Hollywood Hellraisers (39 page)

It was back to movies and one of Jack’s wildest roles in
The Witches of Eastwick
(1987), based on John Updike’s novel about three women in a sleepy town seduced by the devil himself. Really there was only one candidate for the role, since he’d been practising for it his whole life. But it was too obvious a casting choice for director George Miller, who looked at other actors until realising he was crazy not to go with Jack. When they finally met, Jack’s first words to Miller were, ‘What kept you?’

Jack approached the role with deadly seriousness, reading numerous heavy tomes on medieval witchcraft. He told Anjelica that he wanted audiences to believe that he was indeed the devil incarnate. The quietly suffering Anjelica couldn’t miss this open goal, assuring him that such a feat wouldn’t be too difficult, research or not.

At first Miller approached Jack with trepidation. ‘I thought he was a crazy man, that public persona, and that I was walking into the most difficult situation, and it was like falling down an elevator shaft into a pool of mermaids, he was completely the opposite of my expectation.’ At an early meeting Jack said to Miller, ‘You’re paying me a lot of money, and what you’re getting is not an actor but a filmmaker.’ Time and time again Jack proved to be absolutely right. ‘And he did everything he possibly could to make the best possible film,’ said Miller.

And
Witches
needed a solid rock at its centre as too often it threatened to veer completely out of control. ‘We had somewhat dysfunctional producers in Peter Guber and Jon Peters,’ says Miller. ‘And I still don’t know why, but it was all pretty crazy. I remember one weekend
Aliens
had just come out and was a huge hit and suddenly Peters was saying, “Let’s have a horror movie scene like the alien.” And then the next weekend, whatever was number one at the box office, he’d want some of that. There was no logic to it, it was like a kid in a candy shop not knowing which candy to take.’

The film had all the pathologies of Hollywood and Miller actually quit twice. ‘The only reason I stayed was because of Jack, and he coached me through the film because I’d never really worked in Hollywood before.’ Miller had come to prominence in his native Australia with the
Mad Max
movies but
Witches
was his first American movie, and he admits now to not really knowing the score. In early budget meetings he tried to be helpful, save the producers a little money by saying he didn’t really need a trailer. A nice gesture, you’d think, but in the Hollywood-speak of that time it signalled, ‘This dumbass is negotiable on everything.’ So when Miller wanted three camera crews on a particular day, he only got the one. If he needed 200 extras, half that many would turn up. It was Jack who said, ‘George, your politeness is your weakness, you’ve got to make them think you’re a little crazy.’ Miller suddenly realised that not only were you punished for good behaviour but you got rewarded for bad behaviour. ‘So if I didn’t get my third camera I just walked off the set and suddenly, with Jack’s coaching, I found myself enjoying the bad behaviour. Jack had seen all this stuff before and was endorsing it. He told me, “Just walk off the set when the producers arrive.” And I did, and they never came on the set again. Jack knew all the tricks.’

The friction on the set deeply affected Jack’s co-stars, a trio of remarkable women, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Susan Sarandon. They were brought close to tears sometimes, and there were reports of them trying some amateur witchcraft of their own to inflict a nasty dose of herpes on the producers. Again it was Jack who provided the comfort zone, a shoulder to cry on. And a professional aide, able to adapt his performance to the requirements of each actress. Sarandon, for example, was best on the third or fourth take, Pfeiffer on the first. He’d even turn up on his days off to read lines to the girls behind the camera.

Things were a little different with Cher. ‘She was very nervous,’ recalls Miller. ‘She hadn’t done much [acting] and was used to being a diva but here she was in an ensemble piece. Jack had this one long speech with her and every time the take was blown by Cher. We got to about take nine and everyone on the crew was grinding their teeth saying, look, Jack’s doing all the running and then you blow it. But Jack didn’t get angry at all, he was very kind and encouraging towards her. On the take we ended up using, there is one moment where she had to move into her light, and not only is Jack saying the dialogue and carrying the weight of the whole scene, he puts his hand on Cher’s shoulders and turns her body into the light. As part of the character he found a way to get her through it, and I thought, fuck, this guy’s a total master. He’s a master technician.’

On another occasion, early in the shoot, the crew were rigging lights on one of the big sets, banging and clattering, shouting instructions and making a terrible racket. ‘Suddenly Jack walks to the very centre of the room with his script and throws it down on the floor,’ Miller recalls. ‘And this slam echoes all over the place and everyone just froze and went silent. And then he stormed out again. As he passed me he winked. I thought, what the fuck’s going on? I went into his trailer and he said, “George, don’t ask me to do your work for you.” And I realised he needed the quiet to concentrate, and that was his way of telling me.’ After that the crew conducted their work in, shall we say, a more serene manner.

Witches
was a big hit for Jack but his performance, grandiose and operatic, was criticised in some quarters. There were accusations of overacting. Not so, says Miller. ‘Working with Jack was like dialling the volume on an amplifier, you started on one and then you could go up to two and three and four. So we’d start on take one and he’d do a performance which was nothing too flamboyant, pretty naturalistic, and then we’d just ramp it up, and it often got to about take eight or nine and then he hit the sweet spot. And then the next take it just went too far. It was like calibrated. It was an amazing thing to watch. It takes a lot of creative courage to get big.’

Justice and law are distant cousins, and here in South Africa they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.

As rumours circulated that Marlon Brando planned a screen comeback after almost a decade away, people were asking just where the hell had he been and what had he been doing with his time off, apart from eating lard sandwiches. Such questions always irked the Great One, as if the rest of his life was spent taking time out. The simple fact was making movies was time out for him, it was the rest of his life that was real. ‘I’m not an actor and haven’t been for years,’ he said. ‘I’m a human being who occasionally acts.’

The film that tempted Marlon out of his creative idleness was an anti-apartheid drama called
A Dry White Season
(1989). And to prove wrong those critics who claimed he was only returning for the money, Brando donated his hefty salary to an anti-apartheid charity, a gesture that also served to show the world his commitment to toppling South Africa’s evil regime.

Inevitably Brando’s return to movies made headlines. What wasn’t known was that on his first day on the set he was too nervous to leave his dressing room. Despite all that bravado, the image, Marlon was essentially a deeply vulnerable individual. As he once admitted: ‘I put on an act sometimes, and people think I’m insensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armour because I’m too sensitive.’

On set co-stars Susan Sarandon and Donald Sutherland and the crew all waited for Marlon to appear. The director Euzhan Palcy – the first black woman to direct a major Hollywood film – went to see him. ‘OK, darling,’ assured Marlon. ‘I’m coming.’ Another twenty minutes went by, no show. An assistant went to see him this time. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m coming.’ Still no Marlon. Euzhan went back, sat down next to Marlon and they just talked. She couldn’t believe Marlon could be so apprehensive; after all he was a genius, wasn’t he? ‘But he was first of all a human being. And this guy hadn’t worked for years, and he knew that all these actors were there waiting to see the master, the myth. And he needed to wait a little bit to overcome his apprehensions.’

It was a nice little performance, an extended cameo really, but the Academy felt it warranted an Oscar nomination. Despite the plaudits, his considerable girth still bothered him more than he let on. Karl Malden went to see the picture and felt compelled to write to his old friend telling him: ‘I don’t care if you are 500 pounds or 50 pounds. You are a fucking genius.’

You don’t wanna get laid, man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you gotta talk to ’em.

With films like
Blue Velvet
and
Hoosiers
in the can, Dennis Hopper’s remarkable transition from train-wreck personality to respected actor was complete. He decided to leave Taos and move back to Hollywood after his doctor suggested it might be best if he left his Mexican hideaway and came back to reality. ‘Reality? In LA?’ scoffed Dennis. He didn’t quite walk back into the lion’s den. He hated Los Angeles so, recalling fond memories of listening to beat poets and cool jazz in the late fifties at Venice Beach, bought a property there instead. Situated to the west of LA, Venice is home to a thriving artistic community, so suited Dennis perfectly. The fact it was also a war zone didn’t seem to faze him. The place boasted something of a schizophrenic personality: funky boutiques and smart restaurants jostled for space with burned-out cars and driveby shootings. ‘It’s a low-income place you can actually walk round,’ said Dennis. ‘If you don’t mind being mugged.’

Paranoia has always been one of the great themes of Dennis’s life and it was no surprise to anyone that his house was Paranoia Central, a modernistic fortress, a bunker rather than a home with its corrugated steel façade, no windows, heavy-duty entrance door studded with bolts and surrounding 15-foot fencing topped with razor wire. Even the patio sported a steel mesh roof in case a wandering gang member attempted to lob a grenade in from the street. Don’t expect either anything as straightforward as a doorbell; instead visitors had to punch in a special code and wait to be escorted within.

Gray Frederickson, who’d worked with Dennis on
Apocalypse Now
, recalls visiting the Venice house. ‘Dennis lives in a gated, guarded, almost prison-like compound right in the gang area of Venice, and I remember he walked me out to the car and I started up a conversation and he said, “You better get in the car and go, this is not a good place for us to be standing.” I said, “Why do you live in a place like this, Dennis?”’ Because he revelled in it, he loved to reel off the latest crime statistics to visiting journalists. ‘On my corner there’s seven people killed on average every two weeks,’ he told a reporter in the early nineties.

By the 2000s the area had calmed down a bit, only to be blighted by yet another gang war. Again, Dennis was on hand with the statistics, this time to the
Sunday Telegraph
: ‘On my corner seventeen people were killed and seventy wounded during a three-month period in a Mexican-black drug war,’ adding for good measure, ‘And they shot the neighbourhood watch person a couple of blocks away, shot him sixteen times.’

Remarkably, not only did Dennis feel safe in the area, he’d never experienced any trouble. Maybe the muggers and gang bangers were too afraid of him. Walking home one day, he overheard a couple of locals say, ‘Don’t go in there, man. It’s that crazy person lives in there. Any person that chooses to live in a prison is a crazy person.’ But he was always on guard, ever aware of what suddenly might happen, like stumbling innocently upon a drug deal going down on some otherwise deserted stretch of pavement. ‘That would definitely constitute adios, Dennis, and that would be a fucking shame.’

A prison it may look like externally, but inside the place resembled more a piece of industrial art. Incredibly, in the living room, like in a Bond villain’s lair, there is a steel wall that rises up to allow Dennis to drive in and park his car – inside the house! There’s also a studio for his own painting and photography, which he’d recently taken up again. Then, on the walls, a stunning collection of contemporary American art – Warhol, Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, several million dollars’ worth of prime museum fodder housed in one of the highest-crime areas in the USA. Only Dennis. ‘That house is very much a reflection of who he is,’ says filmmaker George Hickenlooper. ‘It stands for the post
-Apocalypse Now
Dennis, the Dennis who became much more serious about being sober, became more serious about finance and more conservative. There’s an iconoclastic aesthetic to the house too; it looks different than any other house in the neighbourhood.’

Rehabilitated, Dennis ironically was emerging as a hero to a whole new generation of disaffected actors such as Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke. They sought his advice and knowledge, held him up as this iconic figurehead of chaos and rebellion, someone who’d strayed pretty substantially from the path most of us trod, done his own thing, survived and returned to tell the tale.

Sean Penn, Hollywood’s current badass, had a script about cops fighting gangs in Chicago and wanted Dennis to direct. ‘I read it and told him it was the worst piece of shit I’d ever laid eyes on.’ There was no bite, said Dennis, no relevance to what was happening on the streets today. Dennis wanted to relocate the story to LA, where he knew the gang situation was out of control. ‘Are there gangs in LA?’ one studio executive asked Dennis at a script meeting. Looking incredulous, Hopper replied, ‘Jesus, there are gangs in my alley!’

It was an amazing turnaround, Dennis directing a mainstream Hollywood movie after years of Hollywood refusing to even give him a shot at directing traffic. ‘As everyone knows Dennis was slightly an erratic character,’ says producer Robert H. Solo. ‘It was like pulling teeth really dealing with him, though he kept making a big deal about the fact that he was now clean, that he wasn’t drinking or smoking or taking drugs, because the studio was afraid to hire him. They only agreed because they loved Sean Penn and wanted Sean to do the movie. And because he wanted Dennis Hopper, he got Dennis Hopper.’ Now he had a chance to prove himself a better director clean than he was off his face. ‘And to be honest once we got going, Dennis was ok, he did a good job,’ admits Solo. ‘And was on his very, very best behaviour.’ No, Dennis wasn’t the problem on
Colors
(1988), his star was: Sean Penn. Dennis genuinely feared that Penn might end up in prison before the film was finished, such was his reputation and tendency to violence. During a break in filming an extra took a photograph of Penn, who ran towards him and knocked the camera out of his hand yelling, ‘You bastard. Don’t take any pictures of me between takes!’ and then punched him in the face. Somehow Dennis guided Penn through the film and they ended up close friends. Penn would name one of his sons after him, Hopper Jack, a tribute to both Dennis and Jack.