AMERICAN DREAMER
Production: USA, 1971
Director: L.M. Kit Carson & Lawrence Schiller
Category: Documentary
An amazing documentary on actor/director Dennis Hopper, shot at the time he was editing his oblique masterwork, The Last Movie, and was generally wasted on drugs and alcohol. Hopper is filmed at his home in Taos, New Mexico, speed-talking about a multitude of subjects, and also indulging in various more physical activities – sharing a bath with three nude groupies, shooting guns, and stripping stark naked in the street. At one point he reminisces about visiting Charles Manson in jail. Hopper even called in Alejandro Jodorowsky to help with the editing of The Last Movie, as he was simply too out of it to cogently decipher and reframe the 37 hours of cocaine-fuelled footage which had been shot in Peru. Hopper was eventually arrested in Taos, a few years later, for drunk driving, leaving the scene of an accident, and evading arrest. It was also around that time that he embarked on one of his most notorious mind-altering binges, which resulted in him wandering naked through the desert for days on end. It would be the mid-80s before he finally sobered up, after being secured in a mental hospital to detox following a terminal episode when police found him, naked and babbling, in the depths of a Mexican jungle.
Posted by Lycanthrope
