Free Hopper by Tom Folsom Page A

the horse, when to hold the reins, when to put the reins down, when to take a drag off the cigarette, how to say my name, and where to sit on the set.”
    A collective groan arose from an audience filled with aspiring Method actors to whom this prescribed paint-by-numbers style of direction was barbaric.
    â€œI walked off the picture three times. So anyway, finally, the last day of the film—”
    The audience could visualize it in their heads like sense memory, this tale of good versus evil . . .
    From Hell to Texas . . .
    Take Two!
    Sick and tired of the rebellious actor’s continuing defiance of his authoritarian direction, the villainous Hathaway escorted twenty-one-year-old Hopper into a room on Twentieth Century Fox’s lot filled with fresh canisters of film.
    â€œYou know what these are? I have enough film in those cans to work for a month. We don’t have to go to lunch or dinner, or anything. We’re just going to sit here until you do this scene exactly as I tell you. We’ll send out for lunch, send out for dinner; we’re here. Sleeping bags will be brought in.”
    So went Hopper’s version of the showdown between the sadist director and the great actor (lasting three days).
    â€œYou want to see Hathaway and Hopper freaking out?” said executives calling each other from the major studios. “Come on over.”
    Warner Bros. studio boss Jack Warner finally reached his contract player on the horn. “What the fuck is going on? Do what fucking Hathaway says and get back over here!”
    His entire studio career was on the line, and still Hopper would not do the scene the way Hathaway wanted it. Finally, on the eighty-sixth take, emotionally bankrupt after three hellish days, Hopper cracked. Exhausted, crying, broken as a kicked mule, he fixed himself up and, holding his nose, did the scene just as Hathaway wanted.
    When it was all over, the director pulled him aside and sneered.
    â€œKid, there’s one thing I can promise you. You’ll never work in this town again.”
    Enraptured by this classic tale of the showdown with the bad guy, the Actors Studio audience sat in awe of the good guy—blackballed by the Hollywood studio system, forced to come to New York for his one shot at the notoriously competitive Actors Studio. Only three spots were available to a throng of fifteen thousand aspirants—not just amateurs, but seasoned professionals clamored to be accepted.
    How to distinguish himself? As the line went from John Ford’s classic about forging the Western myth: “Print the legend.”

THE METHOD
    L os Angeles is a city without principles. Mine were falling. So I left. What I mean is, movies are an art, or can be, but out there they make shoestrings. There’s no time for creating except around a swimming pool. So I came here and began studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. I never studied before. It’s great working only from inspiration, but one day it’s not there. An actor has to learn his craft. I always wanted to come here, but with Warner’s I couldn’t. Out there you need permission to go to the bathroom.”
    Closing his remarks on a New York City talk show in 1959, a year freed from the studio’s shackles, twenty-two-year-old Hopper had full liberty to go downtown to the Village and drink up with the abstract expressionists who lurked at Cedar Tavern, a dark-paneled hive of tortured artists haunted by its own Dean: Jackson Pollock, killed in a car accident not long after Jimmy. Plastered and driven by existential guilt over a recent sale of a painting while his friends were still broke, one artist threw fifty-dollar bills into the air, screaming, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
    Alas, money could ruin the purity of art. Hopper knew it too well with an offer from MGM dangling before him, threatening to destroy his image of himself as the suffering blackballed