When Universal’s Lew Wasserman gave Dennis Hopper a million dollars to make The Last Movie, the mogul was hoping he’d have another youth-marketed, ‘counterculture’ hit on his hands, à la Easy Rider or The Graduate. Hopper had a different vision, though: this project, which he’d first conceived of years earlier, would be his magnum opus.

With his budget secured, Hopper brought a motley crew of writers, actors, friends, directors, artists, and musicians down to Peru for the shoot. Among them were Stewart Stern (who had written Rebel Without a Cause), Peter Fonda, Dean Stockwell, Samuel Fuller, and Kris Kristofferson. The crew landed in a small village, where they took enormous quantities of drugs, had orgies, and in between shot the film.

When Hopper returned to Taos, New Mexico to edit the film, he was of several minds on what his film would become. With miles of footage, assembling the picture proved tricky. One legend has it that his friend Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean surrealist director (whose El Topo became a cult sensation the year before), convinced him to scrap his linear version and to re-cut the film in a disjointed, experimental way. The end product is self-reflexive and personal, as much about the artifice of filmmaking as it is about a stuntman-cowboy named Kansas (Hopper) trying to find authentic meaning in life.

When all was said and done, Wasserman hated the picture and shelved it for decades. Hopper meanwhile felt he had realized his vision and considered it his magnum opus. If nothing else, The Last Movie is a pitch-perfect reflection of early 1970s American film, equal parts self-discovery, reinvention, and hallucination.

Drew Todd