‘Hopper/Welles’ producer Filip Jan Rymsza talks reviving another Orson Welles film:
https://www.screendaily.com/news/hopper ... 64.article
Following the success of his 1969 debut Easy Rider, Hopper was at work on The Last Movie, which was a resounding commercial failure when released in 1971 but soon achieved cult status.
“You see all the warning signs in terms of Hopper’s responses [to Welles’s questions] in terms of what is about to happen with The Last Movie,” says Rymsza.
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Review of the new film by Massimiliano Studer.
‘Hopper/Welles’: The New Hollywood Strikes Back:
https://www.wellesnet.com/hopper-welles ... od-review/
Hopper/Welles (2020) is a strange Wellesian object that is difficult to classify as always. Officially, in fact, it is a documentary-interview, but it is really much more...it begins as an interview, but turns almost immediately into a kind of Socratic dialogue between a young pupil and his mentor. If it was not a documentary it would almost seem like a psychoanalytic session.
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"American Dreamer", a 1971 documentary by Lawrence Schiller and Kit Carson about Hopper, filmed a couple of months after the Welles interview, when Hopper was struggling to finish the editing of "The Last Movie", his ill-fated 1971 followup to "Easy Rider", at his home in Taos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8hpYYhLJyc
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2018 Guardian review of "The Last Movie":
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/d ... nis-hopper
This year’s posthumous release of Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind may reignite interest in another misunderstood film of that period that Welles’ work very much resembles, and which may well have inspired it: Dennis Hopper’s fascinating, flawed, experimental The Last Movie from 1971, about the ritualistic voodoo of cinema, now on rerelease - featuring cameos by Samuel Fuller and Kris Kristofferson. After the smash-hit success of Easy Rider in 1969, awestruck Universal studio bosses agreed to give Hopper and his co-writer Stewart Stern (screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause) a million-dollar budget and an undertaking not to interfere with what they were doing. Hopper took their money, went to Peru and over a year filmed this audacious experimental picture about a movie shoot. Universal didn’t know what to do with it and it was hardly seen.
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2018 article by Josh Karp, author of "Orson Welles's Last Movie", that tells the full story of what happened to "The Last Movie".
Dennis Hopper's Mad Vision
The actor-director's follow-up to Easy Rider was going to change Hollywood. That is, if he could get the damn thing made.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/m ... is-hopper/
The most controversial artistic influence on The Last Movie, however, was Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director of the acid western El Topo,...Jodorowsky’s role in editing The Last Movie has long been the subject of debate. Some claim that the Chilean filmmaker watched a nearly complete version of the film and told Dennis that it was nothing more than a conventional Hollywood movie, encouraging him to strip out the narrative and put it back together like a Cubist painting. (Lawrence Schiller claims Jodorowsky “destroyed the film.”)
Jodorowsky, however, claims the opposite. In his version of the story, Hopper’s film was a mess when he arrived in Taos, and Jodorowsky personally spent several days re-editing the entire picture, giving it a clear narrative line and bringing the story to a deeply moving conclusion. The difference between his cut and Hopper’s, Jodorowsky explained to me via email, was “the difference between the vision of an artist who takes drugs all day and the vision of an artist who searches a profound truth in abstinence.”
It has been suggested that Jodorowsky’s version still exists somewhere, though it has never been found.
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Filmmaker Alex Cox discusses his 2011 documentary, "Scene Missing", about the making of Hopper's "The Last Movie":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54nmJIlGsEI
Alex Cox: "The film was unseeable for many years. Universal refused to distribute it, and Dennis had to struggle to get the rights back. Eventually, Universal split the film in two, and they made Dennis's version, and then the studio cut their own version, which is called "Chinchero", which has supposedly turned up on television from time to time."
"Scene Missing" is one of a plethora of extras on the recent Bluray release of "The Last Movie", the visual quality of which is very impressive.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Movie-Blu-r ... B07GVXDZLJ
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