Steve Blauner then took up the story for our programme; he was helping with the advertising and distribution of the film. Bert Schneider’s father was still a senior executive at Columbia Pictures, so he was able to get the film opened at the Beekman Theatre on East Side, New York City rather than at the drive-in market for which it was originally destined. Then something very strange happened, according to Blauner, “That grapevine thing which, if anyone could predict, would make us kings of show business – word just got around before the opening and there were queues around the block, they were sitting in the aisles, hanging from the rafters, it was pandemonium.” Before long the cinema manager had to unscrew the toilet doors to stop the pre-screening pot smoking.
The massive success of Easy Rider, followed by the equally gargantuan failure of The Last Movie, established a pattern, one that would weave its way, like a poisonous serpent, through Dennis’ subsequent career. After Easy Rider Dennis could have worked with anyone in the world – his acting hero Marlon Brando, for instance – but instead he chose to fire Ben Johnson from the male lead in The Last Movie (an Academy Award winning actor who had once been part of John Ford’s stock company) and put himself in the role. Then he buried himself in the Peruvian jungle for eighteen months.
Even in the context of the drug-fuelled culture of the late 1960s, his behaviour does seem perverse. Rather than being hailed as an artistic statement in the guise of an unconventional western, the ravaged film that finally emerged as The Last Movie was viewed as a vomitus assault on key Hollywood shibboleths. Dennis thereby rendered himself unemployable as a director to any major studio for the rest of his life.
MID-CAREER FRUSTRATIONS
It would be a full decade after shooting The Last Movie before Dennis had an opportunity to get behind a camera again. Made independently on a small budget, Out of the Blue (1980) is a punk-inspired, relentless and hopelessly bleak examination of a dysfunctional family whose father, played by Dennis, wipes out a bus full of school children while driving drunk. The film’s descent of family life into alcoholism and sexual abuse is about as bleak an account of middle America as one could imagine. It’s a brilliant film, but one of such mind-numbing nihilism that paracetamol makes a more suitable foyer-seller at its screenings than popcorn. However, Dennis’ power as an actor and authority as a director was widely acknowledged and the film helped reinforce his reputation as a vastly underrated directorial talent, particularly amongst the European film critics.
Eight years would unwind before Dennis was again able to direct. Colors (1988) was made for Orion, then a major Hollywood player. He had actors Robert Duvall and Sean Penn at his disposal, and a story of drug-dealing and corrupt police, which he transposed from its original setting of Chicago to his very own doorstep, the downtown ghettos of LA. Although this film had some success commercially and even better critical acclaim, it demonstrated Dennis’ attraction to subjects many in the business would describe as “murky”. In this regard he was his own worst enemy. He was unable or unwilling to compromise. Between 1988 and 2000 there would only be three more director credits for him and all were low-budget, low-life thrillers: Catchfire (1990) – re-edited so damagingly Dennis had it credited the infamous pseudonym “Alan Smithee” – The Hot Spot (1990) and Chasers (1994). The meagreness of this body of work was a matter of great regret to Dennis. In a sense, his mischievous persona, used to such advantage by others in the films he made as an actor, sapped his time and energy. He needed a Bert Schneider there to advise and guide him, but when Bert retired from the business as he always said he would at the age of 50, after completing Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven in 1978, he lost that elder brother figure he so desperately needed to continue with truly creative work.
The acting role with which, of course, he will always be most identified is Frank Booth, the psychotic gangster in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). Famously, he pestered Lynch for the role repeatedly saying, “There is no problem for me in playing him, because I am Frank Booth!” Having already carved a niche for himself (in acting terms) as a serial abuser, pornographer, drug user and child maltreater, given to outbursts of contumely at any turn, Dennis delivered his star turn for Lynch. Who can forget his explosive, “Baby wants to fuck, baby wants to fuck Blue Velvet!” But even in this riveting performance as one of the screen’s most unlikeable heavies, Dennis found terrible humour, blacker than the night, in the worst of situations. It was this quality that other filmmakers turned to Dennis to supply, for instance in Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995). In each case Dennis’ arrival served to boost a story when it was flagging, thereby dividing the audiences affections between himself and either the wooden Keanu Reeves, or the preoccupied Kevin Kostner. In these films Dennis delivered the best performance on view.
