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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One of the most interesting — and tragic — conspiracy theories of recent times has been the Satanic Panic of the 80′s and 90′s. During this time faulty research, hearsay and the fears projected by Christian conservatives resulted in a very real panic that saw a number of innocent people’s lives ruined over what amounted to an urban legend. Here’s a long quote from Wiki as the panic was a very complex and nuanced phenomenon and their summing-up is too thorough not to include here…

Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organised abuse, sadistic ritual abuse and other variants) was a moral panic that originated in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout the country and eventually to many parts of the world, before mostly diminishing in the late 1990s. Allegations of SRA involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in the context of occult or Satanic rituals. In its most extreme form, SRA involved a supposed worldwide conspiracy involving the wealthy and powerful of the world elite in which children were abducted or bred for sacrifices, pornography and prostitution.

Nearly every aspect of SRA was controversial, including its definition, the source of the allegations and proof thereof, testimonials of alleged victims, and court cases involving the allegations and criminal investigations. The panic affected lawyers’, therapists’, and social workers’ handling of allegations of child sexual abuse. Allegations initially brought together widely dissimilar groups, including religious fundamentalists, police investigators, child advocates, therapists and clients in psychotherapy. The movement gradually secularized, dropping or deprecating the “satanic” aspects of the allegations in favor of names that were less overtly religious such as “sadistic” or simply “ritual abuse” and becoming more associated with dissociative identity disorder and government conspiracy theories.

The panic was influenced to a large extent by testimony of children and adults that were obtained using therapeutic and interrogation techniques now considered discredited. Initial publicity generated was by the now-discredited autobiography Michelle Remembers (1980), and sustained and popularized throughout the decade by the McMartin preschool trial. Testimonials, symptom lists, rumors and techniques to investigate or uncover memories of SRA were disseminated through professional, popular and religious conferences, as well as through the attention of talk shows, sustaining and spreading the moral panic further throughout the United States and beyond. In some cases allegations resulted in criminal trials with varying results; after seven years in court, the McMartin trial resulted in no convictions for any of the accused, while other cases resulted in lengthy sentences, some of which were later reversed. Scholarly interest in the topic slowly built, eventually resulting in the conclusion that the phenomenon was a moral panic, with little or no validity beyond paranoia.

Official investigations produced no evidence of widespread conspiracies or of the slaughter of thousands; only a small number of verified crimes have even remote similarities to tales of SRA. In the latter half of the 1990s interest in SRA declined and skepticism became the default position, with very few researchers giving any credence to the existence of SRA.

Here’s a Satanic Panic propaganda classic preserved on shiny black VHS tape. Here’s Escaping Satan’s Web…

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