In the 1950s and 1960s Dennis Hopper was a young actor appearing in classic films like Rebel Without a Cause, Giant and The Sons of Katie Elder. But by the late 1960s Hopper was tired of directors telling him what to do. He felt like he knew better and he’d prove it if he could get behind the camera. Hopper got his shot with Easy Rider and he made good on his threats, transmuting a no-budget biker flick into an iconic cinematic statement of youthful revolution and kick-starting the greatest period of filmmaking the world has ever seen. But by the time Hopper followed up his success with the brilliant flop The Last Movie the actor/director began a long and storied slide into an oblivion of drugs and alcohol.

I’m thinking about Hopper tonight because 2018 marks the 30th anniversary of the director’s cops and gangs film Colors. Hopper got sober and made his comeback as an actor in 1986, a busy year in which he turned in four fantastic performances in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers and River’s Edge. But Hopper’s comeback as a director wouldn’t happen until two years later when he directed Sean Penn and Robert Duvall in the gritty cops and gangs film. Colors‘ concrete realism illuminated Los Angeles’ gang culture before most American’s had ever heard of the Crips and the Bloods, and actual gang members were cast in the film. Colors also pointed a camera at the uneasy relationship between the LAPD and Los Angeles’ black community three years before those pigs beat Rodney King and laid the groundwork for the LA Riots in 1992.

Here’s a great documentary about Hopper’s life and art…

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Spike Lee’s controversial new film, Chi-Raq shines a spotlight on the out of control gang violence in Chicago. In 1988, Dennis Hopper similarly pointed a camera at the gang violence in his own Los Angeles backyard. Hopper’s film Colors was a gritty-for-the-time cop drama starring Robert Duvall and Sean Penn, but its most important contribution was Hopper’s insistence on realistically representing West Coast gang culture, introducing much of America to the Crips and the Bloods for the first time. The movie’s first script was actually set in Chicago before Hopper flipped the locations.

Here’s Den of Geek on the flick…

By the spring of 1988, several high-profile cases had brought the gang violence in Los Angeles to national attention. The fatal shootings of an 18-year-old college student and her 12-year-old neighbor were, according to a newspaper report, the 113th and 114th gang-related murders to have occurred in LA County since the start of the beginning of 1988. The previous year saw 387 people killed in gang-related incidents.

Against this backdrop came Colors, Dennis Hopper’s unflinching and disturbingly authentic crime drama starring Robert Duvall and Sean Penn. Some of the film’s harshest critics called it exploitative and voyeuristic – a calculated attempt to cash in on the real violence that was regularly making headlines. Colors’ detractors were given further fuel when reports began to circulate of violent incidents occurring in and around cinemas showing the film. Colors was even withdrawn from some Los Angeles theatres following the murder of a 19-year-old from Stockton.

But far from being an exploitation movie rushed out to cash in on headlines, Colors was only made after several months of careful research. Screenwriter Michael Schiffer, when ordered to rework Richard Di Lello’s original and very different script set in Chicago, spent weeks interviewing LA cops and gang members. He transcribed the recordings and paid careful attention to their slang and speech patterns, even working some of their jokes and anecdotes into his script. Schiffer’s approach was much like Michael Mann’s during the writing of Heat; both rode with police officers during their patrols of the city streets and took inspiration from what they saw.

The resulting screenplay was perfect for Dennis Hopper, an actor and director who was as unpredictable and uncompromising in real life as he was as an artist…

Here’s a long interview with Hopper, illuminating his career as an actor, director, writer and photographer, culminating with the making of Colors…

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