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‘Hopper/Welles’ review: ‘I, Hannaford’ vs. Mr.

‘Easy Rider’ Era
September 21, 2020
By JOSEPH McBRIDE

“Man — is this the lighting?” Dennis Hopper asked, looking at the

kerosene hurricane lamps when he arrived at Orson Welles’s
house in Los Angeles to begin shooting an interview in
November 1970. “Yeah,” said Welles. “That’s cool, man,” Hopper replied. Cinematographer Gary
Graver’s strikingly high-contrast lighting in black-and-white for some of the faux cinéma-vérité
scenes in The Other Side of the Wind is among the most daringly avant-garde aspects of that film,
which was finally completed and released in 2018. Hopper turned out to have only brief cameo
appearances in Other Wind, culled from this long interview session, but now out of the ninety-six
hours of footage shot for the main feature has surfaced another feature-length film, a
documentary of Welles conversationally jousting with Hopper. Here we are figuratively sitting
alongside the (unseen) former wunderkind of Citizen Kane as he explores filmmaking and politics
while he goads the briefly hot new actor-director of that period and often shows frustration.
Hopper, seriously outclassed intellectually, bobs and weaves and spins his characteristically
woolly but occasionally insightful reflections. Hopper/Welles, on a deeper level, is about the
veteran filmmaker confronting the New Hollywood he mostly despised, while engaged in a
generally friendly but sometimes exasperating mano-a-mano with the media-designated exemplar
of what we now call “The Easy Rider Era.”

Hopper proves to be demonstrably uncomfortable with his role as the artistic leader of the New

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Hollywood even as Welles tries to get him to admit to that status for the sake of the interview.
Either Hopper was self-aware to realize that role was hooey — his own take on his 1969
directorial debut, Easy Rider, was diametrically opposed to that of his young audience — or he was
so insecure he knew his eminence was ephemeral as well as largely unmerited. That indeed was
the case, since Hopper was then in the midst of the ruinous year-long editing process on The Last
Movie. That pretentious mess of a film about filmmaking, barely released in August 1971 by the
horrified suits at Universal who misguidedly bankrolled it, has some common ground with The
Other Side of the Wind in its apocalyptic view of the industry and its interest in the American
countercultural scene. Although they approach their subject matter from far different angles, both
are stylistically adventurous studies of Hollywood filmmaking in terminal decay during the
collapse of the studio system and the uncertain interregnum of the new young directors. But
Welles’s film, unlike Hopper’s, is coherent, multilayered, and rich thematically as well as in its
elaborately fragmented style.

Although some of the young directors of that period, such as Francis Coppola and Steven
Spielberg, would go on to long and distinguished careers, many others had a brief shot at success
before flaming out. Welles’s Look article “But Where Are We Going?,” published in the same month
he filmed his interview with Hopper, shows how deeply skeptical and even scornful Welles was of
the idea that the younger filmmakers represented a genuine revolution in filmmaking and how
critical he was of the contemporary trend to lionize directors, whatever their level of experience
or skill. He wrote, “In place of the old movie star, there towers over us now another sacred
monster: the Great Director. . . . Just at this modish moment, everybody under 30 — and his idiot
brother — wants to be a film director. And why not? Let it be whispered that film directing (the
very job itself) is often grossly overrated. . . . Such a man can, as we have seen, wing his way
through 50 years of film directing and never be found out.” (He told me the same earlier; I think
he was referring to Mervyn LeRoy but wouldn’t admit it.) Welles also wrote that “it does
sometimes seem as though the Duce’s balcony has risen again from the ashes in the form of a
camera crane.”

That essay was surprising to me at the time, because it seemed counterintuitive to the pro-forma
hopeful words he wrote at the end about the youth movement in Hollywood. But when I met
Welles that August just before we began shooting Other Wind, in which I play a film historian
named Mister Pister, Welles spent fully half an hour railing against a film made by a fellow of the
American Film Institute, which he described as the worst film he had ever seen. I was baffled by
such ungracious and rather absurd overkill and by Welles seeming to feel threatened by the work
of an apprentice filmmaker (and that fellow would go on to a long, if not particularly successful,
directing career). But it took me years and the experience of acting in Other Wind to understand
how deeply the essay revealed Welles’s anger over being excluded from that “scene” (“You know,
the scene,” as Norman Foster’s Billy puts it), a situation that only enhanced his understandable
bitterness toward Hollywood.

While tyros were being given a million or two to make some incoherent farrago that barely
escaped into the marketplace, if at all, before disappearing into oblivion, Welles couldn’t get

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studio financing for any of his projects (even if he had really wanted to work in the studios again,
which was doubtful). He couldn’t get a job as a director precisely because he did have a long track
record with the studios. His was a notoriously bumpy record at the boxoffice and in combat with
the “suits,” despite his great critical reputation. Most of the younger executives and filmmakers
who professed to revere Welles didn’t step up to support him, with a few honorable exceptions
who tried unsuccessfully, such as John Calley of Warner Bros., Bert Schneider of BBS, and Peter
Bogdanovich, who had a producing deal with Paramount in the early seventies. But Welles
preferred to make Other Wind as a sort of home movie, with his and Oja Kodar’s money, and
eventually and problematically, with additional funding from Iran.

Beatrice Welles recently revealed to Wellesnet’s Ray Kelly that her father had a dual purpose in
mind with the Hopper interview, as he often did. In addition to mining it for cameo material for
Other Wind, he was intensely curious about the mercurial young actor-director whose Easy Rider,
unlike Kane, had been a boxoffice sensation. Welles wanted to craft a feature-length documentary
about Hopper, which he never completed. But the interview footage he shot for it has now been
turned into a stand-alone feature documentary by Other Wind producer Filip Jan Rymsza and
editor Bob Murawski. Also the co-producer of this documentary, Murawski in kind deference to
Welles bills himself as “cutter,” since Welles, who regarded editing as the most important stage of
filmmaking, insisted on being his own hands-on editor and resented his helpers taking that title.
The interview at Welles’s house took two and a half hours and was shot with two handheld
cameras, one by cinematographer Graver and the other by John Willheim. That gave Murawski five
hours of material from which to carve out this 131-minute film, so most of their talk remains
intact.

Murawski preserves the meta nature of the evening by retaining rough interludes of the camera
operators and the rest of the small crew moving around Hopper to set up angles and mark slates
and Welles conferring and joshing with his crew and star. The cutter also keeps in the often
protracted and sometimes uneasy pauses in Hopper’s responses to Welles, parts most editors
would have omitted. This style — and the deliberately shaky, fishing approach of one camera,
while the other remains more steady, part of Other Wind’s strategy of spoofing cinéma-vérité —
won’t be appealing to all viewers, and some will simply find it indulgent. And the audience for
this curio is mostly limited to Welles and Hopper aficionados and students of Hollywood history.
But I enjoyed the intimate feeling of being there with these two filmmakers as they parried their
thoughts and feelings and was grateful for Murawski’s refusal to make the film seem more
conventional. Some of Welles’s dialogue is obscured by overlapping, but his films always use
overlapping dialogue, and I could follow almost all of the sound easily.

The visual focus is resolutely on Hopper, with the camera often probing his handsome, bearded
face as he scratches it compulsively in extreme closeups. Wearing his trademark black cowboy hat
with a blue-jean jacket, Hopper, visiting from his Taos hideaway, is drinking gin and tonic (we hear
Welles reminding one of his crew, “You’re supposed to ply him with liquor”) and scarfing a pasta
dinner while Welles, on a diet and off the sauce, sips Fresca off-camera. Sitting at the drink-laden
table with Hopper are the mostly silent Janice Pennington, a Playboy Playmate who had a minor

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role in Other Wind that didn’t make it to the

screen, and her then-husband, Glenn
Jacobson, a loyal member of Welles’s crew
who says nothing in this film. I found Janice
extraordinarily kind as she consoled me
(along with documentarian Joan Churchill)
when Welles berated me for showing up in
1971 with the wrong costume and costing
him a day’s shooting; Glenn was always a
good sport and foil for Welles and to this day
tells some of the funniest Other Wind stories
(read Josh Karp’s book on the film for the
classic one about the fish). Since the setting is
the birthday party at the ranch home of Jake
Hannaford (John Huston, who in 1970 had not
yet been cast), these two other characters are
mostly scenery, which is a missed opportunity.
We also catch fleeting glimpses of Schneider,
who suggested to Welles that he ask Hopper
why he and the Fonda clan evidently hated
each other. Hopper’s antipathy to them is
intense, but students of Hopper’s checkered
career can better chart the feuding that
The Tony Stella designed poster for Hopper/Welles
caused those internecine rivalries and made
him put down Jane Fonda’s claim to be a genuine revolutionary.

The aspect of Hopper/Welles that is bound to cause confusion among some reviewers and ordinary
viewers who don’t know Welles’s work well or aren’t familiar with the shooting of Other Wind is
that most of the time in the documentary, Welles is sitting in for Hannaford. He told me that
August that he hadn’t decided whom he would cast in the role of the aging macho director trying
to make a comeback in the New Hollywood, but that it would be “either John Huston or Peter
O’Toole doing his imitation of John Huston.” Since he didn’t settle on Huston (the perfect casting
for the legendary, gruff old cynic) until early 1974, we had to play scenes to Welles off-camera as
Jake, as Hopper does here (you can tell at one point that Welles is thinking about Huston, because
he addresses Hopper as “Kid,” Huston’s favorite all-purpose greeting). Sometimes Hopper
addresses him as Jake and makes teasing comments about him, but sometimes he seems baffled
whether he is speaking to Jake or Orson, as some viewers will be too. The danger in this approach
is confusing Hannaford’s often reactionary, fascist, and racist views with Welles’s own. If you think
viewers can sort out this complexity on their own, you’re mostly mistaken, since numerous
reviewers of Other Wind were confused by Hannaford’s blatant sexism, assuming Welles shares his
views, even though the film is, as Welles told his longtime associate Richard Wilson on the set,
“an attack on machoism.”

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A title card at the beginning of Hopper/Welles is only partially helpful: “Welles filmed their
conversation for The Other Side of the Wind, occasionally assuming the role of the main character,
director Jake Hannaford.” I would have put it that Welles is “usually assuming” the role of
Hannaford. My notes indicate that Welles is being Jake perhaps two-thirds of the time. Welles
sometimes slips into his own persona (once firmly correcting Hopper that he is speaking as
himself in discussing the Hollywood blacklist, a fraught topic for the formerly blacklisted Welles),
and sometimes the dividing line is not clear. That is nothing new for Welles, since he always
maintains an ambiguous relationship with his protagonists, one of the finest features of his work,
which, as François Truffaut put it, examines “the angel within the beast, the heart in the monster,
the secret of the tyrant. . . . The weakness of the strong, this is the subject that all of Orson
Welles’ films have in common.”

Welles expressed his ambivalence toward the strong-but-weak Hannaford by telling Bogdanovich
about Other Wind, “It’s about the whole macho thing that I’m so fed up with, although I love it. I
love [John] Ford, and I think it’s a lot of shit that he punched [Henry] Fonda, and I love [Ernest]
Hemingway [the principal model for Jake], and all that shit. . . . I love this man, and I hate him, and
that’s what I think is so great about this story.” As writer-director Walter Hill remarks in
Bogdanovich’s documentary Directed by John Ford, “Ambiguity is the home of the artist, the great
artist.” Welles always approached films as an artist rather than as a polemicist, but his films are
deeply political, though not preachments; he said he did not like most postwar American drama
because it is so rhetorical, such as the plays of Arthur Miller.

With that in mind, it’s natural for Welles to spend much of his time with Hopper (supposedly the
antithesis of Jake as what Welles flatteringly calls “filmmaker, extraordinary leading actor, seminal
personality for a whole generation”) prodding his younger cinematic groundbreaker to discuss the
politics of his own films and the responsibility of the artist as a citizen involved in politics. Welles
was highly active in politics during his early years before exiling himself to Europe when the
blacklist era started in the fall of 1947. But he became less involved in public causes during his
period on the blacklist, evidently out of caution, and after his temporary return to the U.S. in the
1950s and when he came back for good in 1970. He kept his political views mostly for his work
and for interviews, though he was evasive about some of his positions to the press and is cryptic
about the blacklist even here. His films are so complex sociopolitically that they resist
oversimplifying, which causes problems in today’s simple-minded atmosphere.

So it’s somewhat surprising that Welles goads Hopper so insistently on why he won’t express his
political views on camera and why he tries to avoid taking public political stands. But this is
partly a ploy to create a fuss with Jake. Welles says twice, “I, Hannaford . . .,” and tells Hopper,
“Now I’m gonna be shitty and Hannaford-ish,” to which Hopper replies, “Jake, everybody knows
about you.” Welles-as-Jake pokes at Hopper’s reticence and tries to provoke him into making
colorful or outrageous statements. And Welles declares in his Welles-the-director persona, “I want
you to rage against something.” That would be in keeping with Hopper’s media-distorted persona
as a hippie filmmaking guru and would have given Welles choice material for interchanges in
Other Wind with Hannaford (with Jake to be filmed later in reverse angles that, as it happened,

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were never shot). But Hopper is mild-mannered and keeps resisting opportunities to be provoked,
while exhibiting a high degree of anxiety about being pinned down politically. Welles asks
without a facade, “That isn’t a copout?”

To some viewers Hopper may seem paranoid in talking about how he’s surrounded in the Taos
area with radicals making bombs and carrying guns and how the FBI and other federal agents
visit him regularly trying to get him to talk. But knowing of the repressive actions of J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI and the militant radical violence of that period (including the August 1970 University
of Wisconsin bombing, which I predicted to Welles, to his anger, two days before it happened, and
is discussed in this film), Hopper probably was not being paranoid but was genuinely fearful of
consequences. He worries about being put in jail for his political views and admits to buying his
first gun, a semi-automatic weapon (perhaps also influenced by the recent Manson murders), but
fails to rise to “Jake” talking fascist talk about revolution:

“I’m a fella that likes the kids because they are violent. I don’t like the kids because they’re kids. I
like the kids because they’ve got fights. Ten years ago they didn’t; I couldn’t stand them. Suddenly
in my old age I’m beginning to dig them a little bit, because they’re starting to make bombs, and
I’m an old-fashioned nihilist. I always hated the commies. Because I’m a non-organization man. I
hated the Kremlin, I hate Washington. So that’s where I stand. And I happened to be on the Franco
side of the war. . . . I think both sides were wrong. But I am now forever stamped as a fascist. I’m
not a fascist, because I like the spades very much. [Hopper laughs] Now you know who you’re
talking to. But none of these things interest you? They do an awful lot of people for whom you are
a spokesman.” Jake also asks Hopper at one point, “Are you making a bomb?” Here we see Jake’s
reactionary views of young long-hairs meshing with his cartoonish portrait of the young hippie-
ish radicals (Bob Random and Oja Kodar) in Other Wind’s film-within-a-film.

When Jake calls himself a “nihilist,” which Welles never was, and praises bomb-making, Hopper
remains mostly silent and evasive in the face of such provocations. When Jake mocks “all you
lefties,” Hopper does get off a funny response: ’You’re the first person’s called me a leftist since
John Wayne. [Welles guffaws] I was wearing a red shirt at a party and he comes up and said, ‘Gone
red, huh?’” Jake’s claim to have been a Franco supporter runs contrary to Welles’s own fervent
support for the Loyalists in the 1930s (and Michael O’Hara’s bragging in The Lady from Shanghai
about having killed “a Franco spy”), even if Welles later, and disconcertingly, moved to Franco’s
Spain. And Jake makes racist remarks, contrary to Welles’s lifelong egalitarianism. Jake not only
slurs Blacks as “spades” but after predicting there would be a Black president “pretty soon,” adds,
“Might be a good way to keep ’em in their ghettoes by having a Black president.” Although Hopper
says he hopes there will be a black president, he laughs uneasily at Jake’s line about “ghettoes”
and doesn’t offer anything in rebuttal, simply replying absently, “Might work.” With such an
inarticulate, vacant response he is letting down the director, the audience, and himself.

Sometimes, after Hopper pauses, grins, giggles, or makes verbal false starts that Murawski leaves
in for verisimilitude and to sustain the feeling of being there, Hopper does utter some revealing
responses, but most of what he says are platitudes or half-formed, often disconnected thoughts.

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He isn’t playing Jake’s game, or as an actor

isn’t up to faking it. “Jake,” he admits at one
point, “you’re a hard man to talk to.” Their
discussions about sex, a key aspect of Other
Wind, get a bit lively when Welles-as-Jake
says that for an elderly, impotent director
filming an orgy, “Your zoom is your only
prick.” That ties in with Jake’s suspect
machismo, implied impotence, and
voyeuristic filming of a protracted orgy
sequence. But Hopper’s own sexual views
tend toward impenetrability, such as when
he keeps calling himself a “lesbian” and
Dennis Hopper in a scene from the film Hopper/Welles. (Royal Road
admits how badly he wanted to sleep with
Entertainment)
his mother. Welles tries psychoanalyzing
him and gets him to open up somewhat, but seems at a loss to respond to such statements with
remarks of his own, despite the opportunities they offer to give voice to Jake’s kinkiness in
response. The results are mystifying and only would make sense (perhaps) to a Hopper
biographer.

Hopper is more lucid talking about his antipathy toward most directors who, he says, hate actors.
Welles, perhaps partly in his own persona and partly also as Jake, says, “They’re right. Actors aren’t
people — they’re a third sex. They are neither men nor women, it’s something else. And the
trouble is that there’s a little actor in every civilian. . . . I think directors are bound to both love
and hate actors. It’s like sex, isn’t it? Isn’t there sort of a parallel between a sexual relationship
and a relationship between a director with his cast? It’s courtship and conquest.” Then, more as
Jake, he says that actors “signed up for the trip, anybody that’s idiot enough to being an actor.”
Welles always said he loved actors and thought they are the most important people in a film, and
he behaved that way most of the time on the set of Other Wind. If he also hated us, he kept that
mostly hidden — other than when he bullied me for three years to keep my character in a state of
intimidation. Welles was a master at handling actors by (usually) gently but firmly drawing out the
best from them.

Hopper unfortunately doesn’t specifically mention the infamous blowup he had as an actor for the
notoriously irascible director Henry Hathaway that caused him to be blacklisted from the industry
as an actor for years. They could have had fun with that, since Welles told me that one day when
he acted for Hathaway in Morocco on The Black Rose (1950), they had three thousand Black extras,
none of whom, apparently, could speak English. One man spoke French, however, so Welles had to
translate Hathaway’s profane, screaming rants into polite French directions the man would then
translate into their North African language. Eventually, as the camera was about to roll, another
man holding a spear whom they hadn’t noticed walked from the far background right up to the
camera, looked Hathaway in the eye, and said, “Cocksucker.”

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Mostly in this film, however, Hopper and Welles are not comparing viewpoints very fruitfully or
colorfully but simply talking past each other. Welles seems to betray losing interest to some
extent after Hopper admits he rarely reads books and that he is “a very naive, primitive,
unsophisticated non-intellectual,” Welles’s tone starts getting testy, and for a while he seems to
abandon his Jake persona as the conversation drifts aimlessly. He and Hopper exist on two
different planes of reality, a weird problem for a film about a conversation; I found the same to be
true of Louis Malle’s overrated My Dinner with Andre (1981), in which Wallace Shawn is so much
more intelligent and cogent than the tiresome eccentric Andre Gregory but gets to talk less.
Welles’s disappointment with Hopper becomes increasingly palpable when he realizes he is not a
real radical and that he doesn’t even play one on the screen. So in his own Welles persona he
begins accusing Hopper of being politically naive “to the point of madness” and feeding into the
growing reactionary sentiment in the country by not having the courage to speak out about his
political views. Hopper repeatedly parries that he’s saving it for his films and that “I think I’m far
too much of a poet to be that [activist] person” — not an unreasonable answer, since Welles was
mostly doing the same at that stage — but Hopper admits that he expects his opportunities to
direct films would soon be taken away, one of the film’s numerous prophetic statements.

As this turning point in his life and career, which would go through many changes and upheavals
until his death in 2010, Hopper/Welles is occasionally revealing about its star. And as a
disillusioning interchange between Welles and the New Hollywood that confirmed his most
pessimistic views of the decline of American film and political culture, it is far more revealing.
Although both he and Hopper were pessimists, Hopper talks up survivalism as a solution to the
country’s inevitable collapse, a position Welles, a traditional New Deal liberal, clearly thinks is a
cop-out from working for social progress. Evidently speaking as himself, Welles asks, “That being
so, you still want to be silent?” When Hopper says at the end that he doesn’t think there’s ever
going to be a successful revolution in the U.S, Welles replies, “Revolutions aren’t made by masses,
they’re made by minorities. Middle-class, intellectual minorities . . . whoever can read, you know;
they aren’t made by television watchers.” That’s a direct slam at Hopper for saying he doesn’t read
much but gets almost all of his news from TV and, by extension, it’s a slam at the largely passive
American public (as we see Janice Pennington in a rare two-shot laughing in agreement with
Welles). Hopper’s basic shallowness and childish naivete limits the value of the film, and perhaps
in response, Welles does not always seem at the top of his game either. His journalistic
interviewing skills are shown to much better advantage in his 1955 British TV series Around the
World with Orson Welles and in Filming Othello (1978), when he discusses Shakespeare over lunch
with his old cronies Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards.

In those other films, Welles has the sense not to monopolize discussions, but his subjects are
more interesting than Hopper, so even though Welles tries hard to listen to Hopper at length, our
attention flags whenever Welles doesn’t speak. And Welles’s “Hannaford-ish” dialogue is still in
the nascent working stages here. The first time I received a full script for the film was in May
1971, when Welles called me back for extensive shooting in Los Angeles. The script evolved
somewhat over the years, but contrary to Welles’s original plan, little of it was improvised after we

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were given complete copies, although Huston was given considerable license to reshape his lines
(my role as the film historian Marvin Pister was mostly improvised before we shot each scene;
Welles let me work with him on my impertinent questions to Hannaford). In my script I have a key
scene inserted (the one in which I foolishly try to intervene to raise money for Jake’s movie) that
was written as late as February 1974.

Hopper/Welles is a rough sketch for dual purposes from the early days of filming Other Wind, a
glimpse of Welles panning for elusive gold, and it’s easy to see why he didn’t follow through with
his plan to use this highly uneven material for a full documentary on Hopper. Murawski culled a
few good bits from Hopper for Other Wind but left out many other fascinating exchanges,
including his comment that gets to the heart of Hannaford, “I think that that’s a very dangerous
area — the god, the god-director area. I’m still confused about the area of the magician as
director.” There is a good deal more of this in the documentary, with Welles opting for the director
as magician over the director as God or a god. “You know, it is fun to say ‘Let there be light,’ and
there is light. It’s part of the big kick; I suppose it’s why everybody wants to be a movie director
nowadays, because it’s the closest you can get to God. And I suspect that as being a bad thing in
all of us,” argues Welles, who says a director should be a poet and magician instead. But when
they get into actual religion as a topic, the conversation meanders, as it does at various other
points.

I saw Hopper do a Q&A session in the spring

of 1971 at the University of Wisconsin,
showing and discussing The Last Movie (which
I unfortunately had to sit through twice). He
was charming, as he often is here, and though
semi-articulate seemed remarkably well-
versed in the subject of art. Surprisingly, that
barely comes up here except in sketchy
discussions of the leftist painter Diego Rivera,
whom Welles-as-Jake affects not to respect
much, even though the Tim Robbins film
Cradle Will Rock draws cogent parallels
Orson Welles filmed Dennis Hopper in November 1970. (Gary
between Welles and Rivera (Jake also claims Graver photo)
he never heard of Bob Dylan). I offered my
edited transcript of the 1971 Hopper discussion to Sight and Sound, but they rejected it, an early
sign of the decline in critical interest that would soon drop him into oblivion. Later, after his long
and arduous process of becoming sober, he reemerged as a filmmaker and came out of the closet
as a Republican (although he claimed to have voted for Barack Obama in 2008).

Hopper always was a contradictory and somewhat confused figure, partly due to his drug use,
although he does not seem stoned in Hopper/Welles, despite what Graver told me, other than
being in his usual state of mellowness. But Hopper could be surprisingly, even bracingly lucid, as
he is when he objects to Jake caricaturing Easy Rider as a simple-minded battle between hippies

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and rednecks. Simple-minded though the film may be, Hopper points out that the two hippies on
their motorcycles, played by himself and Peter Fonda, are selling cocaine and are as corrupt as the
straight society that surrounds them (“I just wanted to say that I think that we are a country full of
outlaws”), although that does not justify their execution by rednecks at the end. I’ve been trying
since 1969 to make those points to people who mistake these two drug dealers as countercultural
heroes.

What’s next from the Welles closet? As I wrote in my 2006 book What Ever Happened to Orson
Welles;?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, “I proposed that another entire film could be
fashioned from the outtakes [of Other Wind] and added to the DVD: ninety minutes [all I thought
existed] of black-and-white footage of Welles (off-camera, sitting in for Hannaford) discussing the
then contemporary cinema scene with three young directors at the party, Paul Mazursky, Dennis
Hopper, and Henry Jaglom.” As Graver told me, “Orson had them all up to Lawlen Way and got
them drinking and smoking pot, got them stoned. . . . They had totally different views of
Hollywood, and Orson was just egging them on.” The footage I’ve seen of Mazursky arguing
vehemently with Jaglom — a savvy social satirist vs. a loudmouth wealthy poseur who claims to
be a revolutionary — is fascinating, funny, and more incisive about Hollywood and politics than
Hopper/Welles. In its entirety, the Mazursky/Jaglom footage shot by Welles runs about two hours.
Welles also shot about twenty minutes with Curtis Harrington, an erudite director and film buff. I
hope the material with the three other directors winds up with Hopper/Welles as extras in the
hoped-for Blu-ray edition. I’m also ready to provide my audiotape of thirty-minutes of Welles
directing an entire scene between me and Bogdanovich on the first day of shooting, another rare
glimpse of Welles at work that Murawski told me he’d like to synch up with the outtakes of those
six completed shots.

Now we can only hope that all this wealth of material — and the full version of the brilliant but
truncated car sex sequence — will emerge on home video as the blockbuster film event of the
year, whatever year that might be. In the meantime, kudos to all involved in Hopper/Welles for
giving us more bounty from the director’s seemingly endless closet of unfinished material. As I’ve
been saying for years, although Welles has been dead for a long time, his career is still thriving.

***

Joseph McBride spent more than five years playing film historian Mister Pister
in The Other Side of the Wind. He has written three books on Orson Welles. He
has received a Writers Guild of America Award, four other WGA nominations,
two Emmy Award nominations, and a Canadian Film Awards nomination. He is
a professor at San Francisco State University. His most recent book is Frankly:
Unmasking Frank Capra (2019).

__________

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Wellesnet is dedicated to the memory of Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985). Best
known for his stage productions of Voodoo Macbeth, Cradle Will Rock and Caesar; the radio
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