It was only following the success of his era-defining 1969 directorial debut, Easy Rider, that Dennis Hopper was able to secure funding for his passion project, The Last Movie. The premise for the 1971 film, which Hopper wrote long before he ever had the money to produce it, was, indeed, a bizarre one—it was a drama about a stunt coordinator who attempts to stop actors on the set of a Peruvian Western from killing each other for the camera. The final cut played with mixed results: The film was critically praised yet financially disastrous, a toxic combination that set back Hopper’s Hollywood career for well over a decade.

That same year, photojournalist Lawrence Schiller and actor-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson made a film about Hopper's creative process. The directors followed Hopper around Los Angeles and Taos, New Mexico, during post-production and ended up with The American Dreamer, a quasi-documentary released at the same time as The Last Movie at film festivals and on college campuses (but never theatrically). This fall, The American Dreamer will finally be widely available thanks to a newly restored DVD edition from Etiquette Pictures.

Schiller’s original concept was to reveal the truth behind an actor’s mythic persona. He originally wanted to focus on Paul Newman, whom he'd worked with while producing a photo sequence for Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. But Newman declined and Carson introduced Schiller to Hopper, who was apparently motivated to take part because of his desire to be taken seriously as a real filmmaker.

Lawrence Schiller/Getty Images

The American Dreamer presents a startling, candid portrait of a unique personality intersecting with a critical moment in cultural history: New Hollywood. It is not, however, a documentary—following a benefit screening of the film at New York’s Lincoln Center, Schiller told me that although the style pays homage to the genre—especially the 1922 staged silent documentary Nanook of the North—Hopper was always performing. “An actor playing an actor,” Schiller says. According to the director, there isn’t a moment in the film when his subject doesn’t understand he’s being filmed: In fact, Hopper is even credited onscreen as a co-writer.