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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The high point of cinema so far has been the American films made between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Roughly speaking, these dates constitute the New Hollywood period when failing studios turned to young, maverick directors influenced by the anarchistic re-making of genre cinema by European directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Movies like Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde and Raging Bull are emblematic of this period of high art on the big screen where films about bikers, boxers and beautiful killers defied expectations while often also bringing boffo box office.

Another great American flick of the 1970′s is Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Parker is a Brit, but the film was distributed by Columbia and written by the great Oliver Stone who won a screenwriting Oscar for adapting Billy Hayes’ memoir of getting arrested for hashish smuggling and being locked-up in a Turkish prison. Stone’s script is a brutal document and Parker puts his audience in Billy’s skin behind bars and bereft of hope. Brad Davis is unforgettable as Billy and while the film was shot in a Maltese fort the depictions of the cruelty of Turkish justice are so savage and real-seeming that Midnight Express was screened as a cautionary tale for U.S. Navy sailors visiting Turkey for years after the film’s release.

Celebrating 40 years of Midnight Express — and its amazing Giorgio Moroder soundtrack — here’s an episode of Locked Up Abroad featuring the real Billy Hayes and the harrowing true story of his time in Turkey…

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May is a big month for Dennis Hopper fans: the actor/director/writer/painter/photographer/art collector was born on May 17, 1936, and Hopper left this plane nearly seven years ago on May 29, 2010.

One thing that can be said about Hopper is that his years of drug abuse nearly cost him his creative gifts, and maybe even his life. Another thing that can be said is that Hopper was one of the best actors of his generation, and he also proved — over and over again — that that talent’s promiscuous inclinations equally inspired Hopper’s work as a visual artist on gallery walls as well as on the movie screen as a filmmaker.

Here’s to Dennis in his first full flower. What a weird and beautiful jungle he became. Here’s The Making of Easy Rider…

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The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club were the wild and wooly Zeligs of the American counterculture of the Vietnam Era: The Angels partied with Ken Keasey and his Merry Pranksters; they saw their reflections on the big screen in Easy Rider, and in the pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s first book; and they effectively ended the hippie dream at Altamant. But the group’s roots dig deep, back to an earlier generation of soldiers returning home to California after World War II, and naming their motorcycle club in the same bold, fierce nomenclature brandished by fighting squadrons in the war.

Here’s a great documentary from 1983 that tells the story of the rise and fall of Hells Angels. Here’s Hells Angels Forever…

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Rainbow Bridge is an odd little cinematic curiosity from the early 1970′s. Nowadays it’s become a cult fave with its over-the-top grooviness, New Age sensibilties and inclusion of the last footage of Jimi Hendrix shot before he died.

The Wiki has the rundown…

Rainbow Bridge is a 1971 film directed by Chuck Wein about different countercultural figures interacting on the Hawaiian island of Maui. According to author Harry Shapiro, “the idea was to shoot an antidote to Easy Rider showing the positive side of the youth movement”.[1] Wein described it as “a kind of space-age Candid Camera. We’re going to place Pat [New York model Pat Hartley, the protagonist] in all kinds of real-life situtations, and film what happens. We’re going to shoot a lot of film and just see what comes out of it”.

Filmed with non-professional actors and without a script, it features improvised scenes with a variety of characters. When it became apparent that it was floundering, producer Michael Jeffery brought in his client Jimi Hendrix to film an outdoor concert (July 30, 1970). Hendrix’s heavily edited (no complete songs) performance appears near the end of the film. Rainbow Bridge was a critical failure and has been re-released on video tape and DVD formats. Although it only contains 17 minutes of Hendrix performing, it continues to attract attention as his second-to-last American concert and the last one filmed.

Here’s Rainbow Bridge…

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So odd to look at the Wiki entry about actress Karen Black and find it reading in the past tense. Although Black isn’t necessarily a household name today, among lovers of both high and low cinema, and bohemian types with a high pop culture IQ, Black was iconic.

A native Chicagoan, Black was a bright kid who started attending Northwestern University at the age of 15. After two years she moved to New York to study acting with the great Lee Strasberg, going on to appear in a number of Broadway productions.

From the theater, Black broke into television, but she’s remembered for her turns in counter-culture cinema classics like Easy Rider, Nashville and Five Easy Pieces. In that film she played the sweet, sad, scattered, pregnant waitress Rayette. The role found Black nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won the Golden Globe in the same category.

In addition to all of her art-house credits, Black played multiple roles in the horror classic Trilogy of Terror: A made-for-TV-movie comprised of three vignettes written by suspense author Richard Matheson. I saw Trilogy when I was a little boy, watching an afternoon horror show in our old living room in Detroit. In the third chapter, “Amelia”, Black receives a Zuni fetish doll that comes to life and tries to kill her. I was terrified by that mean little doll. I also fell in love with Karen Black.

Karen Black died yesterday after struggling with cancer.

Here is an epic montage of Karen Black’s crazy range of roles

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People who know me know I love to read and during the holidays I look forward to the books I’m inevitably gifted almost as much as I look forward to the fun, food, family and friends. I’ve been plowing through some of the books St. Nick sent my way and am planning on mentioning some of them here as I finish them up.

The first book I’ve read in 2013 is a biography of writer/director/actor/painter/photographer and art collector Dennis Hopper. Hopper started acting as a teenager in movies like Rebel Without a Cause, and he became famous as the director and co-star of Easy Rider – the film that more or less marks the beginning of the New American Cinema that was to take over movie screens in the 1970′s. Of course, Hopper famously imploded into a spiral of drugs and drink before rebounding as an actor in movies like Blue Velvet and Speed, and as a director with flicks like the Los Angeles gang drama Colors.

I enjoyed Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel and I’d definitely recommend it for anyone who is curious about the man, his remarkable career and crazy personal life. That said, I’ve read a ton about Hopper and his films and I’ve watched every documentary about him and his work that I’ve been able to find. If you are a student of Hopperdom, you may find Peter L. Winkler’s prose a bit hacky. He lifts lots of quotes and interviews wholesale from various Hopper documentaries and television appearances and seems to race through his subject with little unique exploration or insight. The book’s cover brags about its being the first full accounting of Hopper and his work published since his death in 2010 and Wild Ride sometimes feels like a race to the store bookshelves instead of a journey through a remarkable life. That said, there’s plenty of information about the man and the movies here, and it looks to be the best place to start for folks interested in Hopper’s considerable contributions to acting, directing and photography. If you’re looking for the deeper exploration the subject deserves, it seems we’re still waiting for that book.

In 1983, following his lecture at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Hopper and busloads of audience members set off for a local speedway where he proceeded to strap himself into a special contraption rigged with dynamite. With luminaries like Terry Southern and Wim Wenders along for the ride, Hopper proceeded to set-off a pretty massive explosion before staggering out of the smoke and soon after checking into rehab.

As a special treat – an amuse bouche if you will – leading up to our Sleepless Film Festival special installment on Dennis Hopper, here is a cool little documentary that was put together by BBC Channel 2 for their Moving Pictures series.

This biography of Hopper follows him from his rise as a young star to the triumph of Easy Rider. It finds the artist lost in the deserts of Taos, New Mexico and redeemed again with roles in Blue Velvet and Hoosiers, and another turn behind the camera as the director of the powerful and provocative Los Angeles gang-film Colors.

Throughout it all, Hopper is a relentlessly creative artist and a visionary in the truest sense.

An Artist's Artist

Watch the full documentary on my YouTube channel here:

Dennis Hopper documentary BBC 2