“People used to ask how much drugs I did. I only did drugs so I could drink more.”
Primarily a character actor, as writer-director of Easy Rider (1969), Dennis Hopper epitomized the rebelliousness of Hollywood in the immediate poststudio era. He was heavily influenced by James Dean, the star of Hopper’s first two major gigs—Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). A method actor, who studied under Lee Strasberg, Hopper developed a reputation as being unmanageable early in his career. As a director, he bombed with his Easy Rider follow-up, The Last Movie (1971), but found work as a reliable wild-card type in a series of low-budget and European productions over the next several years. He earned accolades for his supporting role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and a starring role in Out of the Blue (1980). But it was his terrifying performance as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) that gave his career new life, followed by an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Hoosiers (1986) and critical acclaim for his fourth directorial effort, Colors (1988). An accomplished artist, his paintings, photographs, and sculptures were the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES—that is where the blade was. Just moments before, Rip Torn, Terry Southern, and Peter Fonda were in Fonda’s New York townhouse, ostensibly working on the script for Easy Rider, but mostly just drinking. Suddenly, the film’s director, Dennis Hopper, had blown in, at first looking wild-eyed and irrational, and then just royally pissed off.
The problem: While Hopper was down South, risking life and limb to scout locations, they hadn’t written a thing. “I couldn’t even stop in Texas,” Hopper said. “They’re cutting dudes’ hair with rusty razors!” Rip Torn, a Texan, rose to his feet. “Take it easy,” he said, “not everyone from Texas is an a-hole.”
Hopper picked up a steak knife from a nearby table. No account of the evening chronicles what Hopper had consumed before he arrived at Fonda’s townhouse, but his track record speaks for itself. While on location in Cuernavaca in the early 1980s, shooting a West German sexploitation picture called Jungle Warriors, he locked himself in his hotel room with a bottle of tequila (plus who knows what else) and before long was hearing voices of people being tortured and murdered around him. When he started to see bugs and snakes crawling beneath his skin, he stripped off his clothes and ran into the forest, where he “saw” two armies engaged in battle. Oh, and a flying saucer. “I thought the Third World War had started,” he later said of the incident. “I masturbated in front of a tree and thought I’d become a galaxy—that was a good mood!” At that point in his life, Hopper was downing a half-gallon of rum, twenty-eight beers, and three grams of coke—a day.
Substance abuse was such an inextricable part of his life, filmmakers actually accounted for it in their production plans. One director, knowing Hopper might do one drug in the morning, and another in the afternoon—resulting in two different performances that couldn’t possibly be cut together—went through the script with Hopper beforehand and, scene by scene, determined what drugs he’d be taking when. Seriously: his drug schedule was included on his call sheets.
But back to the knife fight. Hopper didn’t have the upper hand for long. Rip Torn, a former military policeman (an amusing thought) quickly disarmed him. It was at this point Hopper threatened to pull out a second knife, a buck knife. Torn told him he’d wait for him in the street: “Bring your guns. Bring your knives. Bring your pals, and we’ll find out in about three seconds who the punk is.” With that, Torn went outside and waited. He knew Hopper had a buck knife; he didn’t know what he was going to do if he had a gun. Fortunately, Torn never had to find out. Hopper stayed inside.
But within weeks, Hanson, the role Torn was supposed to play, was given to Jack Nicholson.
In fairness to Hopper, it should be noted that a year later while filming the movie Maidstone, Torn struck his director Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer—a hammer! Not afraid to mix it up himself, Mailer responded by pining Torn down on the grass and biting off a chunk of his ear. Cameras were rolling and the scene would end up in the movie.
Years after such mayhem, during a 1994 appearance on The Tonight Show, Hopper told the knife story to Jay Leno—only in his version, Torn was the first one to pull a blade. Torn, who was experiencing a career resurgence thanks to a starring role on HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, sued him for defamation—and won. The reason? The judge claimed Hopper wasn’t a credible witness.
Harebrained is not a bad word for it. If there is any indication of just how harebrained, consider the original thinking. Back in 1971, it was suggested that Apocalypse Now be shot on location in Vietnam—yes, the war was still on. It would be a lean, vérité-style production; you just shoot it in 16 mm for a few million dollars. Hmmm?
Mercifully, that didn’t happen (not hard to imagine why), but in 1976 when Apocalypse was finally launched, the plan was no less ill-conceived. Francis Ford Coppola, both producing and directing, was fixed on the Philippines. Never mind that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos had placed the entire country under martial law four years earlier, or that the production’s helicopters might be called away to fight the active rebel insurgency—or that the script written by John Milius in 1969 was being rewritten by the director on the fly. Oh yeah, and the rainy season was fast approaching.
When Coppola asked legendary director Roger Corman for advice (Corman had experience filming in the Philippines), he replied, “My advice, Francis, is—Don’t go.” It is sort of reminiscent of Charles de Gaulle telling President Kennedy that in Vietnam he would “sink bit by bit into a bottomless military and political swamp.”
Should Coppola have listened? He might have at least given pause. Not unlike the United State’s involvement in the real war, they could have been better prepared. After all, there must’ve been at least the scent of impending disaster—the lead role of Capt. Willard was turned down by no less than McQueen, Nicholson, Redford, and Pacino.
One look at the cast and you knew. Martin Sheen, coming straight from a film in Italy, noted, “I had some personal concerns about my own physical condition.” This in part because he was smoking two packs a day and fighting a decade-long battle with booze. Captaining a Navy patrol boat, the thirty-five-year-old actor also couldn’t swim. When on the first day Sheen asked for a life jacket, the crew—assuming it must be a joke—laughed.
Or Dennis Hopper, who by his own estimation arrived “not in the greatest of shape.” By this he must have meant drunk and high, with photographer Caterine Milinaire, the daughter of the Duchess of Bedford, in tow. Oscillating between erratic and out-of-his-mind, depending on what he was on, Hopper got into his role by connecting to the Fool, as in the card from the Tarot deck. He rarely bathed and chose not to wash his costume for the most of the shoot. Brando refused to be in the same room with him, a stipulation that made filming their scenes together a bit more complicated.
Not that Brando reported to duty in ship-shape. Hired for three weeks at $1 million a week, he arrived weighing almost three hundred pounds. Coproducer Gray Frederickson remarked, “You couldn’t see around him.” Tennessee Williams observed that they must be paying him by the pound. Added to this, Brando hadn’t even bothered to read Heart of Darkness—the book upon which Apocalypse Now was based.
Clearly, nobody in the cast had been to boot camp. Still, with a disciplined commanding officer, things might have been different. But Coppola at this time in his life was not that officer. For one thing, he had just begun smoking grass, an interesting hobby to take up at the onset of the most ambitious production of your career.
The pressure was unbelievable, a strain the director dealt with by ripping doors off hinges, throwing two-by-fours, and eventually falling into a full-blown epileptic seizure. According to actor Frederic Forrest, there were days when the shooting schedule simply read, “scenes unknown.”
It was a production steeped in chaos and prone to excess, difficult in the best of circumstances but impossible given the jungle locale. Cast and crew were pushed eight to twelve hours a day, suffering from the heat, from tropical disease. Sam Bottoms, eighteen at the time, got hookworm. Forrest had blood oozing out of his ears. Almost from the start, the production was behind schedule and over budget as fourteen weeks turned into sixteen weeks, then twenty—Apocalypse hitting the one-hundred-day mark, then two hundred days.
In the second month of production Typhoon Olga slammed into the island: days of torrential rain that wiped out sets, shut down production and killed two hundred Filipinos. Is it any wonder the cast and crew partied like the world was going to end? There were hundreds of beer cans lined up around the pool at the Pagsanjan Falls Resort so you didn’t need to get out of the water. Flaming mattresses were seen flying out of hotel windows (Hopper’s), crew members dove off the hotel roof, and gunshots rang out in the night (again, Hopper). Bottoms, with refreshing candor, would point out that just below the production office there was a massage parlor where “you could go in there and get jerked off for five bucks.” Who knows how this struck his fellow actor Laurence Fishburne—given that he was only fourteen at the time.
There’s a story that, the day after drinking a great deal of tequila, Forrest simply passed out in the middle of filming, just dropped to the jungle floor. Hopper cracked, “Who do we have here? Humphrey Bogart?” But in reality, they were a long, long way from anything as quaint as Bogart and Hepburn squabbling over gin in The African Queen. Martin Sheen seems to have been one of the few who truly saw this. Reluctant to return to the production after the typhoon, he commented, “I was afraid I would not live through it.”
One of the most famous scenes, both because of what happens on screen and what happened on set, involves Sheen. At the opening of the film, his character, Capt. Willard, is hunkered down in a hotel room, smoking and drinking himself numb, as he awaits his next assignment. The scene was shot on Sheen’s thirty-sixth birthday and the actor had spent the day in the hotel room, smoking and drinking like Willard. By the time they were ready to shoot, he was so drunk he could barely stand up. In the outtakes you can hear Sheen mutter, “Give us a little booze here will ya …” In a sort of free-form improvisational tour de force, Sheen struck hand-to-hand poses in front of a mirror, accidently shattering the mirror glass and gouging his thumb. With blood leaking, Sheen naked and weeping, Coppola to his credit wanted to stop filming, but Sheen insisted they press on. What is captured on film is powerful and intimate, a troubled man going deeply inward.
Through the lens of several decades of sobriety, Sheen would come to understand that he was using alcohol as a tool, “an easy ticket to the emotional well,” and that he had been for some time. But certainly, he wasn’t the only member of the cast to do so. When Coppola asked Hopper what he needed to help get into character, Hopper replied, “an ounce of cocaine.” He wasn’t joking. For the documentary Hearts of Darkness, Bottoms acknowledged that “most of my character was done under the influence of pot.” It was a time and place when alcohol and drugs seemed (to use Sheen’s phrase) like a “legitimate professional aid,” and a miracle that all the cast survived intact. Sheen in fact almost didn’t—suffering a heart attack nearer the end of the production. Later, he would wonder if it wasn’t a subconscious attempt to escape the insanity around him.
But escape finally did arrive. By then fourteen weeks had turned into more than fourteen months and the budget had gone from $13 million to over $30 million—and 250 hours of footage had been shot. Coppola, with the help of Brando’s incredible improvisation, had finished the script and the shoot—“the horror, the horror” was over.
Premiering at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, Apocalypse Now would win the Palme d’Or. At a press conference, Coppola declared, “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam”—an overstatement for sure, but not by much.
THE PREMIERE SHOWCASE for singer-songwriters of Southern California and beyond during the 1960s and 1970s, the Troubadour has occupied its current three-hundred-capacity theater just south of the Sunset Strip since 1961. Founded by Doug Weston, a towering longhair with Ben Franklin glasses who’d previously worked as a stage manager at the Apollo Theater, it began four years earlier as a humble sixty-five-seat coffeehouse on La Cienega, but with Weston’s stewardship and keen eye for talent, it became a crucial performance space that helped make stars of Bonnie Raitt, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Carole King, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, and Tom Waits (to name but a few).
Elton John, who made his U.S. debut with a six-night stand at the Troubadour (during which he was introduced by Neil Diamond), still considers that engagement the turning point of his career. Comedians, too, have played a pivotal role in the club’s history. Lenny Bruce was first arrested for obscenity at the Troubadour. Richard Pryor recorded his first album there. It’s where Steve Martin and Cheech & Chong were discovered, and where the Smothers Brothers launched their 1974 comeback. (That performance is best remembered for two famous hecklers in the crowd, Harry Nilsson and John Lennon, both of whom were thrown out by security.)
Yet despite the sentimental attachment performers had to the Troubadour, Weston’s allegedly avaricious business practices caused no small degree of resentment. “The Troubadour is a gold mine that’s been mined by everyone else,” Weston once said. And as the club’s international reputation grew—aided in part by the release of live albums by Diamond and Van Morrison—he wanted his cut. The most egregious of his demands was a “return engagement” contract that required acts to continue performing at the Troubadour no matter how popular they’d become—for the same fees they’d always been paid.
Capitalizing on the festering bad blood, a group that included producer Lou Adler and David Geffen opened the Roxy Theatre in 1973, a larger room that targeted the exact shows that had been the Troubadour’s bread and butter. Weston failed to meet the competition head on. By the early 1980s he’d abandoned his previous booking principles—that he would only present artists who had “something to say”—and started catering to the burgeoning heavy-metal scene on the Sunset Strip. (Metallica played their first headlining gig in L.A. at the Troubadour in 1982; four years later, a gig by Guns N’ Roses convinced Geffen to sign the band.)
It was only after Weston partnered with businessman Ed Karayan, who reorganized operations, that the Troubadour started to reclaim some of its previous luster. These days, the club concentrates primarily on emerging artists and established independent acts, though the old guard continues to pop in from time to time. (James Taylor and Carole King, for instance, reenacted their Troubadour debut for a fiftieth-anniversary celebration in 2007.) And though Doug Weston passed away in 1999, a controversial figure to the end, his name still appears on the sign above the door.
