Dennis Hopper's House :

:My Experience with “The Last Film Festival”, the final film of Dennis Hopper, and my tour of the late great auteur’s mythic compound: (((Goes without saying but a very special thanks to director Linda Yellen.)))

                                                                     

         

                                                                    By 

                                                        Daniel Louis Krone 

Dennis Hopper is without a doubt a cinema legend. 

My two favorite performances from the prolific actor are his role in “Apocalypse Now” as the American photographer trapped in a tribal village during the Vietnam conflict and my other favorite performance is Hopper’s larger than life role as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s classic film “Blue Velvet”. Both performances are drastically different and to me showcase the actor’s tremendous range. One thing about Hopper as an actor and a storyteller is he really relished in going there and pushing cinema to the limits as far as he possibly could in both performance and narrative. 

My introduction to Dennis’s final film happened immediately after my three and a half year journey as a production assistant on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”. A friend of mine, whom I will leave out of this essay, called me up and said that one of her boss’s friends, a producer, was looking for a personal assistant for a week. I said yes and the woman I met was director, writer, and producer Linda Yellen whom among several other projects was working on finishing “The Last Film Festival” which was to be the last film of beloved actor Dennis Hopper. 

Despite what you may already have heard about Dennis and his reputation as a wild psychonaut, who might be in good company with the likes of Hunter Thompson or Oliver Reed, from what I’ve heard from people that worked with him later in life was that he was a surprisingly gentle, sweet, kind, and jovial man. He seemed from stories, I’ve heard, just the kind of man that deeply enjoyed and relished the nuances of what it means to be alive. And men like that can get a little wild from time to time in my experience.

Let us get one thing strait. Dennis Hopper re-invented cinema. You might think Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, or even men like Louis B. Mayer invented Hollywood, and you might be right, but Dennis re-invented Hollywood and gave birth to the golden age of independent cinema that took place during the 1970’s.

In 1969 Dennis Hopper embarked on a journey with Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson and made “Easy Rider”. There are two ways to look at cinema, in my opinion, everything before “Easy Rider” and everything after “Easy Rider”. Wether or not you like the film has absolutely nothing to do with the impact that film had on cinema as an art form. “Easy Rider” proved unequivocally to old school Hollywood producers that there was defiantly more than just the studio way of making films. I am not saying there weren’t great independent films throughout cinema history but at this point in time, before “Easy Rider” came out, American cinema was dominated by the studio system and this film is the one that brought the whole dam down and allowed the flood of fresh independent visions to emerge in the 1970’s. 

Dennis Hopper has 203 credits on the Internet Movie Database for acting along. He was nominated twice for an Academy Award. The first time he was nominated was for writing “Easy Rider” and the second was for his performance in the movie “Hoosiers”. Along with that Dennis had another 23 award wins and 11 other nominations for awards throughout his 55 year career in cinema in which he started out as a ‘goon’ on the film “Rebel Without a Cause”. 

I got the pleasure of touring his house via “The Last Film Festival” Kickstarter campaign. The film had been in a kind of post production hell for nearly 5 years since they wrapped principal photography and when the Kickstarter campaign finished Linda finally had the money to complete her film. It had been a pleasure helping her achieve her goal and because of it soon the world will have the chance to see the final film of a truly great talent. 

Dennis Hopper’s house is less of a house and more of a compound. When I first walked in my gut reaction was essentially, ‘well this is unimpressive’, because I guess I’d assumed the first room would be something wild and crazy but I was actually just waiting in a kitchen for others to arrive to take the tour. However as the tour progressed I became more and more impressed with Hopper’s compound and its eccentricities. 

As I took the tour his compound got stranger and stranger and more unique to me. It has an almost mythic quality to it like anyone who has ever seen Harlan Ellison’s house or been to the Playboy Mansion. There was just a strange quality to the entire estate. During the first part of the tour as I walked up the stairs in his first house it immediately became stranger. There were large wooden beams sticking out of the walls into a beautiful open air lounge area. As we continued the tour the tour guide explained that the ‘house’ was actually three different houses that formed like a compound and despite that one of the houses was clearly bigger Dennis used them all equally.  

There was something inherently modern and semi neo-brutalist about the design but with a somewhat more rustic and do it yourself quality about the estate that pulled it into the territory of strange that seemed to make a perfect fit with the late great artist. There was a kitchen ceiling fixture held together by rusted clamps that seemed to have been there for years. He had industrial ac units (designed for studios and warehouses) in his home, glass floors that you could peer down into the garage from, industrial wiring on gates, chain link fences on windows, the main house’s roof was a strange surreal dome and the entire compound is draped in sheet metal. We were told that was for the gangs and their stray bullets who would shoot up Venice back in the day.  Despite having a 3 house compound with a pool, hot tub, and croquet course the house still felt homemade like the dream of a grown man, an artist, who never lost his sense of playfulness. 

After about an hour and a half tour of explaining the history of when Dennis bought the estate I mostly left, not with the facts in my head, but marveling at the since of awe the compound left me with and I took away one very unique thought. This is the kind of house an artist lived in. This is the kind of house someone who changed the entire shape of cinema lived in. This house wasn’t obviously predictable in the way that most rich people’s houses are. This house was just as unique as the individual who made it his own. There was a definitely link to the wild unhinged free spirit as Dennis was to the wild unhinged architecture that made up his home. Touring Dennis Hopper’s compound and helping Linda complete “The Last Film Festival” was a wonderful experience I won’t forget anytime soon. (CLICK THE PHOTOS FOR A BETTER VIEW OF THE SPACE.)