling the tale of how he has managed to stay Hollywood’s version of the mythical bird the Phoenix, rising up from the ashes that surround him, to be reborn.

What precipitated your writing the book "The Kid Stays In the Picture"?

Robert Evans: I wrote this book not knowing if it would be published or not. I could have cared less. I didn't care if anyone even read it, just one person: my son, Josh. From the time Josh was seven years old until he was 17, his old man went from royalty to infamy. And kids can be very cruel. Unfortunately, royalty fades and infamy stays. The day Josh graduated from high school, the headline on the front page of the L.A. Times read: “Robert Evans Involved in Murder.” There all the kids were, dressed in their caps and gowns. Bob Daly was there. Terry Semel was there. Both their kids were graduating as well. And in spite of everything I accomplished in my life, I felt so low. Josh came up to me, hugged and kissed me, and I was just crying. Afterwards we all went to lunch, just me, Josh, and his mom, Ali MacGraw. Then I went home by myself and just cried some more, thinking “Why should Josh have to go through all this shit because of me and my mistakes?” So I wanted to write a book that would tell Josh who his old man really is. You can’t lie to a kid. You have to tell the truth. So I disappeared for four years while I wrote this book. And it wasn't cathartic at all. It was painful to write about your fuck-ups, because then you’ve got to rewrite them and rewrite them and rewrite them. This book was the only legacy I could leave to him. I had no money. I lost my house. It was the most humble, purest endeavor of my life.

One could also argue that it's been the most successful endeavor of your life.

Absolutely, more so than any film I ever produced. When I was finished with the book, every publisher wanted it, and it became an international bestseller. It also got me the best reviews of my life. Then when I did the audio version, it became a bestseller as well. One day (Vanity Fair Publisher) Graydon Carter came to me and said he wanted to make a film of it. I said ‘Graydon, you can’t make a film of an audio recording.’ (laughs) ‘I don't want actors playing all these real people from my life. I don't want George Hamilton playing me!’ (laughs) He said “We’ll figure a way of doing it.” Graydon spent two-and-a-half years getting releases from people who we never thought we’d get releases from: Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty...out of 256 releases which we needed, we got 255! So it took two and a half years to make the picture. When I went to the screening at Sundance earlier this year, it was the first time I saw it all put together. It was a hallucinatory experience for me because it hurt. It hurt bad. When the picture was over, I got a 15 minutes standing ovation. I'd never had a two-minute standing ovation in my life. All this from a book I wrote for my kid. And the interesting thing is we've never discussed the book. We've never discussed the audio. We've never discussed the movie. He knows and I know and he's the closest friend I have.


Robert Evans and son Josh Evans.

There’s a very touching note you wrote to Josh that’s in the book.

Yeah. Would you like me to read it?

Sure.

(Reading from the book) “Hey Runt! Spent over three years writing this. It hurt. Hurt bad. Reliving your fuckups ain't easy. Then writing ‘em and rewriting ‘em, that’s the killer. Did it for you. Yeah you, you little runt. You deserve it! I wouldn't be today if it weren’t for you. I know it. You know it. Fuck it! I ain’t ashamed. Why keep it a secret? Knew the pain you were goin’ through, too. Showed all over your face. Them pimples you thought of squeezin’? That's how many sleeping pills I thought of takin’. You pulled one hell of a hat trick, kid. That tightrope, you balanced it like a pro. Your strength stopped my fall. We've never talked about it, so I'm writin’ it. Set the record straight. Talkin’ disappears. That's why it's on paper. For better or worse, at least you’ll know who your ole man really is. How much he loves you. It’s all that matters. Pop.”

That’s a beautiful letter.

Well. I wanted to show him my life, warts and all. This is my legacy to him. And by doing that, it opened up doors that changed my entire life. It's funny, not long ago I was completely washed up. Then to make matters worse, I had a stroke. I was half paralyzed. I had to learn how to walk again, talk again, hold a fork again. My right side was paralyzed, including half my tongue. But for some reason, the guy upstairs gave me a second pass. I heard the fat lady sing, literally. I heard Ella Fitzgerald singing It’s a Wonderful World. I saw the white light, then I passed out. When I woke up in the hospital, I thought I was in heaven at first. But when I really regained consciousness, I found myself more like Quasimodo than myself. I really felt like a freak. I took speech therapy for three years to learn how to use my tongue again. The real pain was the physical therapy, though. I used to be a pretty damn good tennis player, and I couldn’t even hold onto a ball. It was tough, but I did it because I wanted to prove them doctors wrong! I’ve never lived by the rules. I ain’t corporate. I’m not a good executive and I’m a lousy businessman, and I’ve never kept the hours that other studio heads did. I learned t his from Zanuck: when he ran 20th Century Fox, he showed up to the studio at 2 o'clock and left at midnight. So when I ran Paramount, I never had breakfast meetings. I can’t help it. I’m just not good in the morning. I'd show up at 11:30 and work until midnight. Everyone resented it, the idea being that you have to show up at 9. I'm not a 9-to-5 guy.

You always did most of your business from home, right?

More Hollywood history was made in my screening room during the late 60’s and 70’s than anywhere else. Chinatown was born here.The Godfather was born here. Francis Coppola and I practically fought WW III here during that time. Dustin Hoffman and Larry Olivier both lived here during Marathon Man. Olivier lived here for six months. Larry Olivier couldn't get a job at the time, because he had cancer and no one would insure him. He was destitute. He couldn't afford to send his son to college. Through my good friends David Niven and Merle Oberon, I was able to go before the House of Lords, and persuade them to get insurance for the greatest actor of our time through Lloyd's of London. Olivier threw his arms around when it was over and said “You saved my life, old boy.” Not long after that, his cancer went into remission and he was able to live his last 13 years doing some of the most brilliant work of his career. That's one of the proudest moments my life. It’s funny, I’ve led a very blessed and a very cursed life.

I think you’ve had more extreme ups and downs than almost anyone in Hollywood history.

I’ve touched magic as much as anyone, and I've been scandalous as much as anyone. And the strange thing is, all my “scandals” were non-truths. I've done a lot of wrong things in my life, but the two things that really brought me infamy: the coke bust and the so-called “Cotton Club murder” of Roy Raydin, I had nothing to do with. How can I get busted for something when I'm 3000 miles away? My nose ain't that long. (laughs) But, I get ink. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. People made careers over my carcass. I’m afraid to walk past the Hustler store on Sunset, forget about going in it! Someone takes a picture, boom! There I am on the front page: “Bob Evans, porn fiend!” (laughs) That’s why I rarely leave my house anymore. I’d get in too much trouble! (laughs)


Out on the town with Ava Gardner, circa mid-'50s.

Yeah, but you were fodder for the scandal sheets way before your tenure at Paramount.

Oh yeah, going back to when I was dating Ava Gardner and Lana Turner at the same time, in the mid '50s. I was getting headlines before most of today's studio executives were even born. I have clippings of me with Terry Moore while she was secretly dating Howard Hughes.

Not bad!

In my teens, I was being kept by four women. I always had a knack for getting myself in trouble! I guess you could say that I’ve been leading a high profile, sometimes notorious existence for a long time. That’s what Jack Nicholson said I should call my book: “Notorious”! (laughs)

With John Frankenheimer on the set of Black Sunday, 1976.

You’ve worked with many amazing directors in your career. In 1977, you produced Black Sunday, which was directed by John Frankenheimer, who recently passed. What are your memories of working with him?

John, to me, is one of the best directors I ever worked with. He’s very unappreciated, too, I think. John went through a very bad period of alcoholism, which made him more than a few enemies. But I loved working with him, thought he was a terrific guy. Black Sunday turned out to be a terrific picture, but one of the big disappointments of my life. When that picture came out, they thought it would do more business than Jaws, that's how big they thought it would be. I turned down an offer of $6.6 million to buy my points in it. I owned 57% of the film. You know how much business it wound up doing? Nothing. It tanked, due to a lot of factors. First, Arab groups claimed we were anti-Arab because the villains in the piece were Arab terrorists. Jewish groups claimed we were anti-Semitic because we tried to explain why someone would join a movement like Black September. I wound up spending a fortune of my own money to hire private security to protect myself because I was receiving death threats. Then, a few months before the film came out, Universal released Two Minute Warning, a film about a sniper in the LA Coliseum during a football game. Even though Two Minute Warning got awful reviews and Black Sunday got raves, and the two films couldn’t have been more different, people associated the two and stayed away. You just never know.

In almost every show business biography and autobiography I’ve read, their subjects are portrayed having one amazing success after another, almost to the point of omnipotence, only to self-destruct just when things seem like they’re perfect. What causes that tendency, do you think?

Gambling. Most successful filmmakers and producers are gamblers at heart. I mean, literally. Darryl Zanuck had such a bad problem he had to borrow money from Howard Hughes. And let’s face it: what’s a bigger risk in life than making films? And when you gamble, you don’t always win. David O. Selznick died broke. I wanted to be Selznick, that’s why I did The Cotton Club, and wanted to own it. But I wasn’t as smart as he was.

You write so well, it’s surprising that you didn’t have a career as a writer at one time.

Well, I co-wrote more scripts than you can possibly imagine, although I never took credit for them and didn’t want to.

But you are working on a sequel to The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Yes, it’s called The Fat Lady Sang. I open it with my stroke, when I was hosting a party for Wes Craven. I’m about halfway through it now. It’s about my life post-Kid, post-stroke, told in flashbacks, also a lot of things from my earlier life that weren’t covered in Kid. It’s all about the third act of my life that I didn’t have before. I’ll tell you, I can’t believe I’m here talking with you now. I should be dead. The guy upstairs is keeping me here a little longer to do something else. I’ve also got a new picture in production, called How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. It’s shooting in New York and Toronto.

You seem to be completely recovered from the stroke. If I didn’t know what had happened, I’d never have guessed.

I had three, actually. One here and two in the hospital. I’m about 90% recovered, I’d say. The three most important things in my life before the stroke were the three S’s: sun, sex and sports. I can’t take the sun anymore because of all the pills I’ve got to take. I used to be a good tennis player. Now I’m in the paraplegic league, but I can play. Sex wise, let’s just say I’m not as dexterous as I was before, but I’ve got my libido at least. Sex will always be important to me. It always has been. That's why none of my marriages lasted. (laughs)

I think any man who was in your position would have had a hard time being monogamous.

I haven’t been since I was 17. That's why Frank Sinatra wanted to meet me so badly, when he saw me with Lana and Ava at the same time! He was very curious, to say the least. I actually didn’t dig Lana that much because she was a terrible alcoholic, in public places, too. She was a very unhappy lady, as was Ava. Terrible alcoholic. Very unhappy with her life. In fact, most actresses I’ve known are very unhappy with their lives.



Let's talk about your days at Paramount. You came there at such a unique time. You even convinced the board to give you complete autonomy in running the studio.

Yeah, but that didn't happen right away. I thought I was about to be fired. So I had Mike Nichols shoot this 40 minute film for me, which I presented to the unsmiling, 18 member board of Gulf and Western (Paramount’s then-owner) in New York, convincing them at Paramount would be the No. 1 studio in town after the release of Love Story and The Godfather. I signed resignation papers when I arrived in the office, saying they could keep the $300,000 it would cost them to buy out the rest of my contract if they’d just watch this 40 minute film. They agreed. After I screened it, Charlie Bluhdorn, my boss, called me into his office and told me to go back to work. I said “But Charlie, I resigned.” He said "Whaddya want, more money?" I said "I don't want another dime from you. What I want is to be in a position were not a single one of those 18 motherfuckers can come on my lot, interfere with my films, or bother me in any way. I want complete control.” He says “Evans, are you crazy? I can’t do that? It’s against all corporate rules.” I said "OK, I'm going. Goodbye." He said "Get back here!" So Charlie goes back in before the board. After an hour, he comes back. “Okay Evans, you got what you want. It's your shop. You better have a lotta mazel, Evans! Now get to work!” So that’s how I got my autonomy. I wasn't a fence straddler. I gambled with my 300 Gs and that’s what took Paramount to 140 nominations and that’s what made history. What do you think most studios would have said to me if I went to them and said “I want to make the story of 18-year-old boy who falls in love with an 80-year-old woman, to be directed by an acid head (Hal Ashby) and written by a guy who cleans swimming pools (Colin Higgins)”? They’d throw it out the window! (laughs) And that’s how we touched magic.

That’s one of my favorite films, Harold and Maude.

I show it every Valentine’s Day! It’s such a romantic film.



Tell us about Hal Ashby.

I loved Hal. A sweet, sweet man, and a great director. He died way too early. He was a brilliant film editor and had a good reputation for that, but his first picture (The Landlord) hadn’t even come out yet when we were prepping Harold and Maude. Colin Higgins worked for (producer) Eddie Lewis as a pool boy! I think it’s a classic that’ll last forever. Every film that the so-called “suits” didn’t want to make were all hits, and the pictures that they did want to make were all flops. No one wanted to make The Godfather. With Chinatown, they begged me “It’s Chinese, nobody’ll understand it!” They didn’t want to release it. They didn’t understand it. Then after it came out, after all the accolades, suddenly they understood it.

You mentioned how much the studio world has changed since you began in the mid-60s. Could Bob Evans happen today, or was it great timing: the right man for the job at the right time?

It could happen. I've always been fortunate enough to meet people who have been mentors me. Some people didn't. Some people did. Fortunately, most people who did were at the top. I think it could be done again. Joe Roth has done it, very successfully. I didn't much earlier age, though. I’m a huge gambler. My attitude always was if I get fired, I get fired. Big deal. So I took chances. I did things people said couldn't be done. If someone came into my office and said “I've got a great idea for this picture. It’ll be so commercial and everyone will love it!” I’d say “Get outta here!” But if someone came in my office and said “I've got a really weird story to tell you. It may not work, but I think it's really terrific and I'm in love with it.” That’s what happened with a film called Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973). Nic Roeg went to everyone in town. No one wanted to make it. I did. Now it’s regarded as a classic. If you pick one hit out of three, you doing great. If a ballplayer bats one in three, he’s a star. If you hit a homer or two, you’re a big star. I always went by the percentages. With Roman Polanski, everybody told me I was crazy to hire this weird Polack to direct this high-profile movie (Rosemary’s Baby). I said “That’s why I’m doing it: it’s crazy!” You’ve got to risk to do something different, something original. If you don’t do what’s original, all you care about is keeping your job. Rules were made to be broken. Break them!

That’s one thing about this new generation of directors that’ve been pulled from commercials and music videos: they’re not in the filmmaking business, they’re in the advertising business and at the end of the day: they turn in these $150 million mouthwash ads.

Exactly. Everything is MTV-ized. There’s no scenes. There’s no texture. It’s cut, cut, cut! No one has the patience to sit and listen. You gotta have boom, boom, boom! Gotta have shoot ‘em up! Gotta have a happy ending! Know what? I don’t believe in happy endings! I think they ruin things. I don’t believe in the boy getting the girl in the end. I believe in unrequited love. There’s nothing more mesmerizing than unrequited love. And real. Waterloo Bridge, Love Story, Chinatown.

Best last line of a movie ever, in Chinatown!

“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Yeah, it’s a great one.



One thing that your book and the film really drive home is how mercurial relationships in Hollywood are. It would drive most people mad. How do you keep your sanity in that environment?

I’ll tell you how: I keep my circle very small: Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Sumner Redstone, Peter Bart, a few others. When I was at my lowest, I didn’t lose my friendships.

Now you’ve become a hero and mentor to a new generation of young actors and filmmakers. Track record aside, I think it must be your candor that draws them to you.

People ask me “What’s the most important thing in your life.” I always answer “It has nothing to do with morality, it’s always telling the truth. Because then you never have to remember what you’ve said.” That way I can walk into any room at any time, and just tell it like it is. People may not like you for it, but there’s an asterisk to it: omission ain’t lying. (laughs)

Sidney Korshak, "The Godfather."


The most fascinating character in your book was your late attorney and mentor Sidney Korshak.

I’m working with Billy Friedkin right now on the Korshak story. He was the ultimate power, my godfather. I spent every day with him for 40 years. A big bear of a guy, six foot five, former boxer. He was totally legitimate, never had a misdemeanor against him, but was the most powerful man I ever met. Seymour Hersh spent three years writing an article for The New York Times on Sidney and in three years, could find nothing out about him! Nothing!

And there was the secret of his power: anonymity. Prior to reading your book, I’d never heard of him.

Exactly.

Do you think your opposite profile, a very high one, is what made you such an easy target?

Yeah, absolutely.

Another lesson I learned in the book is to not be shy about approaching people, if you want to be in show biz.

And the bigger the person, the more approachable they are! I could reach George W. Bush easier on the phone than I could a junior agent at William Morris.



It sounds like The Cotton Club was the biggest professional disappointment of your life.

It was the worst single mistake I ever made in my life. I wanted it to be The Godfather with music. It took up six years of my life. I did more research on that than any picture I’ve ever done. Originally I was going to produce and direct it, and dedicate it to my late father, who had the first integrated dental practice in Harlem: “For you Pop, wherever you are. Your son, Bobby.” We even had a great poster drawn up for it. It read: “Its violence started the nation. Its music startled the world.” It was the single worst experience of my entire life. In 1979, when I began work on the project, I was worth $11 million. In 1989, I was worth $37.00. That was the 80’s for me. Not a fun time.

I’ve heard rumors that a longer version was going to be released.

It should be. Eleven musical numbers were cut out. I think it was done on purpose. All those guys that put the money up lost a fortune. I put my house up, too. But no, no, I doubt it. I think Francis had a score to settle with me after The Godfather. He was resentful, feeling I took too much credit for the film.

You’d think he’d be grateful to you.

No. No. (long pause) Francis is the most charming, seductive man I’ve ever met. I think he’s a direct descendent of Prince Machiavelli. Once you leave his kitchen, you’re enamored by him. (laughs) He’s so talented, so brilliant, and a dreamer. And I think rather self-destructive. We’ve only spoken once since that time, at the 25th anniversary screening of The Godfather. We all went down to the front of the theater afterwards, to tremendous applause. Francis started to pass me. Then he stopped, put his arms around me and whispered in my ear “We did something right.” That about sums it up.

How do you keep rising from the ashes like the Phoenix? What’s your secret?

Very simple: I wanna stay in the picture, because once you’re outta the picture, you’re out.

Karen Black: 1939-2013

Karen Black: 1939-2013

Robert Altman  

Actress Karen Black.

I grew up hearing about Karen Black as far back as I can remember. She would pop up on television and my mother would point her out as a compatriot from their college days at Northwestern University, a mixture of pride and wistfulness in her voice as the memories came back. When I finally got the opportunity to sit down with Karen during the summer of 2007, the venerable actress had turned playwright, with a well-received L.A. production of "The Missouri Waltz," a musical for which she penned the book. Black was alternately eccentric, passionate, grounded and fascinating during our chat, her obvious intelligence shining through the entire proceedings.

“Black brings to all her roles a freewheeling combination of raunch and winsomeness,” Time magazine wrote about her in 1975. “Sometimes she is kittenish. At other times she has an overripe quality that makes her look like the kind of woman who gets her name tattooed on sailors.”

She remains one of my favorite conversations during nearly twenty years of doing interviews. Karen Black succumbed to cancer yesterday after a long battle. RIP to one of the last Hollywood originals.


KAREN BLACK DANCES THE MISSOURI WALTZ
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the June 2007 issue of Venice Magazine.

Karen Black first entered the cinematic lexicon with her heartbreaking turn in Bob Rafelson’s landmark 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, playing a trailer park queen who is the lover of fugitive concert pianist Jack Nicholson. Black’s brilliant, nuanced turn earned her an Oscar nomination, as well as a Golden Globe Award. Born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, she was born Karen Ziegler, and was a precocious student who entered Northwestern University at 15, where she studied with renowned drama teacher Alvina Krause. After making a name for herself on Broadway, Karen made her film debut in 1966’s You’re a Big Boy Now, the first major feature (after Roger Corman’s Dementia 13) of Francis Ford Coppola. After appearing in dozens of TV productions, Karen next appeared (with dance legend Toni Basil) as one of the New Orleans prostitutes in the classic Easy Rider with whom Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda tryst in a Big Easy graveyard.

Following the success of Pieces, Karen Black quickly became one of the most sought-after performers of the 1970s, appearing in such classics as Cisco Pike, The Great Gatsby (her second Golden Globe Award win), Day of the Locust, Nashville, Family Plot, and in her second collaboration with Robert Altman, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. More recently, Karen has appeared in Alan Cumming’s Suffering Man’s Charity, and Henry Jaglom’s Hollywood Dreams.

Karen Black is also a produced writer, whose credits include Movie Money, Murder, Malaika, Going Home, Men, Charades, Edna McCoy’s Festival, and The Invention of Dr. Morel. Her first produced play is currently trodding the boards at The Blank Theater, through July 1. The Missouri Waltz is a delightful musical (songs by Harriet Schock) comedy set circa ’73, starring Karen and Dana Peterson as deceased sisters who watch over their niece, who occupies their former homestead. Karen sat down with us on The Blank Theater stage recently to discuss her remarkable career.

You grew up in Park Ridge, IL. What did Dad do?

Karen Black: He was in charge of sales for the Ed Filkins Company. They would build factories and figure it all out. He was also a violinist, and his father was Arthur Ziegler, who was the first violinist for the Chicago Symphony. He was a great guy: very robust, humorous, extraordinarily handsome as a young man, before I knew him. And my mom is an award-wining novelist, Elsie Reif Ziegler, although she’s not writing anymore because she’s getting elderly. She’s very brilliant, very beautiful, a redhead. I have a sister, Gail (Brown), who was on Another World for many years. She’s a blonde, but we look a lot alike, and I have an older brother, Peter, who isn’t really working anymore. He married the daughter of the governor. He’s a sweet boy.

When did you know you were an artist?

I don’t think it’s something you cognate on, because it’s something you are, so you are it. Whitney Laux, who’s in the play with me, and I were talking about how we like to wear sunglasses when we go out, and just observe people. Nobody understands that, except those who write, direct, and act. It’s just about being enthralled by people: how they think, how they talk, how they gesture, the relation between them all. It has a great meaning, a great cause and a great purpose, which is there are ways of viewing things aesthetically. You don’t view them pragmatically or functionally. And after many years of being enthralled by watching people, which I loved to do, I realized I was putting them on stage. There’s that scrapping, arguing family sitting in a restaurant at the airport. And were you to put them on stage, they would be the greatest actors in the world. Were they on stage? If you’re looking at them like that, it’s incredible. How can they be so natural? How can they be so real? And that’s why we get so excited, because we’re viewing it aesthetically. So you take all that, and you put it in your movie, or put it in your script, and that’s why the people sound like they’re really talking, because you’ve heard it, and you’ve learned it.

And nobody captured what you’re talking about better than my hero, Robert Altman, who you got to work with twice.

Thank you so much. Absolutely right. Yeah, we worked together three times, actually, because I was in The Player briefly. He had such confidence. When you’re creating something, I think you have a certitude about it. It’s present and it doesn’t really compromise, and it’s not self-reflective at all, in fact there’s no ego. You just see it a certain way. And that’s how he was, like all great directors. He also believed in idiosyncrasies and audacious, inadvertent events. If you made a mistake, he loved it. He embraced it. During Nashville, everyone was miked. I was miked on my inner thigh, forgot it was even there, and you never saw the cameras. It was like they were up in the rafters, or something. So you weren’t self-conscious in any way, so you just improvised. It made you feel very safe, because everything was going to work if even mistakes were wonderful. I don’t know how many lines we had going into sound, maybe 24, so we could all talk simultaneously.



It’s funny, when I interviewed him and asked about how he got all that overlapping dialogue in MASH, he said it was all due to the sound mixer, and said “If that guy didn’t win an Oscar, he sure deserved a citation from God.”

Yeah, on the other hand, it’s really his concept. He was a good friend. He’d always call back, and we’d have conversations. The other thing is that he represented a way of working, he was sort of like a symbol of the values and the structure of independent filmmaking. We have so many independent filmmakers in America, and I think they all felt supported by Mr. Altman. He was very important to all of us in that sense, and in that sense, I think he’s still there.

You entered Northwestern University at 15, and studied in its renowned speech and drama department.

I would say that the college training was very lousy, and I don’t think that people learn by being invalidated. I think people get some idea along the line from their analyst, who evaluates for them based on other people’s journeys that they’ve studied who have nothing to do with you, and then you have to buy that evaluation. That’s utterly appropriate. Acting teachers, not all of them but many, seem to think that beating up their students and invalidating them will make them better, which I think is completely wrong. And at that age, you don’t realize that this sick person is really projecting all their neurosis onto you, you think that you’re the one who’s damaged. So I think that Alvina Krause would not validate and would not allow. I think she had favorites, and you could never figure out why you weren’t a favorite, and it never made any sense. The thing you have to remember is that if a person is making you feel bad about yourself, that person is going to be in his or her own world. They are lost in their own universe. If they can’t grant you who you are, they’re locked in their own nutty universe, and they’ To bring this to the present, the director of this piece, Angela Garcia Combs, never evaluated and never invalidated any of us, and it’s been such a joy working with someone like that.



What was it like working on Easy Rider, arguably the film that helped launch the American independent movie?

It was insane! (laughs) I have never really done drugs. I’m against them, all kinds. I think I smoked grass twice. Toni Basil, who is still my good friend, doesn’t do drugs either, so we were in another universe from these guys (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper). Time was very slow for them. (laughs) We’d get in the Winnebago, and we never found the Mardi Gras parade, and there’s not a single shot of us in it. Dennis would see some guy outside the window and say “Hey man, you see that guy outside the window? I’m gonna get him!” And he’d go running out, and lose track of time…It was NUTS! He was NUTS! (laughs) But, that said, Dennis is also a genius and Easy Rider was his masterpiece. He would’ve done anything to get it made. He had a great vision, was very driven, and made that movie with great belief in the way that certain people were living at that time, and loving it, and having a real affinity for it. It holds up very well.

Five Easy Pieces is one of the great American movies.

Did you know it was shot in sequence? Not one shot was done out of sequence.

No, I didn’t know that. What was (director) Bob Rafelson like to work with?

Great guy. He laughs a lot. He’d weep sometimes when we were shooting. He’s a passionate person. He believes in what he believes in. He’s maybe too passionate for Hollywood. The last time I saw him he said “I’m leaving. I’m getting out of town.”

What was it like working with Nicholson on that picture, which really solidified his “great actor” status?

I just loved Jack. I had a crush on him, but I had a boyfriend, and he had a girlfriend. He never seemed unfamiliar to me. He’s a very great spirit, and one of my favorite things to say about him is, once I said to Jack, ‘You know, there are certain people, I just can’t find them. They’re just not there.’ And he said “Blackie, you can always find them. Just keep looking.” He has a really wonderful, human quality to him.



Your portrayal of Rayette was really amazing, because she’s one of those characters that would have been easy to turn into a cartoon, but you made her very three-dimensional. What was it like being Rayette?

If you look through the eyes of Rayette, it looks nice, really beautiful, light, not heavy, not serious. A very affectionate woman who would look upon things with love, and longing. She wasn’t a person who would tear things apart or recompile them, or asses or evaluate, none of those things. A completely uncritical person, and in that sense, a beautiful person. When Rafelson called me to his office to discuss the part he said “Karen, I’m worried you can’t play this role because you’re too smart.” I said ‘Bob, when you call “action,” I will stop thinking,’ because that’s how Rayette is.`

You worked with Alfred Hitchcock on his final film, Family Plot, in 1976. What was he like?

Overall, very avuncular, although he did kiss me one day in a very sexual way, but the rest of the time he was very avuncular. He was funny and shrewd, and knew exactly what he wanted and knew if you were creating that. He thought I was too sympathetic (in my portrayal). So he said early on that he wanted me to be less sympathetic and to speak in a mid-Atlantic accent. But the truth is that I wanted the other part, the one that Barbara Harris played. I told him, and he said “No dear. That character is too low class.” (laughs) I thought to myself “This guy hasn’t seen Five Easy Pieces.” He was just great. We used to read each other poems and limericks and tried to catch me on my vocabulary. He once said “You seem very perspicacious today, Miss Black.” I said, ‘Oh, you mean “keenly perceptive?’ “Yes.” (laughs) So I got him this huge, gold- embossed dictionary that said “Diction-Harry,” at the end of the shoot. And I have to say something about him that I think is remarkable and stunning and obvious, yet I’ve never heard anyone talk about it. We all know people who make storyboards, and they go shoot the movie, and their storyboard goes all to hell. But his movies were the storyboard. He storyboarded with really, really seeing the finished movie, so he didn’t make any mistakes. And nobody has done it before or since. I think he was kind of bored on the set, as they say, because everything in his mind was done.



Around the same time you played what I think was the most tragic character you’ve ever played, Faye Greener in Day of the Locust. It just breaks your heart.

If you have one, and I’m not sure that Nathaniel West (author of the book) did. That was not a fun experience, making that film. It was just horrible. I wish quite heartily I’d never made it, because I’d have had a much longer career in Hollywood. I’d have been making major movies for many years, had I not done that film.

Why did that film kill your career?

It was a very troubled production, and I became the scapegoat that everyone blamed. People kept getting sick, getting fired, and it was just a horror, an absolute horror. Seven months. There were all these rumors that people made up…and I wound up being the center of it. Poor (William) Atherton walked off and didn’t do the final scene, because he couldn’t take it anymore and, oh my God…awful. Gossip-mongers are often very convincing, and there were all these people making things up behind my back, and it really hurt me. It hurt me a lot.



Let’s talk about writing.

I was writing and doing diaries and work as a child, and then started college at an early age because I was sick of high school, and I wrote a lot there, as well. So I’ve always been a writer, I think.

On that note, tell us how The Missouri Waltz born.

It was sort of inadvertent. I was about to do The Vagina Monologues and I studied an online course about playwriting. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was their model. And I went to see Harriet, and she was very light about this. She didn’t sit on me at all. I worked with someone else once who had to have me over every day, and it was awful. But this was so easy. The play is written around Harriet’s songs, and the first drafts were so different from what you see today. A year went by with me not writing it. I just wasn’t interested. Then I met this girl who told me about an old black & white movie she’d seen about a woman who was devastated because some freak in town was trying to take her house away. And I really liked that, and that’s what made it click for me. There’s just no saying why certain things attract us. I mean, why do I like red, and you like blue?

Because.

Because, exactly. So when I wrote it again, it made sense to me.

Creatively, how is it different from being an actor, and how is it similar?

For me, it seems more similar to acting than certainly directing would be. I’ve tried directing before and it’s just not for me. It’s too exhausting, too many parts to it. When you’re writing what’s similar is that you are imagination-based. Everything that occurs in this zone is imagination-based. In that sense you mock up a life, and then you become the effect of what you’ve mocked up, so it’s cause and effect. So the more you can mock it up so that it seems real to you, the more you can react to the effect. That’s what acting is, and that’s what writing involves for me, too. That’s the simplicity of it. It sounds simple, because it is. The other thing that is very important is that how good your work is, is based on how accurately you’ve gauged the effect you create. I’m a pretty accurate actress, in other words I can get people to think I’m stupid, smart, sensual, dried up, evil, you know what I mean? So I can create the effect I intend. If I create an effect that’s far removed from my intention, then that’s how bad my art is. If it’s as close to the effect I intend, and it does engage and effect the audience, then that’s how good it is. So when you do that, you have to be the audience. That’s the key.

Dennis Hopper: 1936-2010

Dennis Hopper: 1936-2010

Roger Corman  

Dennis Hopper: actor, artist, filmmaker, Hollywood survivor.

Today, May 29th, marks five years since Dennis Hopper shucked his mortal coil. Hopper had been on my short list of "dream interviews" during my tenure at Venice Magazine. When I was lucky enough to finally sit down with him in November of 2008, I was thrilled, and didn't know quite what to expect.

What I found while smoking cigars with Hopper in his Venice home-studio, was a thoughtful man with a gentle demeanor, who spoke in measured tones and loved telling stories. Gone was the wild-eyed, cannabis-toking "enfant terrible" that Hopper had made his name playing, and sometimes living. What I saw instead was a man who seemed to be at peace with himself and his life, who loved his children, art, film and new ideas. Sometimes when you have seen life at its ugliest, as Hopper surely had, you're able to come out the other side and drink in its beauty. I hope this was true.

Rest in peace, and thanks for it all.


DENNIS HOPPER IS RIDING EASY
By
Alex Simon

The Hollywood landscape is littered with tragedies, broken promise and self-destruction. Many promising artists stumble once and never recover from that initial fall. In the history of American film, there has never been a phoenix-like story of survival and rebirth quite like that of Dennis Hopper, who has gone from Warner Bros. contract player in his late teens, to Hollywood outcast, to renowned artist, photographer and art collector, to the man who brought independent cinema into the mainstream with Easy Rider, to being outcast again and nearly destroyed during a period of heavy drug and alcohol abuse. There are single incidents of self-destruction in Dennis Hopper’s life that most human beings could never walk away from in one piece, and by his own admission, Hopper repeated these incidents dozens of times over decades, until getting sober for good in 1985.

Hopper has also had a Zelig-like ability to have been surrounded by some of the film, art and political world’s most significant players: James Dean, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Martin Luther King, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Miles Davis, and dozens of other legendary names that could fill every page of this blog and turn it into a history book. Few Hollywood players have led as rich, and varied a life as that of Dennis Lee Hopper, who was born May 17, 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas. Hopper has appeared in 200 films and television productions since 1955, with 2008 showcasing “Dennis the Menace,” as he was nicknamed in his enfant terrible days, in no less than eight feature films, the best being Isabel Coixet’s superb Elegy, with Hopper in a masterful turn as Sir Ben Kingsley’s best friend and confidant, and the lead in the Starz network’s first original series, Crash, based on Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning film, telling a tableaux of tales about the disparate denizens of Los Angeles. Hopper scores big again with his manic portrait of a legendary record producer who seems to be constantly teetering on the precipice of madness or epiphany.

A long-time Venice resident, Dennis Hopper has been named one of the top 100 collectors of modern art in the world, and was recently honored by the Cinematheque Francais in Paris with a retrospective of his work. Mr. Hopper sat down with Venice Senior Editor Alex Simon recently over a cigar, and discussed his life as Hollywood’s greatest survivor. Read on…

You’ve had a busy year. Let’s start by talking about Crash.

Dennis Hopper: I had just gotten back from the Cannes Film Festival, and my agent called and asked if I’d like to do a TV series. They said it was an incredible part and based on the film Crash, which won all the Academy Awards. The kicker was I had two days to decide! (laughs) But I’m glad I did it. It’s been a lot of fun and we’re working very hard: sometimes working sixteen hour days, but nobody’s complaining because the scripts are so good. We have no restrictions in terms of what we can say or do, and in many ways we have more freedom than we would on film, because we had a commitment for thirteen episodes. Then two days after I shot the first episode, I was in France where the cinematheque in Paris had spent three and a half years working on a retrospective of my work and some of my art collection and took the fifth floor of the Frank Gehry building, where the cinematheque is located and built this virtual reality installation with twenty different screens that showed all the films I’d made, commercials I’d done, experimental films I’d made with Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner. It covered my entire career up till now, and it was really amazing.

Every time I’ve been in Paris, Easy Rider seems to be playing somewhere.

Yeah, it played in one theater on the Left Bank for twenty years. It was a very narrow, long little theater. I kept seeing this woman who grew older and older over the years at all these film festivals. She’d walk up to me and say “It’s still playing!” (laughs) I felt like a jazz musician in France, when jazz went sour in the States, the Europeans all sort of took over the jazz movement. I guess if you’re a big enough failure, they really take you to heart! (laughs)


Hopper as Billy in Easy Rider.

You really do have the greatest Hollywood survival story, ever.

Yeah, and this is not a place where you want to try and survive. (laughs)

Well, one could argue that Hollywood is a living metaphor for social Darwinism at its most twisted.

True, very true.

Watching your character in the first episode of Crash, I thought to myself ‘So Frank Booth survived the gunshot to the head in Blue Velvet and became a record producer.’

(laughs) Yeah, right!

Who else would call someone an “eyeless fuck” but Frank Booth?

(laughs) Yeah, yeah. My first conversation with my penis in the limo with the young woman driver, it’s pretty hairy. When I hire the new driver, who’s black, and say “Gorillas in the mist, that’s what the LAPD call you,” he has no stop switch, my character. He says everything and insults everybody. He just goes for it.

Which at one time could have described you.

Yeah, probably. I guess so. It was so long ago now, I can’t remember. (laughs) Phil Spector and I had an office together for ten years, and people have asked me if I’m doing Phil Spector in this and I said ‘No. I’m doing me!’ (laughs) The office was right up on Sunset before you go into Beverly Hills. David Geffen was in there for a while, too.

I know you’ve done TV work before, going back to its infancy in the 1950s. How is working in TV a different process from doing a film, or is it?
Well, you have more time to develop a character, first of all. Instead of an hour and a half, you have thirteen hours, in this instance. Doing regular television you have lots of restrictions, but doing cable you have no restrictions and can push the envelope a lot farther. That said, you have more time to do a feature than you do a television series itself, because we’re constantly under the gun, working twice a week with sixteen hour days. I have so much dialogue, though. I have all these speeches to memorize which really, if you look at them, mean nothing at all! (laughs) They’re just these stream-of-consciousness rants. I’m like a little kid sitting in the corner memorizing this stuff all day and all night. We’re shooting it all in Albuquerque because (Governor) Bill Richardson is giving us such a good deal to film there. There’s probably more movies being shot in New Mexico than anywhere else in the States. It’s a drag because I have to leave my family, but the work is good.

Hopper and Sir Ben Kingsley in Isabel Coixet's Elegy.

You also have a terrific part in one of the year’s best films, Isabel Coixet’s Elegy.

That’s a brilliant film. I hope they get some awards so they’ll mass distribute it. Penelope Cruz gives one of the best female performances I’ve ever seen. I’m very proud to have been part of that.

How was working with Sir Ben Kingsley?

Sir Ben is great, man. All my scenes were with him, really. He’s so comfortable to be with. He’s such a good actor, you could just play moment-to-moment reality with him all day long. It’s a pleasure to work with an actor who’s that good. I had a ball with him, and he’s very funny. He just gives and never pushes and is really there for you, has a great rhythm.

Let’s start at the beginning: you were born in Kansas.

Dodge City, Kansas, 1936, which makes me seventy-two years-old. A guy who never thought he’d live to be thirty, who had a real shock when he made it to thirty-one.

Is there a secret to being a survivor? Does it come down to genetics, to luck, to having a specific outlook?

I think it’s probably a combination of all three. I had such a bad drinking problem, and it took a lot to get me sober.

And you knew from a young age that you liked mind-altering experiences. I remember hearing you tell a story about snorting gasoline from your grandfather’s truck…

Yeah, and I looked up at the clouds and saw clowns, until I ODed on the fumes and smashed up his truck with a baseball bat, thinking it was a monster, smashing out the lights. (laughs) I was about seven. (laughs) Not good, but that was the end of my gas-sniffing.

What did your parents do?

My father served in the OSS during World War II and came back and went to work for the railway mail. So we moved from Dodge City when I was nine, and moved to Kansas City, where I lived until I was thirteen, then we moved to San Diego. My father ended up managing the San Diego post office, and my mother, who had managed one of the largest outdoor swimming pools in the country—she was the backstroke champion of Kansas, and was on her way to the Olympics when she became pregnant with me—and then she managed a swimming pool in a suburb of San Diego called El Cajon. I started acting at The Old Globe Theater in San Diego when I was thirteen.

When did you know you were an actor?

I wanted to be an actor from the time I saw my first films, which I think were singing cowboy pictures like Roy Rogers.

What else do you remember about that time?

It was the dustbowl, so I had to wear a gas mask to school five days a week, and my grandmother would open the door and five inches of dust would blow inside. There were bread lines and soup lines, and it was really bad. The whole middle of the country had blown away. My grandmother used to fill her apron full of eggs and we’d go into town. She’d sell the eggs and we’d go to the movies, while my grandfather would be out working on his wheat farm. I got my first Sheep Dog from the Clutters, the family that was murdered years later that Capote wrote about in “In Cold Blood.” When I was eighteen years-old I came to Los Angeles, went under contract to Warner Bros. and did Rebel Without a Cause, my second movie.

Hopper, second from left, in Rebel Without a Cause.

I know both Nicholas Ray and James Dean were profound influences on you.

Yeah, Dean made a real impression on me. I thought I was the best young actor around, and then I saw him. I’d never seen anybody improvise before. I’d always been doing Shakespeare and other plays where everything was a preconceived idea, preconceived gestures, how I said a line…and here he was differently every scene, adding things to the script. It was really confusing to me, initially. I grabbed him one night, and said ‘What are you doing?’ And we talked for a while, and I asked ‘Should I go back and study with (Lee) Strasberg?’ He said “No, no, no. Just start doing things, but don’t show them. Don’t indicate, or presuppose what you’re going to do. Live in moment-to-moment reality. Instead of playing drinking your coffee, just drink your coffee. Just smoke your cigar, don’t play smoking the cigar. You’ll find the simplest things become very difficult the first time you get onstage or in front of the camera, but eventually you’ll get through all that. Just live in the moment.” So that was the beginning of it. We did Giant together next, and he used to watch me on that picture and critique me afterward. When his character got older, he started asking me to watch him in those scenes and to tell him if I thought he seemed old. That was basically our relationship. We weren’t great buddies who went out drinking or anything like that. He was five years older than me. That was quite an age difference at that point. Also, we thought of him as a kid because he’d done Rebel, but in point of fact, he was older than Elizabeth Taylor, who was considered an “adult.”

Didn’t he also encourage you to pursue photography?

No, but he saw me taking pictures and said “If you’re going to take pictures, don’t crop them.” I said ‘Why not?’ He said “Because you’re probably going to want to direct films someday, and you can’t crop film, so learn how to frame full-frame, full negative.” So from that day on, I didn’t crop my photographs.

Had Dean lived, would he have survived the ‘60s?

Oh yeah, I mean he was…first of all, Paul Newman, who was a good friend of mine and a great man, had made a film called The Silver Chalice which Paul took out an ad apologizing for, because it was so terrible, the two parts that made Paul a star: Somebody Up There Likes Me and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, had both been cast with James Dean before he died.

Do you know the book Suspects by the film critic and historian David Thomson?

No.

He takes famous movie characters and tells you what happened to them after the credits rolled. He did a similar piece on what happened after James Dean “survived” his car crash, with one of the punch lines being that Paul Newman kept losing parts to him and eventually moved back to Cleveland, where he became a successful car dealer.

(laughs) That’s so cool! Wow…

What are some of your memories of Mr. Newman?

Well, I’d been friends with Paul since I was eighteen years old. When they lived out here in California, he and Joanne (Woodward), I’d be at their house a couple times a week, then when they moved back East, we lost touch for a little while, but there was a five year period where I was with them every week. He was a terrific guy, very generous with all his charity work, and just had a huge heart, from day one. He was one of the most unselfish people I’ve ever known.

Hopper, bottom left, with Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, and many other actors who would go onto fame in the egg-eating sequence of Cool Hand Luke.

The two of you were in Cool Hand Luke which, like Rebel, had a who’s-who of young talent that went onto bigger things.

Stuart Rosenberg directed that, his first feature, and he’d had us all in various television shows he’d directed for years. I’d starred in about five different shows he’d directed. I don’t think I had one line of dialogue in that whole picture. I had some interesting physical business I did. Babalugats was the character’s name. I just sort of mumbled a lot. (laughs)

What was the atmosphere like on the set? I’ve heard that you all became pretty tight.

We did. We shot it all up in Stockton, California. We wore our chains and prison clothes all night. We’d go to sleep in this motel with our chains on, go into the restaurant and this little nightclub there, and we’d all be in our chains. (laughs) If a lady wanted to dance with a “prisoner” she could. (laughs) It was a fun shoot. Rosenberg was always fun to work with.

Director Nicholas Ray confers with James Dean on the set of Rebel Without a Cause.

And back to Rebel. What about Nicholas Ray?

Well Nick and I had a long, long relationship. He came and lived with me for a while. He showed up at the Cannes Film Festival when I was showing Easy Rider and asked to borrow $500, which I didn’t have at the time. He said “C’mon, you can get $500.” I said “I’ve been sleeping on the floor of a borrowed pool house for the last year editing this movie, being paid $140 dollars a month. I don’t have any money.” He said “Well go to (Bert) Schneider and ask for the money.” So I went to Schneider and borrowed the money and gave it to Nick, who came back an hour later and said “I need another 500.” I said ‘What you talking about?’ He said “I lost it in the casino across the street.” So he ended up living at my house in Taos, New Mexico for about six months, until I got him a job teaching. He ran up a phone bill that was unbelievable, looking for Howard Hughes to convince him to back his next movie. But during Rebel, Nick was very open to what were then, in the ‘50s, very new techniques of acting.

You became one of the first collectors of pop art. When did you first discover Warhol, Lichtenstein, Ruscha and the pop art movement?

I met a lot of the key figures at a place called Stone Brothers Printers, which was a place where they made mailers and did a magazine called Semina, which Wallace Berman put out. There was an old Chinese man named Mr. Chang who would dress in a Confederate General’s uniform and perform Shakespeare, very badly, in a heavy Chinese accent out on Hollywood Boulevard, and would put his hat out. James Dean was a big fan of this guy, and would throw quarters at him. (laughs) He was having a poetry reading at Stone Brothers, so we went there, and that night I met Walter Hopps and later he and Ed Kienholz started The Ferus Gallery on La Cienega, which is where Andy Warhol had his first show, and he then went to the Pasadena Museum where he gave Marcel Duchamp his first retrospective in 1963. So, in 1962 everybody was talking about “the return to reality.” I was a third generation abstract expressionist, which we all were, really. We were looking at a lot of the Bay Area painters, but really felt that they were just rehashing a lot of the old stuff, it wasn’t a return to reality. It was nothing new. I walked into the Ferus Gallery one day, and Irving Blum, who was running the gallery said “Dennis, I want to show you something.” He showed me two slides, one of which was of a soup can, and the other was a cartoon. It was Andy and Roy Lichtenstein. I went crazy, started jumping up and down and said ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ Irving said “That’s what?” I said ‘That’s the return to reality!’ Irving said “What are you doing tomorrow?” So we went to New York the next day, went to Andy Warhol’s studio, and met Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, I saw the whole thing. That was it. I bought a Roy Lichtenstein called “Sinking Sun” for $1100, which I later lost in a divorce. A year and a half ago it sold for $17,870,000. I bought one of Andy’s soup cans out here and I’ve been collecting since. That was a very exciting time in Los Angeles, in the early ‘60s, and that’s when I had my first shows.

Andy Warhol's 1971 portrait of Hopper.

It’s interesting, because I think most people view pop art as an East Coast movement, not that it was born here.

Yeah, and all the East Coast guys came out here for the Duchamp retrospective. We were all so backward; we had a great thing to fight against: around 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum, one of the curators bought a Jackson Pollock. The board of directors got together and were furious, and refused to show it in the main museum, calling it “Communist propaganda.”

Where the hell did they get that?

Who knows? That’s how backward we were! Then Kienholtz did “Backseat Dodge” which was this sculpture made out of wire, of two people that looked like they might be making it in the back seat, and they closed down the whole L.A. County Museum because of this. Around the same time, the LAPD came in and busted Wallace Berman’s show at The Ferus Gallery and destroyed all his pieces out in the alley because he had a nude picture of his wife on display. But it was a great thing if you were an artist to be sort of underground.

Hopper's 1961 photograph "Double Standard."

When you paint a picture, or shoot a photograph, is it a different process from when you act, or are you tapping into the same vein?

I think they’re all different disciplines, but working with Strasberg, we worked with our senses, and brought back emotional recall and so forth. So I think you work with the same instrument, and just apply it to different disciplines. I was born in Dodge City, Kansas and am really just a middle class farm boy at heart. I really thought acting, painting, music, writing were all part of being an artist. I never thought of them as being separate. I could never play music, but I’d always loved music, and I tried to apply that. Easy Rider was the first film to use “found” music that was popular at the time. Prior to that, most movies were scored with an orchestra. Colors was the first million-selling rap album, and I produced Miles Davis’ last album for The Hot Spot. When I went under contract to Warner Bros., it allowed me to have a cultural life, instead of having to get a “normal” job bussing tables, or putting on a suit and tie and going into the office. I just never stopped painting, taking photographs, writing. There was no pressure to “put that childish stuff away.” It allowed me to continue to be a child.

Hopper with then-wife, actress Daria Halprin, in Taos, circa 1971.

You had a seminal experience with the director Henry Hathaway on a picture called From Hell to Texas.

(laughs) Yeah, that was in 1958, with Don Murray, Diane Varsi and Chill Wills. I got into a lot of trouble on that. I was loaned out from Warner Bros. to Fox, and I didn’t want to do the part, but Hathaway kept insisting. We had the most wonderful dinners, just a delightful, wonderful guy at dinner, and a screaming, yelling maniac on the set. (laughs) But I ended up working for him more than any other director, did three films for him by the end.

Director Henry Hathaway, Hopper's nemesis and reluctant mentor.

But he was the antithesis of what you responded to: an old-school director who carried a riding crop.

Yeah, yeah, and he’d tell you exactly where to move, how to walk, how to talk. He’d give you line readings. I was now trying to “live in the moment” and doing things without preconceived ideas, and I walked off the picture three times on location. He’d beg me to come back, and we’d have a wonderful dinner where he’d be utterly charming and I’d say ‘Mr. Hathaway, tomorrow I’d like to try the scene this way.” And he’d say “Sure, sure kid. Whatever you say.” And the next day on the set, he’d be screaming and yelling again, and I’d say ‘Mr. Hathaway, last night at dinner, you said I could try this.’ He’d scream “That was just dinner talk, kid, dinner talk! We’re makin’ a movie here, now get the fuck over there and hit your mark and say your lines like I tell ya!” (laughs) If you really wanted to drive him crazy, you’d put a paper cup in the scene: “Paper cup in a fuckin’ western! They didn’t have fuckin’ paper cups in the old west, goddammit!” So the last day on the picture, I came on the set at 20th Century Fox, and he said “Hey, good morning. See that over there? Know what those are?” I said ‘Well, those are stacks of film cans, Henry.’ He said “That’s right. I’ve got enough film there to shoot for four and a half months. Did you know that I owned 40% of 20th Century Fox?” ‘No, I didn’t know that, Henry.’ “Well, I do. See that over there?” ‘Yeah, those are sleeping bags.’ “That’s right. We’re gonna do this scene till you do it my way,” and it was a ten line scene, “and we’ll send out for lunch, for dinner, we’ll sleep here for four and a half months, then we’ll send out for more!” So we started about eight o’clock in the morning. Around eleven at night, after 85 takes, I finally cracked, and said ‘Okay, tell me what you want to do.’ I did it, then I walked out. It wasn’t like somebody sent a black ball around after that, but word got around that I wasn’t somebody you wanted to work with. Soon after that, I was dropped from my contract at Warner Bros.. I went back to New York and I studied with Strasberg for five years. I didn’t have another major role in a studio picture for nearly ten years, until Hathaway hired me again for The Sons of Katie Elder in ’65.

Around the same time, you cut your teeth directing for Roger Corman, directing second unit on The Trip. What was it like stepping behind the camera for the first time?

Well, Roger was the kind of guy who wouldn’t give us any money, but would let us take cameras and equipment out on the weekends and shoot. Jack Nicholson had written the screenplay for that picture, and it was a wonderful screenplay. The stuff on Sunset Boulevard, and the acid trip and the stuff in the desert was all stuff that I shot, because we didn’t feel that Roger would have the inclination to shoot that stuff, so we did it all on weekends.

You got to work with some of the great directors throughout your career, from day one. Who are some of your greatest influences behind the camera?

I’d say George Stevens, and Henry Hathaway, strangely enough. (laughs) Even though I fought with him a lot, he had a great leanness to his work. Nick Ray, on Rebel, was a big influence, just watching him allow Dean to do what he did on that film. I’ve worked with so many top directors, John Sturges was another great one. You learn something from everyone, even if they’re terrible directors. A lot of directing is really like being a floor manager of a department store, where you’re just managing all these different divisions, and time is your worst enemy.

I heard that during the filming of True Grit that John Wayne chased you around Paramount with a loaded gun?

(laughs) No, that’s not quite how it happened. He used to arrive on the lot via helicopter from his mine sweeper that he had moored in Newport Beach. He’d have a .45 strapped on his side, wearing army fatigues, and that’s the way he’d arrive to work every day. This one day he arrived, and he wanted to know where “that Pinko Hopper was hiding.” I was actually in Glen Campbell’s trailer, hiding from him. He was screaming “My daughter was out at UCLA last night and heard (Black Panther) Eldridge Cleaver cussing, and I know he must be a friend of that Pinko Hopper! Where is he? I want to talk to him!” So he wasn’t literally running around with a gun looking for me. He was walking around with a gun at his hip, but I think he wanted to have a political discussion, as opposed to committing actual manslaughter! (laughs) Anyway, nothing ever came of it. That was just Duke.


The legendary opening sequence of Easy Rider.

Let’s talk about how Easy Rider was born.

Peter Fonda and I were doing motorcycle movies: I did one called The Glory Stompers and Peter did one called The Wild Angels. Jack Nicholson did one called Hell’s Angels on Wheels, all at American International Pictures. Peter had read I thing I wrote with Stewart Stern called The Last Movie, and I’d wanted to make it as my first film. Peter loved it and went around trying to raise money to make it, but wasn’t successful. We’d promised each other that if we were going to do a movie, that it wasn’t going to be a motorcycle movie. So we wrote a screenplay together with a standup comic named Don Sherman called The Yin and the Yang, a comedy, and we couldn’t find financing for that, either. Around three o’clock in the morning, Peter called me. He was up in Toronto promoting The Trip at the film festival up there. So Peter says that he’s just talked with James Nicholson, no relation to Jack, and Sam Arkoff, who ran AIP, and I told them this idea for a movie: these two guys sell a bunch of marijuana in Mexico, then buy these two beautiful, gleaming bikes and ride cross-country to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, where they have a great time, then they go into Florida to retire, and are shot by a couple of duck hunters. Peter says “They said we could both act in it, and you could direct. What do you think?” (laughs) I said ‘They actually said they’d give you money for that?’ “Yeah.” So I said ‘Terrific, man. If they really said they’d give you the money, it sounds great to me.’ So that’s how it started. Then when it came time to really do it, they pulled back and said I could act or direct, but not both. So we went to see Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, because they’d just finished doing The Monkees and our friend Michael McClure, a poet from San Francisco, he had a project called The Queens he wanted to do which was a satire about LBJ and Dean Rusk, and all these powerful Washington insiders dressed in drag, eating live lobsters, talking about how they assassinated President Kennedy. It was going to be a 20 minute short. We decided to pitch it to Rafelson and Schneider, Peter couldn’t help but talk about what was then called The Loners, and by then we had a full outline. Schneider left the room, the Rafelson left, who came back and said “Can I see you in my office?” So we went in and he said “Call Schneider at home tonight. I think he’s going to give you the money and let you act in it and direct it.” And Schneider said “Yeah, it’s a go.”

And it was groundbreaking on so many levels: the first movie to really address the counterculture seriously, not in an exploitative way. The first to show people openly using drugs. The first to show some of the serious social problems that were happening in the country, particularly in the Deep South, where you actually shot some of it.

Yeah, and like I said before, it was the first time found music was ever used. At that time it was so much cheaper. All I had to do was go the artist and ask their permission to use the music.

So was the decision one that was based more on economics than on creativity?

No. I went out and shot the movie in five and a half weeks. Laszlo Kovacs said it was the best-organized picture he’d ever shot. When we spoke at AFI a few years before he died, he said “People talk about how crazy the shoot was, but there was nothing crazy about that shoot.” The thing was, after shooting the film I came back to eighty hours of footage that I hadn’t seen, because in those days there was no way for me to see my dailies out on the road. I had an editing job that was just horrendous, took me over a year. And driving on the way to the studio to cut the picture, I’d hear all this great music on the radio: Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds. I heard all these songs and cut the picture to picture, and not to sound. Then when I put in a song like “Born to be Wild” it just fit perfectly. But when you see the movie, the story is told through the music, not the dialogue. It was just one of those things that worked.

Has MTV ever acknowledged you of being an early inventor of music video?

(laughs) No, I don’t think so.

Easy Rider changed Hollywood.

Yeah, it certainly showed them that they could make independent films. You had to get an I.A. union stamp on your film to get released in those days, and we didn’t have that stamp. Bert Schneider’s father Abe was Chairman of Columbia Pictures and paid off the unions, gave them $25,000 so we could release the movie, which broke the code, and other studios saw that they could do the same thing: make a non-union film and then make a deal with the union to distribute it. Cassavetes was really the only person in the U.S. who’d been making independent films up to that point, because he was a from a well-to-do Greek shipping family that allowed him to finance his own low budget films. But he could never really get them distributed, because the majors wouldn’t distribute them.

I read a quote attributed to you, and maybe you can tell me if it’s accurate: “There are moments that I've had some real brilliance, you know. But I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough. I never felt I played the great part. I never felt that I directed the great movie. And I can't say that it's anybody's fault but my own.”

Well, I could agree with everything but the last part. It wasn’t all my fault.


Hopper on the cover of Rolling Stone issue 56, April 16, 1970.

You don’t feel that Easy Rider is a great film?

I do. I do, but after that I should have made another great movie and Colors is an alright film, but I don’t know, I just never felt I directed the film I really wanted to direct after Easy Rider. I know I never did. But I don’t think it was my fault that I wasn’t allowed to. I had a lot of help on this end. It may have been my behavior that caused the rift to happen, but once it happened, it wasn’t my fault. I could’ve brought them a ship full of gold, and they wouldn’t have let me direct a picture after my fallout with Lew Wasserman over The Last Movie. He wanted me to re-edit it after The Venice Film Festival. I had final cut and said ‘no.’ He said “Then it will never be distributed.”

Let’s talk about Apocalypse Now. What are some of your memories of being in the Philippines doing that?

I was there for four or five months. When I arrived I was signed to play a CIA agent. There was no script. So I started out in a clean uniform being told by Francis (Coppola) that I was going to be second-in-charge to Marlon Brando’s army he had in the jungle. I was with these guys about three weeks and we were training with these Green Beret guys who’d just gotten out of Vietnam, playing war games. We had mortars that we’d play with that were full of powder, and if you got any of the powder on you, that meant you were dead. We had all these war toys we’d play with at night. We’d be assigned to hold a bridge. Would they be coming by the sea? Would they be coming through the jungle? We’d play these incredible war games and just had a ball. Finally Marlon arrived and everything was shut down for a week because he realized Marlon hadn’t read “Heart of Darkness,” so Francis went out to read Marlon “Heart of Darkness” and 900 people, the cast and crew, just sat and waited! (laughs) We called it “the million dollar week” because Marlon was getting paid a million dollars a week. When he came back he said “Marlon and I agreed that your part should be as large as his, or maybe larger.” When you read “Heart of Darkness” you never actually see the Kurtz character, you only hear about him being talked about by this Russian-Jewish trader, who comes out with shrunken heads and thinks he’s such a great man. So Francis wanted me to play that part, and made him a photojournalist who carried a lot of cameras instead of shrunken heads. So we started there, and wrote a little bit in the morning and then would just improvise off of that.

So those scenes between you and Martin Sheen, when he was locked in the bamboo cage, were largely improvised?

Yeah. I mean, it was improv that came out of writing.



And you and Brando were never actually on the set together, right?

Yeah, he’d shoot one night, then I’d do another. I came in one night and Francis said “Marlon called you a ‘sniveling dog’ and threw bananas at you.’ So I had this prop man throwing bananas at me all night long. (laughs) And that’s how we worked for a couple weeks. It was Marlon’s decision for us to work separately and at the time, I was sort of offended by it, but looking back, I think Marlon did me a big favor. If you’re improvising something, and he suddenly started reading “Hollow Man” by D.H. Lawrence, you really can’t get something going if you have two people vying for (the director’s) time. In the end, it worked out really well.

In 1986 you had a renaissance in your career with three amazing movies: River’s Edge, Blue Velvet and Hoosiers, the last of which earned you an Oscar nomination. It marked a real comeback in your career, and you haven’t stopped working since.

That was my first year of sobriety, too. I’d been out of rehab like two months when I went into do Blue Velvet, then I went straight to Indiana and did Hoosiers. I didn’t do anything but get a haircut and put on some different wardrobe, then came back to Los Angeles and did River’s Edge. It’s funny because I play a drug addict in one, an alcoholic in the other, and a drug dealer in the third! (laughs) So my first year of sobriety was a test. (laughs)



We have to talk about the character of Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. I read an interview with David Lynch where he said you called him after reading the script and said “David, you have to let me play this part because I am Frank Booth.”

Well actually, he’d already cast me, but I did call him after he’d cast me, and we’d never met at that point, and said ‘You haven’t made a mistake, because I am Frank Booth.” So supposedly he went back to the table with Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern, they were all having lunch together, and said “I just got off the phone with Dennis Hopper, and he said that he was Frank Booth, which I guess is really good for the picture, but I don’t know how we’ll ever have lunch with him.” (laughs)

How were you Frank Booth?

I’d come out of a heavy drug life, and had known a lot of people like Frank. I didn’t mean that I was literally Frank Booth, but I’d certainly run into characters like Frank, and understood him. A big discrepancy came the first day we were shooting the big scene where Kyle is hiding in the closet and I come in demanding my bourbon and tell Isabella to spread her legs, and then this sort of horrendous rape scene occurs against her. None of us had met at this point and that was our first scene. (laughs) David had helium on the set, because in the script, the tank that Frank was constantly taking hits from was written as helium, which makes your voice really high, like Donald Duck. But it doesn’t disorient you in any way, it just makes you talk funny. So I said to David, ‘You know I always thought of this as being nitrous oxide or amyl nitrate or something.’ He said “What is that?” I said “Something that disorients your mind for a few minutes. I’m also having trouble acting with my voice sounding like this. So could I just show you what it would look like with the other stuff?” And I did, and David said “Oh, that’s great!” So we went with that, and I said ‘If you want to put the (helium) voice in later, in post, we can,’ and of course, we didn’t. So that was the only real contribution I made to that film, I guess. (laughs) David had written a great screenplay, and there wasn’t any reason to change anything else. Years later I was sitting, thinking about it, and I thought how really weird it would be if Frank Booth had only used the gas to change the sound of his voice, that it didn’t affect his mind at all, and what a cold, calculating kind of guy that would be. The Observer, in England, and Film Quarterly gave me an award in Paris as the outstanding villain of all-time for that film, which is pretty heavy, because that means I beat out Sir Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast and Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. (laughs)



Which brings us to True Romance and the scene between you and Christopher Walken, which has gone down as one of the great scenes in movie history. At the time, Quentin Tarantino was unknown. Did you know upon reading the script that a completely original voice had arrived?

Oh yeah, that was apparent immediately. I thought it was a terrific script and terrific movie, and it just died at the box office. All the buzz came out of tape and DVD. It was strange because I never saw it with an audience where it didn’t get a standing ovation at the end, at Toronto and other places. It just didn’t connect with mainstream audiences. Maybe it was the title, who knows? It’s such a great, popcorn eating movie, you know? (laughs) Tony Scott is a terrific director. The day we did that scene, we did the whole interior of my trailer here at the studio in Los Angeles. First of all, you don’t see speeches like this as an actor in film anymore. It was just pages and pages of this great dialogue. Tony started lighting, was going to shoot with two cameras, and was going to shoot Chris Walken first. Chris came in and saw it, and Tony approached me and said “Chris just said he didn’t want to go first. Would you mind going first?” I said ‘I don’t mind going first, but you’ve been lighting for two and a half hours, man!’ (laughs) Tony said he didn’t mind, and reversed all the lighting and went on me first, and that’s how we did it and it was just wonderful. The only improvisation in the whole thing, because Tarantino’s script was so good, was the bit about the eggplant and the cantaloupe. Walken and I went out later, selling the piece as a team. And someone said to us “Oh, you guys are great actors!” And Walken says “I don’t know if we’re great actors or not, but I started out as a dancer, and Hopper and I partner real well together.” (laughs) And I thought that was a great line.

We touched earlier on your being a survivor.

I think it was genetics. I think it was luck. I think it was attitude that got me through a lot of it. I believe in miracles. It’s a miracle that I’m still here. And I plan on being here a while longer.