A free man: L.M. "Kit" Carson, 1941-2014 | Features

Kit and I talked about the possibility of his rereleasing "American Dreamer" to theaters, or at least trying to get a good video release for it. According to Schiller, who talked about the film after a recent repertory screening, it was meant to solidify Hopper's counterculture bona fides. It's an extraordinary work in a vein that has become increasingly rare, now that nonfiction filmmakers feel obligated to model their storytelling on Hollywood features, leaning on re-enactments, fast cutting, slick graphics, and bouncy montages scored to ironic pop. There are no big revelations here, and no through-line to speak of. It's just Carson and Schiller hanging out with Hopper in his commune in New Mexico, where he's surrounded himself with stoners and hippie chicks and yes-men. The film doesn't diagnose or explain Hopper. It just watches Hopper as he takes drugs and yammers and delivers monologues and shoots off guns and edits "The Last Movie," a psychedelic anti-Western that singlehandedly halted his post-"Easy Rider" momentum. "The American Dreamer" paints a portrait of Hopper at this wild period of his life, when he was so famous and successful that he believed his own hype, and started thinking of himself as a guru and revolutionary rather than as an artist with a particular way of seeing things. It's one of my very favorite documentaries, and I think about it every time I interview another person.

"The camera is always a questioning instrument," you hear Carson telling Hopper from somewhere offscreen. "It is an observer, it is an outside thing, an abrasive thing that comes in."

Kit was a character among characters. He had huge, wise eyes, a ski-slope nose, long hair, and a face that I always thought of as Gallic. I liked to picture him hanging out in a cafe on the left bank of Paris in the twenties, or maybe in the '50s. He had a lovely tenor speaking voice with just a hint of rasp. 

I remember him carrying a little notebook or sketchbook with him, though maybe I just think that because he was always writing on something. He was a compulsive writer. Sometimes he'd be talking to you and suddenly he'd get an idea that he figured he could use at some point, and he'd pull out his notebook or a napkin or a restaurant check and write it down; if you paused the conversation, he'd say, "No, go on, I'm listening." He liked to wear a baggy jacket with lots of pockets—it looked like something a combat photojournalist would wear—and he smoked stubby filterless cigarettes. When he talked to you across a table at a bar or restaurant he'd sort of hunch over and lean in. 

Kit had a great wicked grin, and an explosive laugh. Whenever I cracked Kit up, with a funny line or with an observation that prompted an "Aha, yes!" response, I felt as if I'd won something. He was a magnificent conversationalist. He always came at things sideways, but in a way that made sense when he finished his thought. Sometimes you'd make an argument for or against some movie or novel or painter, and Kit would begin his response with a song lyric or a fragment of poetry or a line from an editorial he'd read that morning, and you'd think, "Where is Kit going with this?" and then, "Oh, right, of course." He and his wife, Cynthia Hargrave, were so attuned that they often seemed to be communicating telepathically. When they were in the same conversational circle they'd finish each other sentences; sometimes their heads would move in the same way, or they'd both have more or less the same reaction to a statement at the same time: two grins; two frowns; two "What the hell is he talking about?" puzzled looks.

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