The American Dreamer

Bought the LP soundtrack 30 years ago & recently bought the DVD to see where the music fit - some tracks are missing on the video. Dennis' ego trip(s) are normal for the 1970s. We all had a bit of telling the government what we were not going to do. Like the late-1960s, the early 1970s fostered the remnants of the 60's revolution into the 1970s "ME" generation. Someone like Hopper could affect so many, as did Tom Laughlin, in the "Billy Jack" series. Hopper was a man of his time & you either liked what he had to say or not. I chose middle ground, thus not getting into the decadence of the message, but not being complacent with what was going on during that period. "The American Dreamer" was one man's version of what he wanted to do with his life at that time. He (& I) have grown up.

This documentary film about Dennis Hopper really impressed me back in 1971, when I saw it at U. of Penn. It was released on college campuses per Hopper's wishes as part of a plan to change film distribution patterns which, alas, failed, and I haven't heard of it being revived since. The premise was to show Hopper at his Taos, New Mexico headquarters editing his epic "The Last Movie". Along the way his pal and documentarist L.M. (Kit) Carson revealed a lot about Dennis, including his fondness for dallying with young groupies, occasionally right-wing views mixed in with a generally liberal philosophy (particularly regarding gun ownership), etc. The most fascinating segments show clips from "The Last Movie" and Hopper in the editing room musing over the filmmaking process. Later, when the finished "The Last Movie" was released and flopped miserably, thereby curtailing Hopper's budding career as a director (see "Easy Rider"), this documentary took on added meaning in revealing those excesses that contributed to his Wellesian implosion.

I'm always wary of someone who makes a documentary about the making of a film or a portrait of a film-maker at work, that it isn't just an ego-trip particularly if the film-maker in question hasn't really earned his stripes. I've always thought that Dennis Hopper was more famous for being Dennis Hopper than for anything he did in the cinema. He made one great movie, ("Easy Rider"), but that feels like a fluke and he gave one great performance, (in "Blue Velvet"), yet you always felt he was just playing himself.

After the success of "Easy Rider" he embarked on "The Last Movie" and Lawrence Schiller and L M Kit Carson took it on themselves to film him at work although, except for one scene, little actual work appeared to be done. What this documentary tells us is that Hopper was a mostly talentless hack with ideas way above his station, (he sure as hell was no Orson Welles though he himself seemed to think he might be), and with a ridiculously high interest in sex, or at least in talking about it.

Whether or not Schiller and Carson knew they were doing Hopper no favors is hard to tell. Personally, I got the impression they thought they were recording the thoughts of a genius which might say more about them than it does about Hopper. What remains is a picture of an ego run riot though, on hindsight, giving Hopper and his co-conspirators 90 minutes out of my life seems a trifle generous on my part. Still, there are some great Gene Clark songs on the soundtrack.

This warts-and-all documentary of Dennis Hopper at home in Taos, New Mexico, in the period after the filming but before the release of his amazing THE LAST MOVIE, provides a fascinating window into a world that is forever gone and probably only lasted for a short time: the period when the sixties were over but we were still running on fumes from the sixties and things had not yet crashed and burned. This was a year when you could go see a film like VANISHING POINT at a mainstream movie theater and when THE LAST MOVIE was released by a major studio. I was an adolescent at that time and can testify that Hopper represented a heroic image to many of us back then. I never got to see this film at the time because it did not get much distribution. How interesting to see it thirty-three years later. Hopper raises so many interesting questions and issues in THE American DREAMER, but rambler and dreamer that he is, he moves on without stopping to analyze or apply any of it. Perhaps Mr. Hopper expected US to make the next move fueled by the ideas he threw us. The film itself shows Hopper at home editing what would become THE LAST MOVIE, pontificating on all kinds of subjects regarding the arts, society, sex, drugs,his own legacy, and life in general. Intercut with this is footage of Hopper taking his clothes off on the street in a residential neighborhood, shooting various guns, talking with representatives from Universal about THE LAST MOVIE, walking around. Voice-overs of Hopper thinking aloud are played during these scenes. The music is an assemblage of vaguely philosophical stoner folk that perfectly reflects the atmosphere. Hopper talks about honesty in film, and he certainly lives by his own ideology as this is one of the least flattering artist-approved film biographies I've ever seen. Bob Dylan's DON'T LOOK BACK and Woody Allen's WILD MAN BLUES are the only other films about well-known celebrities I'd include on the same shelf. If Mr. Hopper owns the rights to this, he should definitely release it on DVD. By the way, I mentioned earlier about the sixties crashing and burning (as symbolized in the final scene of VANISHING POINT). The film that for me documents the final nail in the coffin of the sixties spirit is WONDERLAND.

Raw and Unsettling... probably the way Dennis Hopper would have wanted the documentary about the making of his film, "The Last Movie" , to feel.

I'm more intrigued to watch Dennis Hopper's follow up to "Easy Rider" so I guess that's a job well done from this documentary. Hopper experiences all the high and lows of an artist with a lot of support by showcasing his frequent drug use while in the process of completing his film. I can see why the "The Last Movie", which I have yet to see, was reviewed poorly by general audiences. Hopper is barely able to function at times, so it's surprising it was even completed with slight cohesion. Definitely give this a watch if you are a fan of the behind the scenes work of a film director with a lot of clout and drugs in his system. If that doesn't intrigue you in the slightest, this may not be your type of movie.