The Art of Dennis Hopper

As promised in yesterday’s post on Margaret Sullavan, today a look at her posthumous son-in-law Dennis Hopper (1936-2010).

Only time and distance have allowed us to see Hopper for the great American artist that he was, and by us I mean me. I can’t speak for anyone else. Like most of the world, I knew him for many years almost exclusively as an actor, and naturally I knew him primarily by his best known screen roles, from which I formed an impression that he was basically a clownish acid casualty. That idea was basically upended when his two most brilliant (and heretofore mostly unseen) films as director came to light recently, and biographies reminded us of his other accomplishments as a photographer and art collector, and to a much lesser extent, as a painter and poet. And in retrospect, the totality of his track record in films as an actor is fairly epic as well.

Appropriate to his legend, Hopper spent his younger years in the legendary western town of Dodge City, Kansas. When he was nine, his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, the incubator of the jazz style known as be bop. When he reached his teens they moved to San Diego, where he got involved in speech and drama. This led to study at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, and finally five years at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. He was only 19 when Nicholas Ray cast him in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean, leading to what was basically a charmed career from the very beginning. Other early films included George Stevens’Giant(1956) also with Dean; John Sturges’ all-star Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) which was literally set in Hopper’s hometown; Irwin Allen’s The Story of Mankind(1957) in which he played Napoleon Bonaparte (!); and the Henry Hathaway western From Hell to Texas (1958); among others, including lots of tv work, especially in westerns and live dramas.

I’m the King of the World!

In 1961, Hopper married Brooke Hayward, daughter of producer Leland Haywardand actress Margaret Sullavan. That year, the Bel Air Fire destroyed their home, including almost all of Hopper’s early abstract paintings, which he had turned out since he was a Kansas teenager. He got deeply into photography starting around this time, documenting events like Martin Luther King’s Marches in Washington D.C. (1963) and Selma Alabama (1965), and capturing candids of fellow celebrities. He also began collecting art. (There is no known connection between him and Edward Hopper, but, you know what? How many “Hoppers” can there be? I mean, apart from DeWolf Hopper and E. Mason Hopper. I bet if you hop back a few centuries, they’re all related). Anyway, he started buying works by the likes of Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. He was an early supporter of the latter, picking up some of his early works (Campbell’s Soup cans) for a song. In 1964, at a time when Hollywood work was scarce he appeared in Warhol’s experimental films The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys and Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort of.

Beginning to define himself as an outsider, Hopper started doing small budget features with American International Pictures, including two early horror efforts by Curtis Harrington, Night Tide (1961) and Queen of Blood (1966). At the same time, he kept a hand in big budget features like The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Clint Eastwood’s Hang ’em High (1968), and the massive hit True Grit (1969). He hung out with California musicians like The Grateful Dead and The Byrds, and gradually his fringe lifestyle BECAME commercial, merging the two halves of his career. It started with AIP’s LSD themed The Trip (1967) which introduced him to working with Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, continued with the biker flick The Glory Stompers (1967), as well as Head (1968) with The Monkees, and finally the breakthrough smash Easy Rider (1969), which he not only co-starred in, but directed, relying on his years of photography experience in addition to his acting training and his love of abstract painting. The film helped pave the way for New Hollywood, and became a pop culture phenomenon that surely you don’t need me to inform you about.

However, you may not know about his next phase. Hopper and Fonda parted ways after Easy Rider. While they seem like best friends in the movie, you will also note two very different styles in evidence. While certainly part of the counterculture, Fonda wasn’t about to stray too far from the Hollywood professionalism he had grown up in. Hopper on the other hand was full bore gonzo, an experimentalist by inclination, and an abuser of substances (and people) by habit. Fonda and Hopper fought throughout Easy Rider, and then Fonda washed his hands of him, as did Hayward, also a creature of Hollywood (and to whom Hopper was reportedly abusive). His next wife was Michele Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, though their marriage lasted about one week in 1970. But during this time Hopper directed The Last Movie (1971), an existential, heavily French New Wave influenced acid western and movie-within-a-movie shot in Peru. The suits scarcely released it, though it won many awards. I’m here to tell you it’s an amazing, brilliant film. If it had gotten a release at the time, it may well have found an audience. It’s challenging, but it’s also frequently surprising, and has real intellectual depth to it. Instead, as far as most of the public knew, Hopper had kind of disappeared. Fonda’s The Hired Hand, released the same year, suffered a similar fate, for the opposite reason. It was merely boring and conventional, a lackluster follow-up to Easy Rider. The Hired Hand featured Warren Oates, who as it happens, was in Hopper’s next movie, the much more facile, and not unpleasant hippie-western Kid Blue (1973), directed by James Frawley. During this period he also shot scenes in Orson Welles The Other Side of the Wind, though that wouldn’t be released until several years after he died.

Since they recognized him as a genius over in Europe, Hopper worked over there throughout the mid-70s, working with guys like Wim Winders, Henry Jaglom, Francois Weyergans, Bruno Cremer, and Silvio Narrazzano. In 1980, he directed what is probably his masterpiece. I’ve come to regard it as one of my favorite films and one of the best American films ever made, though both of those claims will surely be divisive. Out of the Blue lives up to its title. The wrong film for the wrong time, it takes an uncompromising, unrelenting look at the bleak life of a teenager, played by the brilliant Linda Manz of Days of Heaven and The Wanderers. Hopper plays her father, perhaps his least sympathetic character ever, a drunk trucker who killed a schoolbus full of children in an accident and seems intent on returning to his old ways, and worse. The third piece of the puzzle is Sharon Farrell as the girl’s drug addicted mother whose sin is enabling the horrors that have happened in the house. The end of the movie is so daring and so appalling that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The whole thing is such a downer, but so well acted and shot, that to my mind it rises to the level of something like Greek tragedy. Plus, it has an original soundtrack by Neil Young!

Out of the Blue might have fared better if it come out in the mid ’70s, on the heels of things like Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, The French Connection, The Godfather movies, Scarecrow, and so forth. It’s basically a natural extension of the hyper-real direction those films were taking. With its improvised scenes, it also reminds me a lot of Cassavetes, only better, because Hopper knows when to cut scenes and not allow them to ramble. But sadly, by 1980, New Hollywood was already headed in the Spielberg direction. It was about to be the Reagan era, and audiences were already turning away from realism.

Meanwhile a curious thing happened, though. Many of the New Hollywood directors began to stunt cast Hopper in their films, and he found a new rebirth as a director, though most of these movies were sort of self-parodies that burnished his legend as a) a drug-taking hippie, b) a psycho, c) a drunk, or d) some kind of combination of all of the above. And then younger directors picked up the baton, and he pretty much worked constantly for the last 30 years of his life. Francis Ford Coppola got the ball rolling with Apocalypse Now(1978) and Rumble Fish (1983). There was also Neil Young and Dean Stockwell’sHuman Highway (1982) alongside Russ Tamblyn, Sam Peckinpah’sOsterman Weekend (1983), Robert Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs (1985), David Lynch’sBlue Velvet (1986), Hoosiers (1986), River’s Edge (1986), Tobe Hooper’sThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (1986), Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow (1987), and Alex Cox’sStraight to Hell (1987), et al.

During the Reagan years, Hopper shocked everyone by becoming a Republican, surely a factor in the creation of his 1988 cop drama Colors, his most commercial directorial effort since Easy Rider. In the film Robert Duvall and Sean Penn play a couple of L.A. cops fighting street gangs, a far cry from Easy Rider, where the HEROES were a bunch of drug dealers. I mean, what is this, Adam-12? He was to direct three more features, none of which was as successful: Catchfire (1990) with Jody Foster,The Hot Spot (1990) with Don Johnson and Virginia Madsen, and the high concept comedy Chasers (1994). But his acting career continued apace (for awhile anway) with such things as Flashback (1990), Paris Trout (1991), True Romance (1993), Speed (1994), Search and Destroy (1995), Waterworld (1995), and Basquiat (1996). In later years he spent down his creative capital by taking seemingly any roles at all, in lots of crappy movies. Some notable later things include a regular role on the tv series E-Rings (2005-6) and Crash (2008-09), and the film Elegy (2008).

Cancer took Hopper in 2010. As a Method Actor, it’s interesting to compare him to his contemporaries. Unlike almost all of them, one can’t really name a single great acting performance that he is associated with. Certainly lots of memorable turns as villains and fucked-up dudes. His work in Hoosiers was acclaimed, but it was a supporting part in a minor film. Though no major role for the ages ever came his way, and he probably lacked the discipline to undertake such a thing, I do think he was absolutely one of the greatest directors and theorists to come out of that system. He brought a lot of art to what he did. He expanded the possibilities, and for the most part, the public has still not caught up. Put THAT in your bong and smoke it!