Given unbridled freedom following the success of Easy Rider, Hopper transported an absurdly large crew to the remote mountain village of Chincheros, Peru (altitude 14,000 feet) for The Last Movie. Anti-illusionist, the film parodies Hollywood westerns, Godardian self-reflexive cinema and counterculture romanticism. The Last Movie dwells on the nature of cinematic reality, as both an aesthetic convention and a spectator-consumed commodity. Three interlocking films provide the framework for Hopper's somewhat delirious exploration. The first is a Hollywood western about Billy the Kid, directed by Sam Fuller in Peru. When the film wraps, the stuntman Kansas (Hopper) stays behind with the wacked-out hope of building production facilities at Chincheros for subsequent films. The local Indians become Kansas's first quasi-clients. Having observed Fuller's activities with much interest, the Indians act out a ritualistic version of his western on the abandoned set. "Here," J. Hoberman observes, "narrative evaporates as continuity vanishes and The Last Movie itself turns into a kind of comic documentary of Hopper and his crew-actors go out of character, the set photographer wanders on camera, Hopper gives offscreen directions. This loss of fictional storyline is superceded by the disintegration of cinematic representation." For its outrageous critique of the mechanics of cinema, The Last Movie achieved a level of notoriety surpassed only by Heaven's Gate. Hopper's film, however, gained notoriety not for its abuse of power, but for its fantastical assault on the source of that power. Personal mania, or hubristic derring-do, Hopper's problematic film discloses, what Hoberman calls "the technology of deception."