Dennis Hopper: The Hopper Agenda

https://lebeauleblog.com/2016/04/02/dennis-hopper-the-hopper-agenda/

Dennis Hopper had seen it all and done it all. If you saw his life story in a movie, you would not believe it. By 1990, Hopper had settled down and was reestablishing himself as an actor and a director. Movieline contributor, Stephen Rebello, sat down with Hopper to discuss the long, strange trip he had been on and where he thought he was headed.

Three a.m., Dennis Hopper time, and the signs say he may not be in a talking mood. The actor-director has just debarked a plane from Tokyo, where film festival acolytes lionized him at screenings of Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider, The American Friend, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, and Colors–in part, for having once been nearer my God, James Dean, to thee. Looking in fighting trim at 54, particularly after a 12-hour flight, Hopper ambles across the Brian Murphy-decorated living room of his Frank Gehry-designed Venice, California, home and punches his sound system’s control panel. He chooses well. Miles Davis blows cool and hot ’round the cool, white planes of what has been called “the Prado of pop,” hung with works by Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Laddie John Dill.

Called by some who know him “a control freak,” Hopper insisted that Brian Murphy orchestrate the interiors of his fortress-like home to accommodate a surveillance system that beams visitors’ faces onto TV screens throughout. Hopper arranges himself on a low-slung couch, suggests where I might sit, and worries aloud whether he should scoot closer to my tape recorder. Shooting the cuffs of his sports coat, he screws his eyes to size me up. Not unfriendly, mind you, but reserved.

As if on cue, his new wife, Katherine–a petite, porcelain-skinned, 23-year-old dancer/choreographer–glides into their meticulously maintained kitchen and calls out an offer of drinks. Bringing mineral water in pale green stemware, she rarely takes her eyes off Hopper, who stares broodingly into his fireplace-as-work-of-art, the outer hearth of which is strewn with marbles. For an instant, they suggest a mysteriously sexy May-December pairing out of an old gothic. Jane Eyre bedeviled by Mr. Rochester, or that nameless young thing who marries poor Max de Winter, only with a postmodern spin. But the fourth Mrs. Hopper is no put-upon heroine from Bronte or du Maurier, and her husband is battling no demons–at least not these days.

Dennis Hopper has spent five decades in the public eye, every few years shedding his skin for a new persona, or, at least, playing variations and themes on the Ornery Motherf*cker. Take, for instance, several seasons ago, Hopper’s Armed and Dangerous period, when multiple addictions and personality kinks landed him in a straitjacket in the psycho ward of Cedars Sinai Hospital. To hell and back, he cleaned up, and performed widely-reported acts of contrition for a town he had alienated. Back to work as a Model Citizen, Hopper won respect, affection, even an Oscar nomination to certify his status as Hollywood’s hipster Lazarus. The abiding fascination of Hopper-watching comes from the tug-of-war between this man’s irresistible urge to rule the world and his equally irresistible urge to screw up.

Going into his sixth year of sobriety, Hopper would seem almost on the brink of a new incarnation: The Hardest-Working Guy in Movies. Most recently, he’s played an accessory to rape who escapes Bedlam in Florida with Gary Oldman in Chatta-hoochee. For balance, there is Flashback, a road comedy pitting hippie Hopper against straight-arrow FBI man Kiefer Sutherland. Upcoming are Backtrack (a long delayed thriller-cum-love story in which Hopper directed himself and Jodie Foster), and, later this year, The Hot Spot (nineties-style noir with Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, and Jennifer Connelly, also under Hopper’s direction).

I ask Hopper whether he might be spreading himself too thin on projects that matter too little. “At this point,” he says, in that raspy, crazy coot drawl, “I’m going to do things that I know I can do. Work is all I want to do and I’m just going to keep doing that. I don’t feel I’ve left a body of work.” After a moment, he adds, “I must leave a body of work,” like a man who feels the weight, and waste, of his past.

And Hopper is most certainly a man with a past. His remembrances of childhood and adolescence–his Rebel Without a Pause phase–play like a collaboration of Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, Steinbeck, and Kerouac co-directed by John Ford and Elia Kazan. He was born in Dodge City, then moved with his mother, while his father was in the military, to his grandparents’ twelve-acre farm. “I got my first sheepdog from the brother of the Clutters, the family killed in In Cold Blood. There were breadlines. The sky was obliterated by dust storms a lot of the time. There was nothing much to do but look at the horizon line or wonder about where the trains were going.”