Hopper and "Easy Rider" cohort Jack Nicholson at the 1990 Academy Awards.

Filing for divorce from what’s described as your deathbed might seem like an odd thing to do, but it likely doesn’t even rank very high on the list of the most unusual things Dennis Hopper has done in his life. In 1970, the actor-director-artist did something that’s present somewhere on that list: He decided to use the good will from his 1969 surprise hit Easy Rider (which cost $350,000 and raked in tens of millions) and head to the backlands of Peru on Universal’s dime to make an almost indescribable film (ultimately titled The Last Movie), which would become one of the most tortured productions in Hollywood studio history. It had only a brief release and nearly ended Hopper’s career. Well, that and the drug abuse. The artist never fully recovered from the debacle of The Last Movie until his brilliantly perverse turn in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986.

Luckily, Life magazine dispatched the excellent reporter Brad Darrach to profile Hopper during the volatile production. The resulting article is called The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes. An excerpt from the beginning of the article:

“Peru has painfully learned to live with earthquakes, avalanches, tidal waves, jaguars and poisonous snakes. But Dennis Hopper was something else. When the director of Easy Rider arrived in Lima several months ago, a reporter from La Prensa asked his opinion of marijuana (illegal in Peru) and ‘homosexualism.’ Taking a long reflective pull on an odd-looking cigarette, Dennis said he thought everybody should ‘do his thing’ and allowed that he himself had lived with a lesbian and found it ‘groovy.’ No remotely comparable statement had ever appeared in a Peruvian newspaper. The clergy screamed, the ruling junta’s colonels howled. Within 24 hours the government had denounced the article and issued a decree repealing freedom of the press.

Dennis Hopper was undisturbed. Furor trails him like a pet anaconda. At 34, he is known as a sullen renegade who talks revolution, settles arguments with karate, goes to bed in groups and has taken trips on everything you can swallow or shoot.”