Dennis Hopper: Dynamite, Cocaine, Cheating Death, Subverting Hollywood, and Life on the Fringe
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This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is the story of one of the most rock and roll characters to ever work in Hollywood.

An artistic revolutionary. A drug-crazed lunatic. A man who once tried to blow himself up in front of a crowd in Texas. A man who took a $300,000 hippie art film and turned it into a $40 million box office smash. It's a story about Dennis Hopper. A man whose movies and whose myth inspired great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show.

That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called Frank's Oxygen Mask, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to In the Year 2525 by Zagger and Evans. And why would I play you that specific slice of futuristic cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on July 14th, 1969.

And that was the day Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider was released. An event that brought 60s counterculture into the mainstream kicking and screaming and set its director, Dennis Hopper, on a path that would take him to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. On this episode, Artistic Revolution, the Dynamite Death Chair Act, Easy Rider in a 357 Magnum Packing Dennis Hopper.

I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. From where he stood, atop the roof on the third story of his 22-room adobe house, you could see for miles in every direction.

The sun was high in the sky and the edge of the horizon sizzled. The desert wind blew in from the southeast. The submachine gun was heavy in his hands. It rested on his right forearm. His right finger, swollen and sweaty from the New Mexico heat, caressed the trigger.

It wasn't the kind of gun that one of his silver screen heroes, Errol Flynn, used in Dodge City, the 1939 movie named for his hometown in Kansas. And it wasn't the kind of gun that another of his early acting influences, Montgomery Cliff, carried alongside John Wayne in Red River. It was a James Cagney gun, a Charles Bronson gun. It was the kind of gun held by a man on the fringe of society and on the fringed end of his last nerve.

It was the kind of gun that he, Dennis Hopper, champion of the counterculture, hero of the hippies, fountainhead of the fringe, deemed necessary to hold in his hands while he stood his ground and beat back the horde of angry locals who didn't want anyone like him polluting the water in Taos, New Mexico. He had that gun because they were coming for him. They were coming to kill him. He could hear the dull roar of the mob riding on the wind. He couldn't make that shit up. A literal angry mob armed with actual pitchforks.

The only other sound he could hear was the beating of his own heart, accelerated by his daily intake of cocaine or maybe it was the LSD. Some days you just never knew which drug was responsible for what. Some days you felt clear in your mind but your soul was mad. That was a whole other story. How he had gotten here was an easy story.

It happened the night before. The year was 1970, the sun was going down, the cicadas were out. Some local kids in town gave Hopper shit about his buckskin fringe jacket and his long hair. Told him they didn't want his kind in Taos. "Go back to LA, hippie." Hopper pretended the verbal daggers didn't faze him. He pretended he didn't watch them walk away. He reached inside his pickup, opened the glove box and took out a loaded pistol. He kept one eye on the kids as they receded into the distance.

He walked casually but with a sense of urgency. The sun was gone, the hum of cicadas thickened. He clutched the gun tight against his body and thought of the sea change in Hollywood that he was responsible for. His last film, Easy Rider, captured the zeitgeist of late 60s America.

Old Hollywood was moldy Hollywood. Hopper and Easy Rider had ushered in a new style, a new look, a new Hollywood. They wore the outfits of the tuned-in, dropped-out generation, not the costumes of the old guard. They made love on screen, not war. They talked the way they talked, not the way some screenwriter thought they should talk. They smoked real dope. They were out to change the entire course of American film. It was the hippies' turn.

Hopper told this to any titan of Golden Age Hollywood dumb enough to lend an ear. "You are the old Hollywood and we are the new," Hopper said to director George Cokora, nearly four decades his senior. And then he leaned in real close and dropped his voice to a menacing whisper: "We are going to bury you." If only crusty old George Cokora could see him now. Hopper first fell in love with Tauss when he brought a film crew to town in 1968 for Easy Rider.

It was his directorial debut and was made after a nearly decade-long stretch where Hopper had been blacklisted in Hollywood. Hopper's reputation in La La Land throughout the 1950s and 60s was that of a bad, bad boy who was difficult to work with and whose behavior cost him countless good roles.

Easy Rider gave him some temporary redemption. The road movie followed two bikers, Billy and Wyatt, played by Hopper and Peter Fonda, and was largely responsible for bringing hippie counterculture to the American mainstream. Made for under $400,000, it went on to bank upwards of $40 million domestically and another $20 million abroad. It was an honest-to-God cultural phenomenon, and it made Dennis Hopper, it made him a star.

Now just a few years later, Hopper was no longer a fringe icon. He was just an unwanted long hair, a crazy person. A crazy person with a pistol following a group of shit-talking kids back to their house. When the kids reached their house and were about to walk inside, Hopper made his move. He drew the pistol, cocked it, and told them they were under citizen's arrest. When the cops arrived, they took Dennis Hopper to jail.

Hours later, when Hopper met his $8,000 bail, the police chief offered some unsolicited advice. "There's a mob outside," he told him. "Best to slip out the side door and keep your head down. Once you get outside, we can't help you." That was the night Hopper bought as many firearms as he could get his hands on.

He brought them back to the Mud Palace. He stood guard up on the roof. He stood up for the fringe. It had taken a few years for the fringe to make it to the Hollywood mainstream. There were other movies in the late 1960s that began to turn the tide from what Hollywood had been to what it would become. Movies like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner all represented major shifts in how popular cinema approached sex, violence, and civil rights.

Prior to Easy Rider, producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider made a first attempt at mainstreaming counterculture with Head, a comedy starring the Monkees. They were responsible for the Monkees' hit TV show, a ready-for-prime-time version of the counterculture, but the movie sabotaged their squeaky-clean image and failed to make waves.

The Monkees had conceived of the film with screenwriter and B-movie actor Jack Nicholson. Which means they all sat around a hotel suite surrounded by bags of California grass and riffed while a tape recorder spun. Later, Nicholson took the tapes along with some Nicholson-grade doses of LSD and turned them into a script. Experimentation with illicit substances only increased on the set of Easy Rider. Nicholson was cast as a lawyer who became the gang's third wheel.

On and off the set, Fonda, Hopper, and Nicholson continued to smoke weed, continued to do LSE. They were all so eager to alter their minds that Hopper didn't even ask what was inside of an urn that sat on the mantle of one of the production company's offices. He dumped the powdery contents onto a boardroom table and snorted them up with a wrinkled dollar bill. Fonda broke the news. Hopper didn't just snort coke. He snorted the ashes of one of the movie executive's dead wives. On the fringe, things aren't always what they seemed.

Back in Taos, they rarely were. In 1975, Dennis Hopper continued his role as just another long-haired hippie haunting the locals. It had been years since he had a proper role in a proper film. Years since any major studio let him near a director's chair. So Hopper went off the edge of the fringe and went all in on Crazy. The locals called it the Dennis Hopper Psychodrama Cowboy Act.

That act played out one night that July after a poker match at the Hotel La Fonda. Hopper won the pot that night, which happened to be a handful of LSD instead of the customary cash. Hopper then popped a few doses on his tongue and chased them with some swigs of PPR.

He put his Stetson on top of his head. He stood from the table and felt the room wobble. The .357 Magnum stuffed in his boot made a clicking sound when he walked. It sounded like spurs. He stepped out of the front door of the La Fonda and saw it, straight ahead. It was on his hind legs, a whopping eight fucking feet tall, maybe taller, claws sharp, teeth snarling. It was the biggest bear Hopper had ever seen in his life, and he feared it would rush him at any moment.

Hopper stumbled down the front steps of the hotel. He retrieved his .357 from his boot. His Stetson fell to the ground. He raised his .357 into the air, shouted some psychodrama cowboy nonsense into the wind, and fired three times. After the final shot rang out, Hopper unclenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes to take stock of the damage. Had he made contact? Was it dead? Was it a black bear? A grizzly?

Once the smoke cleared, so did Hopper's mind. He blinked twice and the bear was no longer a bear. It was a tree. Hopper tried to outrun the cops, but there were too many of them. They hauled Hopper back to the county courthouse. As the acid began to slowly wear off, Dennis Hopper realized he was sitting in the same jail cell where he had filmed a scene for Easy Rider seven years ago.

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Nobody told Dennis Hopper what to do. In Dodge City, Kansas, on his grandparents' egg farm, he roamed the wide-open landscape. He had the autonomy of a kid three times his age. In La Mesa, California, where his family moved when he was 13, he grew to resent his absentee parents. They told him he'd have to become a lawyer or a doctor, but they couldn't really tell him what to do. They didn't even know him. So he ran away to join a Shakespearean theater troupe.

He'd known he was destined for the stage from an early age. All the way back to when Dodge City premiered in his hometown in 1939 and Errol Flynn strolled down Main Street to the sound of rapturous applause. He was going to be an actor, and not just any actor, but the greatest actor in the country, perhaps the world. And no one could tell him otherwise. Not even Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Studios and the maker and breaker of careers in Hollywood.

King Cone was one of five studio heads who offered Hopper, then only 18 years old, a major contract after his breakthrough role as an epileptic on an episode of NBC's weekly TV drama series, Medic. This was 1955. The kid's response to the 63-year-old Cone was pure Dennis Hopper gold. Go fuck yourself.

Those three words ensured Hopper wouldn't step foot on the Columbia lot for another 15 years. Word traveled fast in Hollywood, and the word on the street was that this kid, Hopper, had an oversized ego. Defying it, he told King Cone to stick his polished, glistening Oscar trophies up his goddamn asshole. He was good. Damn

Damn good. He auditioned well. The raw, visceral performance on that episode of Medic was obviously no fluke. Dennis Hopper had something. Still, he was too much of a wild card. Best to cast him in the fringe roles, the supporting roles, at least until his attitude adjusted. That was Nicholas Ray's thinking that same year, 1955, when he cast Hopper in Rebel Without a Cause. Not in the lead role, but as a gang member named Goon.

The role of Jim Stark, of course, went to James Dean. To Dennis Hopper, the self-proclaimed greatest actor in Hollywood, witnessing James Dean on set was a punch to the gut. Who the fuck is this guy? Hopper asked himself. How is James Dean better than him? Filming the chickie run scene up on the bluff overlooking the City of Angels, Hopper paced from car to car. Dean's transcendent takes played over and over in his head. He had to know. James Dean had to show him.

Hopper lost his temper. He flung open the suicide doors of the 46 Ford Coupe Dean was getting ready to race and threw Dean in the back seat, grabbed him by the collar of his cherry red jacket. Hopper's eyes went widescreen. I was the best actor in Hollywood, man, Hopper yelled, his grip tightening on Dean's collar. I was the best damn actor and then you came along and somehow you're better, man.

Dean laughed and his eyes did that thing where they squinted shut when he found something humorous. But Hopper was serious. He wasn't laughing. You better show me everything you know about acting or else, he said. He threw in that or else part to drive home how serious he was. James Dean knew he was serious. He told Hopps to play it cool, lay back, dig it.

Dean told Hopps, "When the camera rolls, drink the coffee. Don't act like you're drinking the coffee." Dean told Hopps, "When the camera rolls, smoke the cigarette. Don't act like you're smoking the cigarette." But most importantly, Dean said, "Play it cool. Lay back. Dig it. Can you dig?"

It was what Marlon Brando did. Dean idolized Brando, but Dean was also a serious student and had honed his chops at the Actors Studio in New York City. The Actors Studio's founding artistic director, Lee Strasberg, developed an edgy technique called "The Method," where actors would use their own real-life experiences to inform their choices on stage and on screen.

The results were real, raw performances unlike anything moviegoing audience had ever seen. Secondhand method acting advice wasn't the only thing James Dean and Dennis Hopper bonded over. Inside Dean's Warner Brothers dressing room, the duo would smoke marijuana in secret. They'd put paper bags over their heads when they exhaled, so that the suits at Warner Brothers would never suspect anything. No smoke, no smell, no foul, no harm. Play it cool.

Dean and Hopper's experimentation and improvisation didn't end there. One afternoon, James Dean had Hopper meet him in the kitchen of a guesthouse in the Hollywood Hills that he was renting. His mission, if he chose to accept it, get extra high. Dean told him to come on an empty stomach. The hungrier you were, the higher you'd get. James Dean pulled a chunk of peyote cactus from the pocket of his cherry red jacket. It was dull green, looked like a fat caterpillar in the fetal position.

"The best way to eat this," Dean told Hopps, "is raw, but this shit tastes so nasty and so bitter that most people puke their guts out when they eat it." Dean's solution was to boil the green fat cactus on the stovetop for about an hour, or until they were tired of watching it boil. Dean took a pair of pliers and yanked out the spines like he was deboning a salmon filet.

Hops cut the cactus into slices with a steak knife. Then he and Hops took turns taking hits from a thin marijuana cigarette while the peyote bounced around a soup pan full of water on a rolling boil. When the hour was up, Dean strained the sludgy green peyote tea through one of his old white t-shirts into two porcelain mugs. Bottoms up.

Hopps felt like he'd stepped into a dream. The walls fluttered like they were alive. The floor sparkled like a starry night sky. He looked over at Dean and it was like he was looking in a mirror. No maybes, no fractions, no supposes. Hopps was there, man. He was there whether it was grass, peyote, or half a bottle of whiskey that got him there.

when he took his girlfriend and Rebel castmate Natalie Wood up Mulholland Drive one night. It was pitch black. The only light came from the headlights of Hopper's brand new Austin Healy convertible. It was raining. Natalie had just told Dennis Hopper that she was also having an affair with Rebel's director, Nicholas Ray. When she laid that trip on him, Hopper's foot sank into the gas pedal.

Natalie was only 16, Hopper was two years older, but Ray, Nicholas Ray, was 43, old enough to be Natalie's father, and he was sleeping with the film's underage ingenue. Hopper saw red, and they were making their way downhill, the convertible swerving and curving on the road like a snake trying to eat its own tail. Hopper hugged the curve and then pushed his foot as far as he could into the gas pedal, and the rain on the windshield was abstract art, and the car floated into the opposite lane as it rounded another corner,

Hopper didn't even see the oncoming car as it hit them head on. Natalie was thrown through the windshield and wound up on the pavement. At the hospital, Ray burst through the door. He wanted Hopper, found him pacing the lobby and waiting for word from the doctor. Ray grabbed Hopper by the collar of his shirt, just like Hopps had grabbed Dean that night on the bluff, and threw him up against the wall. "Cool," Ray spat through his gritted teeth, his eyes watering with fear and anger.

Hopper sat in the darkness of his Doheny Drive apartment that night, wishing he'd had a chunk of peyote cactus to boil in water. He had a stray thought that he would end the love triangle once and for all. He'd get a pistol and walk himself right over to Nicholas Ray's house, knock on the door, fire one shot into Ray's chest when he opened up. Cool it. He'd show him cool, man. Nobody told Dennis Hopper what to do.

Nah, Hopps thought he better not. He could face a lot at 18, but going to the can for premeditated murder was too much. Instead, for his revenge, he'd fuck with Ray on the set of Rebel. While they were filming the field trip scene at the Griffith Observatory, Hopper took off to go score a hot dog and caused a major production delay. When Hopper finally returned, Ray told him he was fired.

But Ray couldn't fire Hopper because the kid was under contract, untouchable. So Ray did the next best thing and took away all of Hopper's lines. And no one would hear a word come out of Goon, Hopper's character's mom, for the entire movie. Henry Hathaway was the next director who tried to tell Dennis Hopper what to do.

In 1958, on the set of From Hell to Texas, Hopper did it his way for 79 takes, multiple days of shooting. Finally, on the 80th take, Hopper, broken down and once again on the fringe of his last nerve, did the scene Hathaway's way. As Hopps left the set in search of his next job, Hathaway told him to not bother looking. He was going to personally see to it that Dennis Hopper would never work another goddamn day in Hollywood again.

We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

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I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. We're going to Hollywood! Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryan, and Ryan Seacrest on American Idol. Season premiere Sunday, 8/7c on ABC and stream on Hulu. Brooke Hayward recoiled in fear when the first foot came down on the windshield. She fumbled the car keys in her hands. Another foot stomped on them, and the glass cracked.

Hopper was wearing those big shit-kicker boots, steel-toed, heavy treads. He jumped up and down on the yellow hood and rattled the entire car. She reached for the floor and got the keys back in her hands, just in time for Hopper's boot to go right through the windshield. Brooks screamed as the glass shattered and fell into the car's interior. Hopper was on the hood, panting. And why?

All because Brooke felt like going home alone after being subjected to watching her husband, Dennis Hopper, playing Billy the Kid in Michael McClure's obscene play, The Beard, rip the panties off his co-star and go down on her. If Brooke was looking for a sign, this was it. It wasn't the first time Hopper had gone violent. It was a Jekyll and Hyde thing with him.

Peter Fonda, brother of her best friend Jane Fonda, called her once back in 1968 to warn her that something was up with Hopps. He was acting strange. He may have gone off the rails. When their kids were still at home when Hopper walked through the door, his wily long hair held at bay by a thin paisley headband and said to Brooke, get me food or I will kill you.

It wasn't long after that that the LAPD pulled Hopper over. They told him he threw a roach from the window. He begged to differ and proved it by showing him that he still held a roach in his hand. While they booked him downtown, Brooks seized the opportunity to get a restraining order and start the divorce process. Michelle Phillips could relate. The former singer for the Mamas and the Papas became Hopper's second wife on Halloween night 1970 in a candlelit ceremony in the courtyard of the Mud Palace in Taos.

Eight days later, Hopper drove his truck onto the tarmac of the Santa Fe airport to physically block her from leaving on a jet plane. Their one week of marriage was far from blissful. Hopper was paranoid. He was Mr. Hyde. He shot his guns off in the house. He was convinced that Michelle was a witch. He handcuffed her so that she couldn't escape. As soon as she got Hopper to take the cuffs off, Michelle was out the door.

At the Santa Fe airport, security soon had Hopper surrounded. They moved him off the runway and then the plane was gone, Michelle along with it. He called her that night. "I love you," he pleaded. "I need you. Have you ever thought about suicide?" she responded. Hopper went back to the Mud Palace and back to working on what was quickly becoming his own version of career suicide.

He was piecing together the upteenth edit of his new film, The Last Movie, which was his quixotic attempt at making the film to end all films. The success of Easy Rider offered him carte blanche with his next directorial effort. He decided to realize a pet project of his, a meta-movie about a stuntman who goes into self-imposed exile in Peru.

In his head, he was better than Altman, Cassavetes, and Peckinpah all put together. He was the American Fellini. "I'm a genius and I can do anything," Hopper shouted at the mountains. He was emboldened by whatever combination of peyote, LSD, grass, and cocaine were tooling around the inside of his body. Cocaine in particular was everywhere in Peru, which is where Hopper chose to shoot the last movie.

Cokeheads in LA clamored for a chance to get a job on the crew, simply for the chance to peep some of the purest shit known to man, which they could then smuggle back home to the States in film canisters to make a mint.

But the reality of a Dennis Hopper film shoot in Peru was an entirely different reality, an alternate reality. The crew had to haul 15,000 pounds of camera and lighting equipment three hours up the side of a mountain in treacherous conditions. Actors suffering from altitude sickness puked all over the beautiful countryside. One of the production members forced a stewardess to smoke a joint on the flight into Cusco, and the Peruvian cops thought for a hot minute about locking up the entire crew and throwing away the key.

another production member attempted to take his own life. Hopper knew that if the guy had been successful, the movie and Hopper would be held responsible by the government. The insanity of an unstable, oxygen-deprived, cocaine-saturated shoot in a foreign country drove Dennis Hopper to further paranoias. He was convinced that the Peruvian government had the whole set under surveillance, that they were in communication with the United States government, and that he'd be arrested the minute they stepped off the plane in Los Angeles.

When production wrapped and they touched down in the States, there were no feds waiting for him. There was just Hopper's rampant parents. Back in Taos, Hopper spent the better part of a year editing the last movie. He screened cut after cut in the town's movie theater for anyone who cared. One cut was eight hours long. Eight hours long! When it was finally released in the fall of 1971, it was a lean 90 minutes long. It won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and then it promptly bombed at the box office.

It was too arty. For the studio, it was delivered too late. It was all but forgotten months later. Dennis Hopper wouldn't direct another movie for a decade. Instead, he struggled. While his old friend Jack Nicholson made Chinatown and won an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hopper grasped for scraps and was occasionally rewarded with small films in countries like Germany and Australia.

He was so desperate for something new, something that would rekindle that feeling of leading the march on the fringe frontier, that he even answered Charles Manson's calls.

Manson was on trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders, some of the most savage and nightmarish crimes Los Angeles had ever seen. The aftermath rumbled through the city like a late-night aftershock, and many musicians and artists had gotten mixed up with Manson's self-proclaimed creative endeavors. But that was before the killings, before Manson sent a group of blood-hungry cronies up Cielo Drive with explicit instructions to kill them all.

It's worth repeating Dennis Hopper was different from Dennis Wilson or Terry Melcher or Jim Morrison in that he was the only one crazy enough to get involved with Manson after the murders.

Manson wanted to make a biopic of his life story. Hopper would direct. He could even star in it if he wanted. Hopper thought of Terrence Malick's Badlands. He thought of Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, Leonard Castle's The Honeymoon Killers. A film on Manson could be the defining work in an emerging genre in American cinema that looked to get into the heads of cold-blooded killers. Hopper took the bait. He took the meeting.

From across the table, Hopper looked into Manson's eyes as he spoke. His eyes were everywhere. They bounced around like two pinballs. Hopper looked beyond the bouncing eyeballs to go deeper. Manson rambled on about how he was a movie star. He'd always been a movie star, only the cameras had never been rolling. He needed Hopper to turn the cameras on and start rolling.

Hopper looked deeper. Behind the bouncing eyeballs was blackness. Hopper wanted to find a familiar French poet behind those eyes. The sludgy counterculture oozing on the edge of sanity. Something that could make good commentary, a good story, a good movie, maybe something Hopper could relate to. But all he found was blackness. So dark and so black that Hopper worried if he looked any longer, he'd get sucked right out of the room and never find his way back. He left the Manson tale on the table.

Hopper was left to contemplate a failed career in the mid-70s, a career derailed by his own stubbornness. And maybe he'd never work again. He decided to put it out of his mind. He took more drugs. By the end of the 1970s, Dennis Hopper's daily intake, by his own admission, involved a case of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, 28 beers, and 3 grams of cocaine. He eventually graduated from snorting the coke to shooting it.

It was honestly a miracle that he ever made it back to the director's chair alive in the early 80s, especially considering the other chairs he tried on for size, including one that had the potential to blow him to kingdom come.

*Dramatic music*

The trick of the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act is to get the four sticks of dynamite to all explode at the same time. That way, the explosion creates a vacuum which saves you from bodily harm. You do that and you escape death. You don't do that and you're fucked. Dennis Hopper had seen the trick performed by a stuntman when he was a teenager. For years he thought about trying it himself. In May 1983, he decided to give it a shot. Why the hell not?

The cocktail of drugs in his system gave him courage. The paranoia in his brain gave him purpose. He worried the feds or the Peruvians were still after him. Maybe the mafia too. Again, why the hell not? These are the things you worry about when you are literally not thinking straight. And obviously he was far from thinking straight when he sat down in a chair in the middle of the big H speedway in North Houston. And the house lights went down and the spotlight went up on Dennis Hopper.

The rednecks and film students in the audience had never heard of the trick before, and they were there simply out of morbid curiosity. The film students were bussed over from Rice University, where Hopper had just screened his new film out of the blue. The fuses were lit. The spotlight went dim, and all the audience saw was the sparkling fuses as they snaked their way to the chair's feet.

The explosion sent a boom through the speedway. Smoke enveloped Hopper in the chair. It was like a Houdini act. People in the stands were covering their eyes with their hands. Others were screaming and gasping. As the smoke cleared, Hopper stood up and walked away from the chair. Chest puffed out, adrenaline on 11. Not a scratch. Dennis Hopper left Houston, feeling invincible.

He headed for Mexico and the set of the German film Jungle Warriors, a low-rent sexploitation flick. When it came to work, Hopps took what he could get. It wasn't long into the shoot before the crew lost sight of him, and Dennis Hopper wandered into the jungle in his pajamas. Deep in the tree's head full of orange sunshine and the White Lady, he thought back to another jungle of his recent past, the Philippines, where he had the opportunity to work with director Francis Ford Coppola, a titan of New Hollywood.

It was on the set of Apocalypse Now that he got to do scenes with Marlon Brando, the hero of his hero, James Dean. But Brando had hated James Dean. He thought he was a wannabe. And so, by proxy, Marlon Brando hated Dennis Hopper. He threw bananas at Hopper in the scenes that they did together and called him a mutt.

Was it method or madness? Maybe a little bit of both. Either way, it's fucking hysterical. The jungle in Mexico, though, was definitely madness. The cops found Hopper walking down a dirt road. He had been following flashes in the sky. He was receiving transmissions from the clouds. And they told him World War III was on the brink. Oh, and he had shed his pajamas along the way. And Dennis Hopper was buck naked.

The insanity reached a fever pitch when Hopper escaped from the plane that was bringing him back to the States. Still higher than James Dean on a half-gallon of peyote tea, Hopper thought the plane was on fire and climbed out onto the wing through an emergency exit. From there, he stood on the edge of the wing, knees bent slightly to help maintain his balance, waving off the people who were attempting to coax him back inside, and his shirt rippling wildly from the suction of the nearby turbine as the plane powered up for takeoff.

And this image of Dennis Hopper standing on the wing of a plane in Mexico and waiting for World War III to hit is fucking bonkers even by Dennis Hopper's standards. And it was his last truly gonzo move. Back home, he entered rehab in Century City to kick his cocaine habit. And there would be no more naked runs through the jungle or 357 Magnum cowboy showdowns with trees that looked like bears. No more tantrums on the hoods of cars or strange fruit boiled up on a stovetop.

However, there would still be plenty of strange. Dennis Hopper's third act arguably was his best known and most culturally beloved, even more so than his Easy Rider origins. He was reborn in a kinder, gentler role, still plenty eccentric, like an uncle who had his cage rattled one too many times, but he reserved his flashes of crazy for the roles he'd play.

He played the wacko who inhaled nitrous oxide and blue velvet. He played the town drunk in Hoosiers. He played the maniac who rigs a bomb on the bus in Speed. He played the leader of post-apocalyptic pirates in Waterworld. He directed Robert Duvall and Sean Penn in Colors. And later, toward the end of his life, even ended up playing himself in the bro-tastic television show Entourage.

But before that, Dennis Hopper settled down in a fringe section of LA's Venice Beach called The Ghetto, where he bought a funky condo designed by architect Frank Gehry. Inside, video monitors played on constant loop footage from the premises. Hopper kept a small gun stuffed in his sock and a loaded shotgun inside.

Not because he was fending off a horde of pissed off locals, but because he still had that edge to him. And he still stood guard for the fringe. He was there, in his futuristic Venice compound, until May 29th, 2010, when he died at the age of 74 from prostate cancer. From out there in the future, he went straight back to a simpler past, buried in a plain pine box in Taos.

And what did they say when he died? He was a kind man, he was a wise man, he had plans, he had wisdom? Bullshit! They said he was King Freak, a powder keg and a liability, the most cosmic cowboy hippie and one of the craziest fuckers to ever walk a Hollywood-backed lot. But also that he was a visionary and a prophet for a new age.

and one of the very few who wandered off the edge of the fringe and lived to tell the tale. A tale not quite a disgrace, but so wild it needed to be told. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. ♪

All right. I hope you dug this episode on Dennis Hopper. Hey, Apple podcast listeners, you know the drill. Make sure you have automatic downloads turned on so you don't miss any episodes. All right. This week's question of the week is which actor or actress from Hollywood history is the most popular?

rock and roll in your estimation? Is it Dennis Hopper? Is it someone else? Is it someone like Johnny Depp or Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe? And that reminds me, we also want to know if you think the Kennedys had anything to do with Marilyn's death. 617-906-6638. With your answers, you can leave me a voicemail or text

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