![]() It takes no effort to imagine what the two men saw in one another, with Hopper functioning as yet another proxy or onscreen surrogate for Welles, unaware as of this filming that having already made his Citizen Kane (1941) with Easy Rider, that The Last Movie was months away from being his own personal Ambersons-level catastrophe. ![]() Welles’ daughter Beatrice says that her father had intended to make a documentary about Hopper, so perhaps this was Orson’s ever-thrifty way of using one film’s budget to finance a dry run for another. Neither Welles nor Hannaford appears onscreen in Hopper/Welles, and the extent to which Welles maintains this performance off camera becomes staggering as the proceedings wear on and the lengths to which the views being expressed as a means of stimulating debate conform to Hannaford, considering that Welles was improvising as a character he himself was not playing in the film for which this footage was ostensibly shot. This footage was among the discoveries made in the recently completed efforts to release The Other Side of the Wind, which truly begs the question: what else is in there? It’s hard not to imagine Kane’s storage warehouse, but with mountains of reels containing similar ephemera shot on the “set” of The Other Side of the Wind over its multi-year gestation. If anybody ought to be credited as the author of this newly resurfaced footage, aside from Filip Jan Rymsza and Bob Murawski, who assembled it in the present, it might as well be Jake Hannaford, the character played on camera by John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind (2018), and off camera here by Welles. On the other hand, Hopper/Welles is dubiously not anywhere close to an actualized Orson Welles project. Lucid, articulate, and questioning what it means to undertake the godlike act of creating film, this is likely closer to Hopper as he was, not as the public wanted or needed him to be in order to satisfy the destiny promised by Easy Rider (1969). In as much as The American Dreamer has long been instrumental in solidifying the Hopper myth of the Taos-dwelling, gun-toting, orgy-hosting maniac whose lifestyle became an extended performance of the themes and characterizations of The Last Movie, the Hopper on camera in Hopper/Welles (and if there is a frame in which Hopper is not on camera, it’s only because his face is obscured by one of the countless slates that punctuate this morass of seemingly unedited footage) is the Hopper who would have been in on the joke of The American Dreamer. As well, Hopper riffs on one of his most profoundly ridiculous lines from The American Dreamer here: “I’m not queer, but I am a lesbian.” He also doubles down on that film’s schtick that he doesn’t read, further cementing the extent to which he is acting, writing, and essentially doing tried-and-true material in the fictionalized documentary. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller’s The American Dreamer (1971).Īn opening title card establishes “Los Angeles, November 1970,” though it’s unclear when exactly this was filmed in relation to Carson and Schiller’s film, as Hopper looks like he just stepped off its set, and engages in copious familiar pensive beard-stroking. ![]() As such, it stands in opposition to the scripted/performed L.M. On the one hand, the film is, in fact, 130 minutes of Dennis Hopper, operating in peak mysterious-sage-poet-cinematic-warlord fashion, captured roughly halfway between the production and release of his totemic masterpiece, The Last Movie (1971). ![]() Presented as a “new” documentary of which Orson Welles is the credited director, Hopper/Welles is at once less and more than whatever would accurately befit that pithy description. ![]()
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