A madness to his method

Pick your favorite Dennis Hopper moment. How about   Hopper as crazed Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, lifting an already deranged Lynch movie into some fourth dimension of dementia? (Discussing the comparative strengths of beers with Kyle McLachlan: “Heineken? F**k that s**t! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”)

Or as a feverish photojournalist discussing Col. Kurtz (and quoting Kipling and Eliot) in Apocalypse Now: “Suddenly he’ll grab you, throw you in a corner, and say, ‘Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you’... I mean I’m... no, I can’t... I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s... he’s a great man! ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...’”

Or menacing slick cop Keanu Reeves in Speed: “Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do?”

Or as a cowboy hat-wearing Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’ existential noir, The American Friend, collecting his thoughts on a microcassette recorder: “It’s December 6th, 1976. There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. I know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is.”

Or as one-legged pot dealer Feck in River’s Edge: “Look, I’m not psycho. I know she’s a doll… (turns to blow-up sex doll) Right, Elly?”

Or, in a classic tough guy showdown, smoking a final Chesterfield before meeting his certain fate at the hands of Christopher Walken in True Romance: “Now, if that’s a fact — tell me, am I lying? — that makes you… an eggplant.”

Dennis Hopper — who passed away from prostate cancer at 74 last week — was an iconic character actor, a director of early acclaim (1969’s Easy Rider) who rode up and down Hollywood’s elevator more than most rebels of the ‘70s generation. Put Hopper in a movie, and that movie gained a certain stamp of hyper-reality, at least during his golden years. You didn’t need CGI to turn Blue Velvet into a roller coaster ride through hell: you just needed to put excessive Method actor Hopper into a room and let him ratchet up the crazy.

It wasn’t always that way. The Kansas-born Hopper started out on Gunsmoke and other TV shows, got minor roles working with Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without A Cause) and George Stevens (Giant). He was an up-and-coming Method boy, having studied with Lee Strasberg in New York, when he got into a battle of wills while making From Hell to Texas in 1958. (Hopper wouldn’t play it the way director Henry Hathaway wanted, resulting in 80 takes, a near nervous breakdown on set, and threats that Hopper would never work in Hollywood again.)

He did eventually, working up a script with hippie pal Henry Fonda in 1969 called Easy Rider, somehow finagling studio money to shoot the counterculture “Western on motorcycles,” and earning millions at the box office and industry acclaim. Hopper was the first true barbarian at the gates of Hollywood’s studio system, opening the doors for a thousand screwball auteurs (and many great ones) who thought they could capture the hippie zeitgeist. But even Hopper’s follow-up, The Last Movie — which he shot and edited with $1 million studio money in Peru, delivering what most called an incoherent mess — couldn’t capture it. Hell, even a lot of Easy Rider is unwatchable nowadays, but it definitely changed what audiences were willing to watch.

You could call Hopper’s journey from career hell back to Hollywood heights a success: years of drug and alcohol excess left him unemployable (Peter Biskind tells the story in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls of directors scribbling down notes in the margins of Hopper’s scripts about which drugs he would be allowed to ingest while filming), though German director Wim Winders thought he’d make a good Ripley in his version of Ripley’s Game in 1976. Wenders’ film, The American Friend, was my first glimpse at the “new” Dennis Hopper: given to soliloquies that only he understood, erupting with sharp bursts of laughter and manic facial tics. This was the Hopper who nearly stole Apocalypse Now from Marlon Brando, as the skittery hippie cameraman documenting Kurtz’s mental malaise. And he’s the one who made a comeback as a character actor in the above-mentioned films, and too many others to mention. It was said that, after coming back, Hopper never turned down a single role. Whether it was over-the-top villains (as in Waterworld or Speed), or flawed screw-ups who gain audience pity points (as in Hoosiers), Hopper kept working. Most of it was forgettable. (He had a peculiar sideline talent for playing alcoholic/washed-up dads in teen movies, such as Pretty in Pink, The Pick-Up Artist, Hoosiers, etc.)

He also directed again, working with Sean Penn and Robert Duvall in the gang flick Colors in 1988 and a steamy noir called The Hot Spot in 1990. But mostly he became a cultural icon for a new generation, the guy who did the fanatical “I love this game!” TV ads for Nike; or the guy who turns up in an Entourage cameo. Hopper no longer had to worry about losing his perch in Hollywood: he had a star on Hollywood Boulevard, his art collection, his love of painting and photography, and he was a longtime Republican — not so odd, considering that equally excessive characters like Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper also voted for Reagan and Bush. (Must be something in the California water.)

But I like remembering him as the washed-up dad who won’t give away his son’s whereabouts in Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993): his whacked-out scene with Sicilian mobsters in a trailer is the type of Method work they stopped doing in Hollywood after 1975 or so: testosterone-heavy, but full of heart, and funny as hell. (And yes, that was a young James Gandolfini in the background, taking notes.)

Or we can remember Hopper as biker Billy in Easy Rider, debating with George (Jack Nicholson) why America finds him such a threat:

George: You know, this used to be a hell of a great country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.

Billy: Man, everybody got chicken, that’s what happened. They think we’re gonna cut their throat or somethin’. They’re scared, man.

George: They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to ‘em.

Billy: Hey, man. All we represent to them is somebody who needs a haircut.

George: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.

Watching Dennis Hopper — onscreen, unhinged — he still does.