Dennis Hopper - actor, filmmaker, photographer, art collector, worldclass burnout, first-rate survivor ? never blew it, as he put it in his most famous line from “Easy Rider.” Unlike the villains and freaks he has played over the decades - the psycho with the mommy complex in “Blue Velvet,” the mad bomber with the grudge in “Speed” - he has made it through the good, the bad and some spectacularly terrible times. He rode out the golden age of Hollywood by roaring into a new movie era with “Easy Rider.” He hung out with James Dean, played Elizabeth Taylor’s son, acted for Quentin Tarantino. He has been rich and infamous, lost and found, the next big thing, the last man standing.
Lately Mr. Hopper, who turns 74 on May 17, has been in the news again. In March his lawyer in a contentious divorce from Mr. Hopper’s fifth wife, Victoria, announced that the actor has terminal prostate cancer and was too ill to appear in court. That same week a gaunt Mr. Hopper showed up smiling with Jack Nicholson to receive a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Mr. Nicholson, next to Mr. Hopper, was wearing a sensationally ugly shirt decorated with the stars and stripes and the image of the two doomed motorcyclists from “Easy Rider,” the movie that made Mr. Hopper a director and broke Mr. Nicholson out of B-movie irrelevance. It was a sublime, ridiculous Hollywood moment, canned and simultaneously real.
It was also a perfect gesture for Mr. Hopper, who has straddled seemingly contradictory realities for much of his career, wearing a loincloth in Andy Warhol’s “Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort of …” in 1963 only to show up as a snitch opposite John Wayne in “The Sons of Katie Elder.” Inspired by Vincent Price to collect art (yes, that Vincent Price), Mr. Hopper bought a couple of early Warhols for $75, snapping up other masterworks from the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Later, when “Easy Rider” was released, Warhol, who immortalized Mr. Hopper on silk-screen, mused on the influence he had on the actor who’s “so crazy in the eyes”: “You never know where people will pick things up.”
In Mr. Hopper’s case the lines of influence are perhaps more overt than they might initially seem, winding from the American flag in one of Mr. Johns’s paintings, for instance, to the one that Peter Fonda wears like a target on the back of his motorcycle jacket in “Easy Rider.” Among the most striking formal strategies in “Easy Rider” are the propulsive, eye-thwacking edits that were a signature of Mr. Hopper’s longtime friend, the collagist and avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner (“A Movie”).
In 1970 he started “The Last Movie,” a prophetic title if ever there was one. Bankrolled by Universal , he traveled to the Peruvian Andes to make a film about a stunt man who, after production on a violent Hollywood-style Western wraps, stays behind. Played by Mr. Hopper, the stunt man (though not necessarily in this order) hooks up with a local prostitute; coordinates a sex show for debauched tourists; jaws on about “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”; and takes perhaps lethal part in another film shoot, this one staged as a ritual by Indians using equipment made from twigs.
The film was doomed ? badly released, mocked and soon dismissed, as was Mr. Hopper. He more or less dropped out from the public eye until he flew off to the Philippines in 1976 to play the zonked-out photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” Chattering like a hopped-up monkey, cameras clattering around his neck, T.S. Eliot’s words rolling around in his mouth, dirty, disheveled and totally bonkers, the character is a wonder.
If the pleasure of his performance is tinged with discomfort, it’s because Mr. Hopper has never been afraid of looking ridiculous . Few actors can navigate the line between terror and comedy as unnervingly, evidenced by his mesmerizing turn in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Where does that character end and Mr. Hopper begin? You don’t know, and that is the space in which he works.
If his life doesn’t fit notions of stardom it’s because Mr. Hopper has charted his own course from the start. After signing a contract with Warner Brothers in 1955, h e shook off the studio yoke, went to New York to study with Lee Strasberg, began collecting art, starred in the experimental film “Night Tide” and collaborated on an art project with Marcel Duchamp. He photographed his famous friends on and off the set and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama.
He helped make Mr. Nicholson a star and did his bit to jump-start American cinema. Not bad for someone who “blew it.”
By MANOHLA DARGIS
