Film

Dennis Hopper’s notorious follow-up to Easy Rider is a $1 million avant-garde freak-out, an unhinged product of the counterculture bankrolled by a major Hollywood studio. Evergreen published a first-hand report by L.M. Kit Carson from the film’s chaotic production in South America. “This has been the riskiest movie I've been around: actors lost for three days in the mountains, horses falling on people, a stuntman mutiny, schizophrenic love/hate treatment of the movie company by the military government and the Peru communists, rain stopping the filming almost every day—Hopper uses this insecurity,” Carson wrote. “He tricks actors by starting the camera after the scene and filming them when they think no one's looking; he interrupts their dialogue with sudden questions from behind the camera (I've seen him goad actors into punching each other bloody, into breaking their hands)—in all of this, he's driving spikes into ordinary moments to crack them, and get inside them to the dangerous, real, uncontrolled meat.”