Hopper Knows Best or: Make Room for Dennis - A Father's Day Tribute to Dennis Hopper

(for D John Young...)

Reflecting on what Dennis Hopper (who died May 29, 2010, at the age of 74) meant to movies, not as an iconoclast who, along with Peter Fonda, changed the way Hollywood made films with "Easy Rider," nor as one of the screen’s most unforgettable wingnuts, from the out-there, jungle-jumbled photographer in director Francis Ford Coppola’s "Apocalypse Now" to the unhinged, mystery gas-inhaling Frank Booth in David Lynch’s "Blue Velvet" (critic Richard Corliss of Time magazine described him as "the vilest sadistic creep in movie history") and the megalomaniac bomber in "Speed," but rather, the moviehouse, as an afterthought to Father’s Day, would like to recognize Hopper’s inimitable portrayals of fathers and sons.

Born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kansas, Dennis Hopper was the son of Marjorie, "a swimmer of near Olympic standard," according to one journalist, and Jay Hopper, who, Dennis claimed, was in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA, and worked in China with Mao Tse-tung.

The family, including Dennis’ brothers Marvin and David, moved to Kansas City, Missouri, after World War II. In a newspaper tribute to the actor, Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, noted that Hopper once "confessed to violent sexual fantasies about his mother, but managed to more or less stay out of trouble by growing up on his grandparents’ farm, though he developed a taste for beer at the age of 12."

When he was 13, the family moved to San Diego, where Dennis’ father worked as a post office manager and his mother was a lifeguard instructor. While attending high school, Dennis started acting in local theater. He studied at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre and later performed in repertory at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Television roles led to a contract with Warner Brothers, where he made his motion picture debut in "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) as "Goon," a member of the teen-aged gang who harasses misfit James Dean. (Below, Dennis Hopper with Natalie Wood and James Dean)

During his brief, meteoric blaze across the screen, Dean distracted, frustrated and maddened costars and directors with his singularly quirky interpretation of Method acting, but Dennis Hopper was awed and became convinced that he was in the presence of one of the most talented and most original actors he ever met, Appearing on "Inside the Actors Studio," Hopper recalled, "The man was doing things I couldn’t conceive of. He wasn’t doing things that were on the written page…He was improvising…He was using his imagination."

In a 1990 interview for the Chicago Tribune, Hopper said, "I was a very good technician, but Dean was, like, so loose, creating all these wonderful things." He remembered physically pulling Dean aside on location for "Rebel" to tell him, "I thought I was the best, and now I see you, and I know you’re better, and I don’t even know what you’re doing." Dean, according to Hopper, responded, "You have to do things, not show them. You have to take a drink from the glass, not act like you’re drinking. Don’t have any preconceived ideas."

Hopper admitted in a 2008 interview, "It was not as though we hung out, but he taught me, he became the mentor to me on the set." Hopper claimed that Dean taught him "to act in the moment…if I was living in the moment, the rest would take care of itself, and he was right…the truth of the moment is everything."

Hopper appeared with Dean again in "Giant" (1956), a melodramatic mural - painted in broad brushstrokes by director George Stevens (of "Shane" fame) - depicting the growing pains of Texas during World War II. Hopper was cast as Jordan Benedict III (below), the sensitive son of cattle baron Rock Hudson and his socialite wife Elizabeth Taylor.

As a child, young Jordan, heir to the sprawling Reata ranch, much to the chagrin of his parents, forgoes horseback riding to play with a toy doctor’s kit. Of course, he grows up to become a doctor, who marries a Hispanic woman and quickly learns a harsh lesson in prejudice, personified in James Dean’s character of Jett Rink, a former Reata ranch hand-turned-overnight oil tycoon.

James Dean died in a high-speed car crash the year before "Giant" was released (actor Nick Adams, who had also appeared in "Rebel Without a Cause," redubbed some of Dean’s lines), which deeply affected Hopper. In a 1987 Vanity Fair interview, he said, "The most personal tragedy in my life was Dean. I was 19 years old, and I had such admiration for him." Dean’s influence would inspire Hopper’s performances for the rest of his life. "Approach something differently every time," Dean had told him. And that advice, Hopper would admit with a laugh, "was the beginning of a lot of problems for me with directors."

As a young actor in Hollywood, Dennis Hopper often portrayed the son as a mixed-up kid, on display in his role as the conflicted Billy Clinton in "Gunfight at the OK Corral" (1957), a fast-and-loose fictionalized version of the historical showdown in Tombstone, Arizona, between Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, along with Doc Holliday, and an outlaw faction of cowboys that included Billy and his elder brother, Ike Clanton.

One memorable scene has Wyatt (played by a puritanically stoic Burt Lancaster), bring a drunk (and fatherless) Billy home to his doting mother. Doing his part as a surrogate pa, Earp, in florid prose penned by screenwriter Leon Uris (author of the best-selling novel Exodus), preaches, "You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you, son? I never knew a gunslinger yet so tough he lived to celebrate his 35th birthday. I learned one rule about gunslingers. There’s always a man faster on the draw than you are, and the more you use a gun, the sooner you’re gonna run into that man."

As Billy (above), Hopper sulks, "I don’t know why I get into gunfights. I guess sometimes I just get lonely."

"All gunfighters are lonely," Wyatt sermonizes. "They live in fear. They die without a dime, a woman or a friend." Despite the fatherly attention of Earp, the confused Billy meets his untimely demise in the final shootout.

Hopper’s next mixed-up son role became the stuff of Hollywood legend. In the 1958 western "From Hell to Texas," he was cast as a hotheaded youth out to avenge the death of his older brother. Don Murray (star of the groundbreaking late 1960s TV series "The Outcasts") starred as the saddle bum wrongly blamed for the death, while Hopper’s pa was portrayed by R.G. Armstrong, a venerable character actor whose familiar face enlivened a number of westerns directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Probably under the influence of James Dean, Hopper allegedly refused to deliver his dialogue and make gestures the way veteran director Henry Hathaway demanded. Some accounts claim that the moody actor refused Hathaway’s direction for more than 80 takes. Hopper himself recalled that the director had him perform take after take from seven a.m. to ten p.m. before he finally did it to Hathaway’s satisfaction. Hopper would later say he asked too many questions and had too many of his own ideas.

However the tale went, it ended with Hathaway intoning his version of the adage, "You’ll never work in this town again!" Branded a difficult actor, he was dropped by Warner Brothers ("I was looked on as a maniac and an idiot and a fool and a drunkard," he related) and found himself virtually blacklisted in Hollywood, prompting his move to New York City, where he studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

Interviewed by Charlie Rose in 1994, Dennis Hopper gave John Wayne credit for revitalizing his Hollywood career, seven years after the "From Hell to Texas" fallout. According to Hopper, because his mother-in-law at the time, actress Margaret Sullavan, was a friend of Wayne’s, Wayne brought Hopper on board for a role in "The Sons of Katie Elder" (1965), directed, coincidentally, by Hopper’s old nemesis, Henry Hathaway.

This time, Hopper was cast as the cowardly son of a land-snatching gunsmith responsible for killing the father of the adult Elder boys (one of the screen’s most dissimilar collection of siblings in the persons of John Wayne, Dean Martin, Earl Holliman and Michael Anderson Jr.). Hopper’s old man, portrayed by James Gregory (Dean Martin’s boss in the Matt Helm spy spoofs of the 1960s and the dour Deputy Inspector on the late ‘70s series "Barney Miller"), ominously tells him, "Only a weakling breaks!" shortly before the kid snitches and seals his fate.

In 2008, Hopper told an interviewer that John Wayne "was a hell of a finer actor than he was given credit for while he was alive. I was and am good friends with his boys, so I became his very favorite pet ‘pinko.’ One time on the set of ‘The Sons of Katie Elder’ I had a bad case of athlete’s foot and put some powder on my feet before slipping my boots back on. I had gotten some on my pants and Duke noticed. He ambled over and put his arm around me and I am thinking ‘Oh Christ, what now,’ because this was a big man. ‘Kid, stay off the powder…It’ll kill ya.’ He was the Duke, and I loved working with him…And I never told him it was athlete’s foot powder."

(Above) Hopper worked again with Wayne and director Hathaway in "True Grit" (1969). Hollywood folklore has it that during filming, a furious Wayne, brandishing a loaded gun, chased Hopper around the Paramount lot. Hopper allegedly hid in costar Glen Campbell’s dressing room until the Duke cooled off. However, considering his friendship with Wayne and his family, Hopper remembered "True Grit" as "a pleasure."

It was a mere month after "True Grit" that "Easy Rider," directed by Hopper (above), who costarred with Peter Fonda (who produced) and Jack Nicholson, was released. Long story short, the picaresque saga of two long-haired motorcyclists who score big selling cocaine and head off on a truth-seeking odyssey to New Orleans was filmed on a $500,000 budget and grossed $40 million, establishing Hopper as a counterculture icon and prompting him to proclaim, "We’re a new kind of human being. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the past 19 centuries. The studio is a thing of the past, and they are very smart if they just concentrate on becoming distributing companies for independent producers."

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." So wrote the Greek dramatist Euripides. Inflated with hubris, Hopper plunged headlong into his next project, "The Last Movie" (above) as a drug-fueled auteur (and star). Filmed in Peru (at that time, according to writer Peter Biskind, "the cocaine capital of the world, and every coke fiend in LA wanted in on the picture to smuggle drugs up north"), it was a madly disjointed exercise in unchecked vanity, a film-within-a-film (studio executive Ned Tanen called it a "film-without-a-film") which Hopper described as a "story about America and how it’s destroying itself." The cast included Michelle Phillips, Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, John Phillip Law, Sylvia Miles, and directors Samuel Fuller and Henry Jaglom. "The Last Movie" garnered the Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival, but its embarrassingly dismal reception in theaters delivered a knockout punch to Hopper’s career. "There were 17 years when I couldn’t do anything," he recalled. "I was stopped from making movies."

He also remembered, "I was doing half a gallon of a rum, with a fifth of rum on the side, 28 beers and three grams of coke a day - and that wasn’t getting high, that was just to keep going, man."

As a father, Dennis Hopper had four children from four marriages: Marin Hopper (born in 1962), Ruthanna Hopper (born in 1974), Henry Lee Hopper (born in 1990), and Galen Hopper (born in 2003).

Daughter Marin Hopper did not spend much time with her dad as she was growing up. After graduating from prep school, she paid an unforgettable visit to her father in Taos, New Mexico, beginning when he picked her up at the airport. He was drunk. Come nightfall, when Hopper’s girlfriend tried to wrench the car keys from him, he tossed them into the nearby brush. Daughter and girlfriend dashed out of the auto, and, according to Marin, Dennis "fired shot over our heads with this gun he had in the car. Amazingly, he found the keys and drove off, leaving us there."

It was on an acting assignment in a movie being filmed in Mexico in the early 1980s when Hopper, convinced that the Mob was after him, ran off, naked, into the jungle in the middle of the night. "I was a nightmare," Hopper later remarked. "I finally just shorted out."

After hospitalization and rehab, he successfully "worked his way back into the business," in the words of Peter Biskind. His career renaissance produced a number of inspired variations on what critic Roger Ebert referred to as the "most dependable and certainly the creepiest villain in the movies." Hopper himself told the Los Angeles Times, "I’m not usually in one of those movies that leaves you feeling good when you leave the theater."

On the other hand, Hollywood’s renewed interest in Dennis Hopper resulted in some memorable and moving portrayals of fathers.

One of the breakthrough performances in his comeback occurred in "Rumble Fish " (1983), director Francis Ford Coppola’s second screen adaptation of a novel by Tulsa, Oklahoma native S.E. Hinton (the first was the 1983 cult hit "The Outsiders," starring C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise). The film revolves around Rusty James (played by Matt Dillon, who, besides costarring in "The Outsiders," had the lead role in yet another film version of an S.E. Hinton book, "Tex"), a wannabe street tough who struggles to live up to the legendary reputation of older brother Motorcycle Boy (portrayed - at the peak of his charismatic, Method-mumbling bad-boyness - by Mickey Rourke).

Inspired by the stylistic cinema of German Expressionism. French New Wave and American Film Noir, utilizing unsettlingly stark black-and-white photography and a uniquely original music score by The Police drummer Stewart Copeland, Coppola’s avant-garde experiment disappointed audiences expecting another "Outsiders." Not only did the box office for "Rumble Fish" fall millions of dollar short of its budget, but the film was audibly booed at the New York Film Festival.

In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin said "the film is so furiously overloaded, so crammed with extravagant touches, that any hint of a central thread is obscured," while Newsweek’s Jack Kroll wrote, "’Rumble Fish’ is a brilliant tone poem." Roger Ebert described the movie as "offbeat, daring, and utterly original." According to Time magazine critic Richard Corliss, "this is (Coppola’s) most baroque and self-indulgent film. It may also be his bravest."

The noteworthy supporting cast featured Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage, Diana Scarwid, Laurence Fishburne, Chris Penn, Tom Waits, and Dennis Hopper as the alcoholic father of Motorcycle Boy and Rusty James. Remarking on his boys’ errant behavior, the old man dryly remarks, "Strange lives you two lead," to which Rusty James replies, "Strange? At least I’m not a lawyer on welfare."

The script devotes much attention to speculation about Motorcycle Boy’s questionable sanity (as well as that of the brothers’ runaway mother), capsulized in a cryptic father-son exchange between Hopper and Dillon. "Every now and then a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person," the dad says. "It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean an acute perception, man, that doesn’t make you crazy."

When Dillon asks, "Could you talk normal?" Hopper responds, "Sometimes it can drive you crazy, acute perception." Still confused, Dillon pleads, "I wish you’d talk normal because I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying." Hopper rambles on, "No, your mother is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything that he wants to do and findin’ nothin’ that he wants to do. I mean nothing."

Roger Ebert succinctly described the crowd-pleasing "Hoosiers" (1986) as "a movie about a tiny Indiana high school that sends a team all the way to the state basketball finals when schools of all sizes played in the same tournaments and a David could slay a Goliath." It is, more importantly, a movie about redemption, for the middle-aged coach, an at-first unwelcome newcomer with a troubled past, portrayed with fascinating layers of complexity by Gene Hackman, and for a pathetic figure called Shooter, the local drunk whose besotted presence is an embarrassment for the son on the basketball team. The role of the alcoholic father, who boasts, "I know everything there is to know about the greatest game ever invented," was Dennis Hopper’s only Oscar-nominated performance (he was robbed by Michael Caine’s supporting role in Woody Allen’s "Hannah and Her Sisters").

Ebert’s last word on "Hoosiers" was, "It’s a movie that is all heart." That heart breaks in the poignant moment when Shooter, drying out and recovering in the hospital, is visited by his son, who delivers the ultimate guys-get-out-your-handkerchiefs line, "I love you, Dad."

"True Romance" (1993) was Quentin Tarantino’s second script to reach the screen (after 1982’s "Reservoir Dogs"), although it was, in fact, the first screenplay he sold. It’s no secret that Tarantino is a shameless movie freak who worked in a video rental store in the mid-1980s, so it’s not surprising that the geeky protagonist of "True Romance" is a movie buff who works at a comic book store. Critic Leonard Maltin described the film (which starred Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette) as "a ‘90s twist on the young-lovers-on-the-lam genre, with hedonism, highly stylized violence and colorful supporting characters the main ingredients," the latter provided by performances from Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Sizemore, Chris Penn, and, among others, James Gandolfini.

This "young-lovers-on-the-lam" take is especially reminiscent of director Terrence Malick’s 1973 crime melodrama "Badlands," based on the real-life killing spree by Charles Starkweather and girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in the 1950s, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. In an intentional nod to that film, Patricia Arquette narrates "True Romance," as did Spacek earlier.

"Badlands" featured a brief but memorable turn by Warren Oates as Spacek’s doomed father, In "True Romance," it is Dennis Hopper (above) who portrays the fatalistic father (of the boy, not the girl). Dishing out backhanded praise, Leonard Maltin pointed out that Hopper "plays the most ‘normal’ person in the movie!" The Washington Post critic Richard Harrington concurred, writing, "Dennis Hopper is the voice of reason and responsibility…Unfortunately, Hopper’s big scene is chewed face to face with Christopher Walken, playing a Sicilian mobster who’s in a ‘vendetta kind of mood.’"

Dennis Hopper’s last paternal role of note came in the 2000 two-part miniseries "Jason and the Argonauts," a TV remake and homage to the beloved 1963 mythical adventure, with computer-generated special effects replacing Ray Harryhausen’s wondrous stop-motion creature animation.

In surprisingly authentic makeup and costume, Hopper makes a convincing King Pelias, the treacherous despot of ancient Thessaly who dispatches Jason on the perilous quest for the Golden Fleece. One internet review noted, "The best performance comes from that old trooper Dennis Hopper," who "gets his teeth into the part of the crusty, aging king and plays with a genuine viciousness."

Afterword

A funeral mass for Dennis Hopper was held in Ranchos De Taos, New Mexico, on June 2, 2010. His son, Henry Lee Hopper (above), read from Walt Whitman’s poetry collection, "Leaves of Grass."

In 1993, Dennis appeared as the villain in a turkey called "Super Mario Bros." starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. Hopper’s character, King Koopa (above), was depicted as a subterranean, germophobic dictator descended from a Tyrannosaurus rex. Hopper later recalled that Henry, then six years old, said, "Dad, I think you’re probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in ‘Super Mario Bros.’?" According to Hopper, "I said, ‘Well, Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,’ and he said, ‘Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly.’"