He directed and starred in Easy Rider (1969), winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as co-writer. During the next 10 years, Hopper appeared frequently on television in guest roles, and by the end of the 1960s had played supporting roles in several films. He made his first television appearance in 1954, and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. at the Brattle Theatre.Dennis Lee Hopper (– May 29, 2010) was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. “The American Dreamer’’ screens in a digitally restored version on Thursday at 7 p.m. Though Hopper does stroll naked through the streets of Los Alamos - a statement of some sort about the first A-Bomb test - the trip to Hot Springs is canceled. You know the ’60s are over when Dennis Hopper responds to a bunch of nubile, in some cases unclad women by leading them in sensitivity exercises. They play a guitar, smoke dope, take off their clothes, give massages, and listen to their host talk ragtime.Ĭue the orgy! Or maybe not. So a van arrives full of girls and they drape themselves around Hopper and his furniture. Going to Hot Springs with three girls, he offers. Perhaps to puncture the ennui, someone asks Hopper what his fantasy is. Bearded, solemn, and resembling the recently in the news Charles Manson, he intones tidbits like, “It’s very difficult at times, if you believe in evolution, not to believe in revolution.’’ Shots of him editing, drinking, shooting guns, and engaging in sophomoric conversations with assorted visitors, staff, and hangers-on fade into solemn soliloquies in the desert. Though Hopper performs a version of himself, it nonetheless exposes his fragility, narcissism, and innocence, his ambition to be an artist banging up against his lack of any vision. Little is spontaneous, but much is revealed. In order to penetrate the thespian mask to expose the real Hopper, the two documentarians and their subject paradoxically decided to stage almost everything that happens, feigning a vérité style and then chopping it all up into a fractured Godardian anti-movie. Hopper allowed them to join him at his Taos, N.M., homestead where he was editing. To top it off, his marriage to singer Michelle Phillips (of the Mamas and Papas) had crashed after eight days.Įnter Schiller and Carson, who wanted to make a documentary about an actor who grapples with the distinction between performance and identity (they originally had Paul Newman as a subject). He was determined to prove that he was a real artist, but “The Last Movie’’ - a kind of “Three Amigos’’ without the comedy - was frustrating him. After the epochal success of “Easy Rider’’ (1969) he had been treated by Hollywood as the second coming of Orson Welles. Who needs drugs when you’ve got this kind of solipsistic hall of mirrors?įor Hopper, that scene epitomizes an ongoing bad trip. His character is surrounded by mock camera equipment made out of sticks, wielded by people who believe they are making a film, except the violence is real. Kit Carson’s meta-documentary “The American Dreamer’’ (1971), Dennis Hopper is at the Steenbeck machine, editing a moment in “The Last Movie’’ (1971). In one scene in Lawrence Schiller and L.M.
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