Read Online Hopper by Tom Folsom - Free Book Online Page B

an unflappable six-gun line. “Dennis, get well soon.”

BLACKBALL
    I t felt like a biblical curse. Hopper was off to the California desert to play another goddamn twitchy bad guy in another B Western, Henry Hathaway’s From Hell to Texas by Twentieth Century Fox. Couldn’t Warner Bros. loan him out for something grander , as golden as MGM’s 1941 Western spectacular Billy the Kid ? So big that studio chief Louis B. Mayer had dramatic clouds and mesas painted on top of the film shot on location in Monument Valley, the ancient totemic sandstone buttes of mammoth proportions not quite monumental enough for Hollywood.
    Hot and dusty on a Texas prairie staged in the Sierra Nevada, Hopper’s son of a vengeful cattleman tried to get the jump on the gun-handy hero played by Don Murray, who retaliated with a spectacular one-handed diving rifle shot. Rodd Redwing, a Chickasaw Indian who worked in the movies, taught Don to never shoot at the head—the cardboard wad blank could easily take out an eye.
    â€œCut!” yelled Henry Hathaway, the last of the great hard-ass directors. “Don, you’re pointing the rifle at the woods !”
    â€œI was pointing at the body.”
    â€œOkay! Take two! Ahhrgh! Yeah, you were pointing at the woods !”
    As the sun beat down on Lone Pine, California, Hopper got ready to suffer Hathaway’s whip like Dean had under George Stevens, Giant ’s immovable freight train of a director whom budding star Warren Beatty nicknamed the Super Chief.
    â€œI may be working in a factory,” Jimmy told the Super Chief, believing his mechanized approach to acting was killing him. “But I’m not a machine. Do you realize I’m doing emotional memories? That I’m working with my senses—my sight, hearing, smell—”
POW!
    â€œCut! Ahhrgh! Don! I told you you’re pointing at—”
    â€œNo, Henry, I’m pointing at—”
    Hopper sauntered over, shot right between the eyes with a cardboard wad. Real blood trickled down his nose into his mouth. If only the bullets had been real, too.
    By the time Hopper moseyed onto his set, Hathaway had directed so many of these oaters and horse operas, he could practically direct this one while taking a shit in the outhouse. He knew the Western inside out, classic tales of good and evil, white man/redskin, simple as Cain and Abel. He’d directed Gary Cooper in The Virginian , for chrissakes. Coop never asked about motivations—“Well, why would my character do that ?” But this runty son-of-a-bitch contract player from Warner Bros. was bunging up the works, asking all sorts of damn fool questions that didn’t belong in a Western.
    â€œPlease don’t give me line readings,” insisted Hopper, pushing against Hathaway’s habit of feeding him every line—the way he wanted it.
    â€œI’m a Method actor ,” said Hopper. “I work with my ears, my sight, my head, and my smell.”
    Hathaway finally snapped. He’d been around since the dawn of time, when dinosaurs roamed Hollywood. He was a young upstart assistant director on Ben-Hur . The 1925 one. They didn’t have goddamn sound, let alone worry about smell .
    Cutting off Hopper, he stopped production to see if anyone could understand the goddamn kid mumbling lines into the floorboards— Aaaaayeeeeuh, hey man, aahduuh —like some Jimmy Dean. Hathaway asked his entire cast and crew, “Can you understand Jimmy? Can you understand Jimmy?”
    Someone piped up and said he couldn’t understand a single goddamn word the kid said the entire picture.
    Hathaway turned to Hopper. “You hear that , Jimmy?”
    Hopper told Hathaway where he could stick his picture and walked off the set.
    Hathaway didn’t know what to make of it. Hopper ignored him, ignored direction, argued with him, swore at him, called him a fucking idiot .
    Dumbfounded, Hathaway turned to the