The Last Movie

The Last Movie is a 1971 American metafictional drama film directed by and starring Dennis Hopper. It was written by Stewart Stern, based on a story by Hopper and Stern, and features an extensive supporting cast including Stella Garcia, Don Gordon, Peter Fonda, Sam Fuller, Kris Kristofferson (in his film debut), Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and Tomas Milian. The plot follows a disenfranchised stuntman (Hopper), who begins a filmmaking-centric cargo cult among Peruvian natives after going into self-imposed exile.

Greenlit after the success of Hopper's previous film Easy Rider, Universal Pictures gave the director/star complete creative control over the project, which was budgeted at $1 million and was shot in Peru. Hopper only loosely followed the script by Stern, filming hours upon hours of footage built around friends whom he invited to the set, including his frequent collaborators Fonda and Basil. The film's elongated post-production came from Hopper's constant editing and re-editing of the film while suffering from the effects of his drug habit, leading to allegations of self-sabotage and missing the film's initial deadline to deliver a final cut by nearly six months.

Despite high expectations, including a well-received screening at the 1971 Venice International Film Festival, the film was a critical and financial disaster. Dissatisfied with the finished product, Universal Pictures gave the film a staggered, limited release under multiple alternative titles. Its poor reception led to Hopper's self-imposed exile from Hollywood for several years, barely starring in any film until Francis Ford Coppola hired him for Apocalypse Now (1979), not directing another film until Out of the Blue (1980), and never writing another film again. In the decades since its release, it has undergone a critical reappraisal and has become a cult classic.

Kansas is a stunt coordinator in charge of horses on a western being shot in a small Peruvian village. Following a tragic incident on the set where an actor is killed while doing a stunt, he decides to quit the movie business and stay in Peru with a local woman. He thinks he has found paradise, but is soon called in to help in a bizarre incident: the Peruvian natives are "filming" their own movie with "cameras" made of sticks, and acting out real western movie violence, as they do not understand movie fakery.

The film touches on the ideas of fiction versus reality, especially in regards to cinema. The movie is presented in a way that challenges the viewer's traditional cinematic understanding of storytelling, by presenting the story in a non-chronological fashion, and by including several devices typically only seen behind the scenes of film-making (rough edits and "scene missing" cards), and the use of jarring jump cuts.

Hopper later said he got the idea for the film when making The Sons of Katie Elder in Mexico. He says he came up with the story and got Stewart Stern to write the script; Stern had written Rebel Without a Cause, in which Hopper played a small role. Hopper said, "I had time to fantasize as to what would happen when we left this village, leaving behind all the movie set fronts built on their existing adobe houses and church. ... I wanted to use film as film; I wanted to keep saying, you're really just watching a movie."

Hopper tried for several years to secure financing for the film, intending it to be his directorial debut.

In July 1966 The New York Times reported that record producer Phil Spector would help make the movie with Hopper. "It will be an art movie," said Spector. "I am an admirer of Truffaut, Stanley Kubrick, Fellini. It'll be in that tradition. Hollywood needs that kind of movie." Filming was to start in Mexico on 15 September with Haskell Wexler doing cinematography.