Last week we lost Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton was one of those character actors who never played the dashing leading hero or achieved cinema sweetheart status. But Stanton’s body of work over about a half century of acting gathered together the kind of gravitas that swirls around true artists of the screen, and it’s a kind of poetic coincidence that Stanton takes his leave so shortly after Sam Shepard, the screenwriter of Stanton’s masterpiece, also exited this stage. Here’s the actor talking about Paris, Texas in an interview in The Guardian from back in 2013…

There is indeed a peculiar kind of sadness about Harry Dean Stanton, a mix of vulnerability, honesty and seeming guilelessness that has lit up the screen in his greatest performances. It’s there in his singing cameo in 1967′s prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in his leading role in Alex Cox’s underrated cult classic Repo Man in 1984 and, most unforgettably, in his almost silent portrayal of Travis, a man broken by unrequited love in Wim Wenders’s classic, Paris, Texas. “After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted to play,” Stanton once said of that late breakthrough role. “If I never did another film after Paris, Texas I’d be happy.”

Now, with mortality beckoning, Stanton still gives off the air of someone who, as he puts it, “doesn’t really give a damn”. In his room in a hip hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the aircon is on full blast despite his runny nose and troubling cough, and he smokes like a train as if oblivious to the law and the health police. He looks scarecrow thin, but dapper, in his western suit, embroidered shirt and ornately embossed cowboy boots: a southern dandy even in old age. His hearing is not so good, but his voice remains unmistakable, that soft trace of his southern upbringing in rural Kentucky still detectable. “I’ve worked with some of the best of them,” he says. “Not just directors like Sam Peckinpah and David Lynch, but writers like Sam Shepard and singers like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. I could have made it as a singer, but I went with acting, surrendered to it, in a way.”

Here’s Stanton as a youngster in the cult classic 92 in the Shade (1975)….

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts

Anticipating the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, here’s a look back to a super project dreamed up by Wim Wenders at the festival way back in 1982: Room 666 is a documentary project that profiles a number of prominent filmmakers using a static camera in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez. According to the Wiki…

Each director is given one 16 mm reel (approximately 11 minutes) to answer the questions. The principal question asked was, “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Wenders then edited this footage and added an introduction.

Directors interviewed include Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died less than a month after filming. The film was later screened out of competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival will get underway on May 13. In the meantime, here’s Room 666…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

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.