The Dennis Hopper Poll

Not hard to predict what will win. I voted Red Rock West.

What about as a director? I've only seen Out of the Blue and The Last Movie besides Easy...

Red Rock West for me too, although Speed was tempting.

(Brad Dourif's hair and Dean Stockwell much scarier in BV)

you forgot to include the liberty mutual ads

WATERWORLLLDDDDDDDDDDDD BABY!!!!

blue velvet * american friend * easy rider

hard!

Hopper-directed movies have parts that are better than the whole: specifically the visuals and soundtrack for both Colors and The Hot Spot.

i've seen only a handful of these films, but he was pretty incredible in blue velvet.

I'm gonna say True Romance.

hopper's performance in waterworld convinced my parents that the whole movie was a comedy rather than bad sci-fi

Out of the Blue is pretty great - I think that may be the only film he's directed that I've seen. Funny stuff happened when the hippies tried to "be down" with the punks (see also: "Human Highway"!!)

presumed winner = Blue Velvet...?

one wd think.

Actually, 'deep' character comedy is roughly what he does best, whatever the context.

isn't Kid Blue the one where he plays Billy the Kid? and Night Tide has a good reputation.

picking a "worst" out of these films is almost as hard as picking a "best"... Space Truckers vs. Super Mario vs. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2...

Space Truckers really is some kind of apotheosis of incredibly shitty sci-fi filmmaking. Debbie Mazar spends the whole movie in a plastic bikini while Hopper bellows lines like "No one jacks my load!" at space trucks full of genetically modified pigs.

http://www.the11thhour.com/archives/101999/videoreviews/images/spacetruckers.jpg

he's pretty uninspired in meet the deedles (understandably, and it appears they didn't pay enough for him to stand up), but you do get to see him digitally floating on the top of Old Faithful.

space truckers sounds awesome, though

I'm probably going to be the goofball who votes for King Koopa.

There was a movie where he played Sinatra!?

presumably OLD Sinatra

I am the guy who voted for Space Truckers

someone had to do it

I saw his part in Hoboken Hollow and thought it said, "Pam Grier."

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

man, his career's had quite a rough patch since Waterworld

I don't think I've seen or have even heard of a single film of his since then (except for Edtv I guess)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Dennis_Hopper_praying_for_Obama_vic_10132008.html

Actor Dennis Hopper hospitalized

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/30/ent.hopper.hospital/

got the RIP thread and my zingers ready.

he seems like an asshole and actually kind of a dolt but a pretty charismatic actor no?

also nobody voted for it but he is great in
Amerikanische Freund, Der (1977) .... Tom Ripley

Yeah a great movie too even though it's pretty far afield from the way I think of the novel.

This is awesome:

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-middle-word-in-life-20100406

Just watched that Middle Word In Life montage... well worth your time

My Science Project was robbed.

Out Of The Blue is an amazing film

look @ all that mid-00 shit, god. he mustev been dead broke huh

yea out of the blue is p good

I've had Red Rock West for years, finally watched it. I wouldn't rank it alongside Blue Velvet (either film or Hopper's performance), but I enjoyed it. Hopper drifts into Frank Booth II territory now and again, then pulls it back a bit. I love when he starts howling with glee as Cage drives alongside the train. Cage is fairly subdued for him (only one lapse into Cage-like camp: "FUCK MEXICO!!!"), J.T. Walsh great as always. I generally find Lara Flynn Boyle bland, Twin Peaks included (where her blandness fits the character), and I wasn't sure why they laid on the pancake makeup so heavily at one point.

Speed holds up well. It played here as part of a Keanu Reeves series--a stretch, I know, but he did provide a funny pre-taped intro. The Winkie's guy from Mulholland Drive is one of the people trapped on the elevator. More Frank Booth from Hopper--he gets off a couple of great laughs. I was looking at the action poll to see how it did, and one post alerted me to something I don't think I fully appreciated at the time: Speed was released exactly seven days before the O.J. chase. That's almost up there with the timing of The China Syndrome.

This is playing in a first-run theatre here for (only, I'm guessing) a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRcxibpTsgE

I've still never seen The Last Movie.

Told my friend that "I'm guessing there's like four people there per screening" and that we needed to see this right away before it closed; sure enough, there were four people there tonight during the trailers, with a fifth person walking in just before the film started. Not that I needed one, but another reminder that I'm living in some dream world where this is something of an event and the theatre's packed for a one-night-only screening.

I could spend a few hundred words ridiculing the film, but (so?) I'm glad I saw it. At one point--this is 1971--Hopper seems to speak admiringly of Manson. Later on, as he sits around with about a dozen women who've been flown in by Bert Schneider to satisfy his whims or to take part in The Last Movie or maybe both, it's fairly obvious that Hopper wishes he were Manson--not the killing part, just the group sex and messianic rap sessions. My favourite of Hopper's many ruminations were his thoughts on visiting cities for the first time: once you've been there they're less abstract because, well, now you've been there.

I don't know Hopper's photography very well--from the few pictures you see, it looks like he was very talented.

Kid Blue is a '73 revisionist-western comedy; great ensemble cast, fairly frequent laughs, wobbly tone. Hopper is a train robber who moves to a small Texas town to go straight, labors at barbershop sweeping and chicken beheading. Warren Oates is his new best buddy, who lectures him about the loving ways of the Greeks and then invited him into the bathtub; Ben Johnson is a mean sumbitch sheriff; Peter Boyle a hallucinogenic-taking preacher; elsewhere Janice Rule, Clifton James, Janice Rule, M Emmett Walsh. Directed by James (Son of Fred Mertz) Frawley, whose biggest hit was The Muppet Movie. Gonzo screenplay by Bud Shrake. Saw a lovely 35mm 'scope print. As the L Maltin guide points out, Hopper is too old for the part (about 36, 37).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-xp3TnUSKg

heh, this is def not "for children"

much respect for nailing the punk lifestyle in "Out of the Blue." Elvis and "Rust Never Sleeps."

4K Resto of The Last Movie coming...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/toronto-arbelos-launches-new-art-house-distributor-last-movie-1036141

I have a hard time believing that's worth watching (is it)?

I liked Out of the Blue a lot though

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8Lk7-UkV9BI/TAWvBgdwMoI/AAAAAAAACPE/4cxnhGJZPyE/s1600/dennis-hopper-my-science-project.jpg

still love him so much in "My Science Project" (1985)

Kickstarter up for an Out of The Blue restoration.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elizabethkarr/save-dennis-hoppers-out-of-the-blue

film always had a Fassbinder feel to me

I saw The Last Movie on the library shelf last night, which i haven't watched in ~20 years. I passed it up in favor of a Garbo-Gable film.

Just saw the Out of the Blue restoration. Wow. It’s a bit schizophrenic as a film, presumabky due to its disjointed production history, but when it gets dark it gets REALLY dark. The final two scenes are the best in the film, it ends on an intense dark high. It’s an amazing Hopper performance. And yes, I can totally see the Fassbinder vibe of it.

I saw this on late-night TV sometime in the 90s. I found the female lead really at sea, I didn't think she carried the film at all. The most memorable scenes were of Hopper working in the garbage dump, wordlessly contending with oceans of trash.

I secretly agree with you about the lead. There are scenes where she’s quite awkward and unconvincing, and I tried to write it off as, the dialogue they gave her wasn’t good. (I think the film had two main screenwriters). She’s more naturalistic in other scenes. But Hopper and Sharon Farrell carry the film imo.

Just started Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles--really, how could it not be great?

Always loved this picture of Jane & Brooke - I think Hopper took it:

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6bf178f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3091x2048+0+0/resize/1200x795!/format/webp/quality/80/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F8b%2F3a%2Ffe45022548499702574aece81e3f%2Frozzo-insert-17-credit-dennis-hopperhopper-art-trust.JPG

In 1965, Hayward’s lifelong friend Jane Fonda and her French director boyfriend Roger Vadim rented a beach house in Malibu for $200 per month. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $1,800 today. That same 1930 house, since renovated, is currently available for rent — for $125,000 per month. You have to have much, much more money in the 21st century to live like a bohemian...

Robert Christgau said something related to that in his review of Brian Wilson's Smile a few years ago: "There are many things I don't miss about the '60s, including long hair, LSD, revolutionary rhetoric, and folkies playing drums. But the affluent optimism that preceded and then secretly pervaded the decade's apocalyptic alienation is a lost treasure of a time when capitalism had so much slack in it that there was no pressing need to stop your mind from wandering."

I mentioned liking Hopper's photography in a post above; the book singles out this photo, "Double Standard," as his most famous.

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AM144A_hoppe_F_20100831180328.jpg

I often think about the beachfront cabin in Big Sur that bohemian/single mom Elizabeth Taylor lives in in the movie The Sandpiper (1965). Would that have any relation to reality at all? I always assumed not…

love that cabin, it's the star of the film

Spooky connection: Hopper's grandparents on his mother's side (whom he was closer to than his own parents) leased their farm from the Clutter family of In Cold Blood fame.

Same night of the acid trip that inspired "She Said She Said" (3/4 of the Beatles--no McCartney, who was off with Peggy Lipton--the Byrds, Peter Fonda; Hopper wasn't there):

As evening came on and the LSD showed no signs of wearing off, someone showed up with a print of Cat Ballou, the recent Jane Fonda hit, to screen for the assembled rock stars. It was the drive-in version, with an irritating, dubbed-on laugh track.

Really? This was when I started to see movies myself, often in the back seat at a drive-in. I was only five or six, but I have no memory at all of movies with laugh tracks.

Never heard of that either.

Just finished the book. Most surprising tidbit was that Miles Davis's tune "So What" on Kind of Blue was named after a frequent Dennis Hopper retort to Davis.

Yeah, that was neat. The part with John Wayne on the set of The Sons of Katie Elder killed me:

Wayne seemed to like Dennis, and the feeling was mutual, despite the fact that they were at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. "He thought of me as his house Commie," Dennis remembered. "He'd get agitated about something and shout, 'Where's Hopper, that little Commie bastard?'"

And later, Dennis's brother's quip about Dennis's brain being replaced in the sanitarium with Ronald Reagan's brain.

But the material about his art collecting was fascinating. American pop art seems like such a fundamental part of art history - and always was in my lifetime - that it's hard to imagine a time when no one was sure if it was worth buying at all, even at $800 a piece or whatever.

He must have been incredibly rich (or at least theoretically, in the value of his art collection) near the end, depending upon how much of it he held on to. Unless he blew it all on drugs...I know I'll get the answer to that later in the book. Quite impressed that his photos were being used for the cover of Artforum in the mid-'60s.

Besides the subject matter itself, a big thing that makes this such a good book is how well Mark Rozzo knows his stuff. He knows movies, he knows art, he knows Hollywood (old and new), he knows celebrity, and he knows pop music--just finished almost a page on "River Deep - Mountain High." Also, he understands what a gigantic, Pete Frame-type constellation that moment is of interconnections and collisions. And he's not oblivious to the downside: Hopper's incredible hypocrisy with Hayward when it comes to certain things, something awful that happens after one of the greatest parties ever, etc.

That’s for sure. With books like this I’m normally jumping out of my seat every other page spotting a typo or a factual error or when the writer gets the chronology wrong. I didn’t catch a single unambiguous error in this book.

This sounds like a better Hopper biography than the paperback I read in the 90s, which emphasized that only snobs cared about Blue Velvet, his real comeback was in Hoosiers.

Real headz know the true comeback was in O.C. & Stiggs.

Finished up. One of the best books I've read on the '60s--takes in a lot. Further to a post on the David Crosby thread, a few people here are quoted as saying Hopper's Easy Rider character is explicitly based on Crosby (and Fonda's on McGuinn). Never one of my favourite films, but I'll give it another go soon. Had no idea Hopper was married for a few years to Zabriskie Point's Daria Halprin (still alive, as is Brooke Hayward). I want to buy a book of Hopper's photographs, but, as expected, prohibitively expensive.

So do you guys think I will like this book?

I buy books from this place all the time--you can get it cheap here.

https://bookoutlet.ca/products/9780062939975B/everybody-thought-we-were-crazy-dennis-hopper-brooke-hayward-and-1960s-los-angeles

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/02/the-untold-story-of-brooke-hayward-and-dennis-hoppers-hollywood-home

Brooke Hayward was a Warhol-level collector/hoarder of anything and everything.

Currently reading "Everybody Thought We Were Crazy..." and liking it a lot. I had no idea Hopper ran in the circles he did pre-Yosemite Sam phase. Funny anecdote about how he and Crosby were similar down to how they pronounced "man" as in "Look, maaaaan..." :)

Man I wouldn't even want to be a fly on the wall when those two were in the same room.

Calling BS on the "So What" story, as appealing as it might be, I mean I just repeated it myself until I looked around for verification.

Here are some experts from another locale weighing in.

But that's wrong that Hopper only went to The Actors Studio in 1959, didn't he first attend several years earlier, before being in Rebel without a Cause? I don't have the book at hand to check.

So in other words it is very possible, just that we have no one else's words than Dennis's at this point to confirm.

I see that Brooke started there in December 1959.

Randomly searching in the book for this I find Henry Hathaway going to a motel to berate Dennis Hopper for trashing a room and asking Jim DIckson's wife, with whom Hopper had been having an affair, to settle him down. This book is Redd Kryptonite!

Again, this is a staple of the Dennis Hopper biography, but Brooke Hayward indicated that Dennis, in fact, had nothing to do with the Actors Studio. Patricia Bosworth was there around the same time as Dennis would have been and could not recall ever having encountered him.

Rozzo, Mark. Everybody Thought We Were Crazy (p. 362). HarperCollins

Which reminds me, Patricia Bosworth's Jane Fonda bio is also pretty good and also quite relevant.

He did appear on Inside the Actors Studio where no doubt he was treated by James Lipton the way that David Crosby would be treated by a ... I'd better not go there.

Was Dennis the ultimate source of the "So What" claim? Who knows, it could be bs but I'd need more evidence either way.

I couldn’t find any other source. Must things I saw said “Hopper claimed….”

Most things

Dennis says

Dennis says
I’ve come to hate Pabst Blue Ribbon

One of these things I read this weekend said that Bob Gottlieb wanted Brooke to do a sequel to Haywired about the Hopper years but Dennis threatened to sue so it never happened.

^It's in that Vanity Fair article by Rozzo I linked yesterday.

Sooooo Catchfire is listed in the poll, no votes, but having never heard of it myself it was called to my attention today by a friend who posted on FB saying:

FAILED MOVIES THAT NEED AN ORAL HISTORY: "Catchfire aka Backtrack" (1990) starring Dennis Hopper (who directed but Alan Smithee'd it), Jodie Foster, Vincent Price, Charlie Sheen, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Dean Stockwell, Catherine Keener, Fred Ward and Bob Dylan! Box office: $6,000,000

When I boggled and shared this out further, another friend, ex ILXor Ben Boyer, chimed in with:

Oh man this one is a DOOOOZY. Produced, by the way, by Dick Clark. Supposedly the reason Hopper is Alan Smitheed on it is because the studio rejected his *3 1/2 hour* cut of the movie so he walked. There is a lot of Hopper tooting on a saxophone and spying on Jodie Foster in the shower. Truly bananas.

Needless to say I'm going to have to watch this idiocy at some point. It is, of course, on Tubi:

https://tubitv.com/movies/301311

A 2015 piece on it recommended by Sean Howe to me just now:

https://projectorhasbeendrinking.blogspot.com/2015/09/protect-me-from-what-i-want.html