Tag: Dennis Hopper

The Dennis Hopper songs that will get you moving!

Posted on by victorfraga

Throughout his directorial films, American filmmaker, actor, and visual artist Dennis Hopper used music, songs, and sound to convey several important factors. Using lyrical insinuations, Hopper provided indications to the audience of the emotional headspace that his characters inhabited. He also used music to signpost the era in which the narratives took place and to construct the political and societal conditions of the times and how these impacted upon the lives of his protagonists. While all this sounds serious and deeply considered on Hopper’s part, he also knew that a good song matched with some iconic cinematography could propel his films beyond the cinema screen and into the popular culture.

Hopper’s directorial debut film Easy Rider (1969) is an obvious contender for how Hopper used music to complement the visuals. It was one of the first films to pull popular songs by already established bands and artists and place them on to the soundtrack. Among other components that made Easy Rider a hit with critics and audiences, the use of music was the most compelling and influential to other filmmakers of the time who could use popular songs to create instantaneous emotional connections for the audience to savor.

Hopper’s use of music and sound on his second feature The Last Movie (1971), was a continuation of Easy Rider’s folk rock style yet included elements of sound collage, indigenous music and chant, with an abrupt and destabilising fast cut editing technique that meant the music never lingered for long. Out of the Blue (1980), Hopper’s third film, used punk rock music, Elvis Presley songs, and Neil Young’s folky compositions, to portray the generational war, family dysfunction, sexual abuse, and addiction that takes place within the film. Hopper’s fourth film, Colors (1988) came loaded with hip-hop and rap standards that soundtracked the life and urban environment of the predominantly Black and Latino gang members who ran the streets of Los Angeles. The soundtrack brought hip-hop and rap to a much wider audience through its use within the film. The neo-noir film, The Hot Spot (1990), saw Hopper commission a hybrid of blues and jazz music by Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker. It was a steamy, simmering composition that befitted the tale of obsession, lust, and betrayal set within the putrid Texan heat.

To demonstrate the importance of music in Hopper’s films, I’ve selected 10 essential tracks from Hopper’s soundtracks that in some way define the films, the eras, and the surrounding cultural landscapes that the narratives revolve around. It is in no way definitive, but it’s a great sampler of how music played an inventive, and meaningful role within his films. Let’s begin.

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1. Steppenwolf – Born to Be Wild, from Easy Rider:

If one song has become synonymous with Easy Rider’s hell-for-leather iconography it is Canadian American rock band Steppenwolf’s 1968 anthem Born to Be Wild. Though not the first song to be heard on the soundtrack (that goes to another Steppenwolf song The Pusher) it lays down perfectly the freewheeling’ attitude of the first half of the film in which two hippie bikers, Billy and Wyatt (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda respectively), set off across the southern states on their custom-built motorcycles. Financially secure after selling cocaine over the Mexican border, they embark on an odyssey that sees them cruise through the sunlit vistas, wind in their (long) hair, and freedom on their side.

Born to Be Wild is an anthem that points towards a collective freedom and embracing the road in a state of love, understanding, and togetherness. However, while the progressive movements of the 1960s certainly promoted these collective values, Billy and Wyatt have dropped out of society completely and are headed out alone. Instead, their version of the American Dream is to get rich quick, ride off to New Orleans to attend the Mardi Gras festival, get loaded on drugs, and then “retire to Florida”. As many of their peers would eventually do, Billy and Wyatt have exited the idealism of the 1960s and instead embraced “individual freedom” over the collective wellbeing of American society.

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2. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – Bob Dylan, from Easy Rider:

On the road, Billy and Wyatt are joined by a normie Southern lawyer named George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) who tags along to New Orleans to visit a bordello he’s heard about. George’s betrayal for hanging out with the “longhairs” is punished by a gang of Southern thugs who beat him to death while he sleeps. It is at this point where Billy and Wyatt’s dream begins to shatter. Bob Dylan’s nightmarish 1965 song “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” arrives after the two bikers’ trip-out on acid in a New Orleans cemetery. It is the comedown song to end all.

Dylan’s lyrics reflect the death of the utopian dream of 1960s’ idealism, and that corporate power, materialism, war, and injustice would always overpower the alternative way of life proposed by the radical and progressive movements. Billy and Wyatt continue their journey, though Wyatt confesses that they “blew it”. They die when a passing hick waves his gun at them and it accidentally goes off. And so, dies with them the so-called American Dream.

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3. Me and Bobby McGee – Kris Kristofferson, from The Last Movie:

Unlike the soundtrack style of Easy Rider, in which Hopper placed popular studio recorded compositions over the top of his imagery, The Last Movie uses songs recorded live within the film itself. The recordings are rough, laced with microphone hiss and the sound of wind whipping in and out. Me and Bobby McGee by a then little-known folk singer called Kris Kristofferson is first heard as Hopper’s cowboy stuntman character Kansas rides past Kristofferson and singer Michelle Phillips harmonising the song on the side of a Peruvian mountain. The song would become more famous as covered by Janis Joplin for her 1971 album Pearl and topped the US music charts when it was released posthumously.

The lyrical refrain of “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” reflected the post-1960s disillusion that the progressive movements hadn’t turned into more permanent societal change.

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4. The Party Walk – various artists, from The Last Movie:

Alongside the live recorded folk renditions, the soundtrack to The Last Movie contains a chaotic and overwhelming mosaic of music and sound. Hopper took the overlapping aural assault of the New Orleans acid trip scene in Easy Rider and stretched it out over the entire film to create an enveloping, immersive, and disorientating experience. This merging of sound and music is best demonstrated by a scene within the film in which Kansas moves through a house party where every room is overtaken with a different form of music. This includes a harmonised folk song, a group of stoned partiers chanting, a clunking out of tune piano and a rabble of dancers. All the sounds overlap and blend with the voices of the party until the whole varying musical styles come crashing overtop of one another. Kansas breaks down in tears, overwhelmed by the noise and stimulation. This sound collage style continues throughout the film.

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5. My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue) – Neil Young, from Out of the Blue:

Hopper’s third directorial cut was the Canadian film Out of the Blue. Originally only cast in a small supporting role, Hopper took over the production when the original director and screenwriter left. Hopper rewrote the script, recast some roles, and injected the film with a nihilistic punk rock energy. The original theme focused on a young girl named Cindy (Linda Manz) who is saved and rehabilitated by the welfare state. In Hopper’s new take, Cindy – now named Cebe – falls prey to her parents physical and emotional abuse. She kills them and herself in a violent act of retribution. Neil Young’s acoustic 1978 song My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue) concerned the generational shift that was taking place in the late 1970s as the hippies’ dominance (Young and Hopper included) within popular culture withdrew to the sidelines and was replaced by the punks as the new countercultural force. It reflected the mood within the film with Cebe standing in for her generation’s dissatisfaction with the hippies’ inability to practice what they once preached and enact the changes to society they once talked about. Hopper holds the gun to his own head and the head of his own generation’s inadequacy.

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6. Out of Luck – Pointed Sticks, from Out of the Blue:

After seeing her mom shoot-up heroin with one of her dad’s deadbeat friends, Cebe runs away to the city. Her adventures lead her to a small, sweaty club where Vancouver-based punk band the Pointed Sticks are performing a kinetic live set. Out of the Blue fizzles with a punk rock attitude yet features very little music from the actual genre. Here, though, we are treated to two Pointed Sticks songs back-to-back. A live rendition of Somebody’s Mom and a recorded and mimed performance of Out of Luck.

In a film that offers very little hope for the outcome of the characters, this moment gives Cebe, and the audience a short reprieve from the darkness. Cebe is invited on-stage to hit the drum skins along with the band. For a moment another future is presented to Cebe in which her aspirations to become a punk rock star is fulfilled. It doesn’t last long, and the bright and brash stab of punk music is once again buried by Young’s brooding and deathly My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue).

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7. A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste – Mc Shan, from Colors:

Hopper’s fourth directorial film Colors came after a period of exile from Hollywood. Reeling from the critical and commercial fallout of The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue, plus the copious amounts of drugs and booze he ingested during the period, his work suffered greatly, and the acting gigs he was offered were mostly abroad. However, after getting clean and sober, and a triumphant come back with three stellar performances in Blue Velvet (David Lynch), River’s Edge (Tim Hunter), and Hoosiers (David Anspaug),all from 1986, he was handed another shot at directing for a major studio picture. Hopper used the story of two white cops patrolling the gang-ridden streets of Los Angeles as a gateway to explore the lives of the gang members and the system that allows predominantly Black youths to turn towards gang membership as a replacement for fractured family values and broken social structures.

The soundtrack to Colors was a compilation of contemporary hip-hop and rap music. Though within the film itself the music is buried and mostly heard in passing as gang members blast the songs from car stereos and ghetto blasters, the music is central to the characters life. MC Shan’s “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” details via awesome rhymes the reasoning behind why gangs exist in the first place and displays the negative aspects of being in a gang where “there is no turning back” and where life becomes about “fightin and killin”.

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8 – Go On Girl Roxanne Shante, from Colors:

Across his soundtracks, Hopper would embrace different genres of music to compliment his narratives. Using folk, rock, psychedelic, jazz, punk, and hip-hop to great effect. It’s telling though that most of his films center on male protagonists and therefore the principal voice of his soundtracks was also predominantly male. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Kris Kristofferson, Neil Young, Ice-T, Elvis Presley, and Miles Davis give voice to these male-centred perspectives. On the Colors soundtrack, Hopper features songs by two prominent female hip-hop artists. Let the Rhythm Run by the all-female group Salt-N-Pepa and Go On Girl by the female MC Roxanne Shanté. While the narrative of Colors, much like the rest of Hopper’s directorial output, sidelines female characters to roles as love interests, sex workers, or drug addicts, it’s worth noting that the female rappers featured on the soundtrack are nothing of the kind. Within the male dominated arena of hip-hop and rap music both these artists trailblazed the way for a shared space within the future of mainstream hip-hop, rap, and soul music that was to come.

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9. Coming to Town – Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker, Tim Lee Drummond, Earl Palmer and RoyRogers, from The Hot Spot:

The final trifecta of Dennis Hopper’s directorial career jettisoned the cultural and political elements of his previous four films and replaced it with narratives that concerned male and female relationships. Catchfire (1990) was about a hitman falling in love with the girl he’s sent to kill. The Hot Spot sees drifter Harry Madox (Don Johnson) succumb to the charms of two female characters. Hopper’s last film Chasers (1994) saw two military officers tasked with escorting a beautiful female officer accused of deserting her unit to military jail. The female lead just happens to be played by Playboy Playmate Erika Eleniak. The most interesting entry in Hopper’s final three films is The Hot Spot.

While the film was certainly adequate in acting and direction, and was his most flashy and star-studded film, the soundtrack is what it is really noted for. Hopper commissioned jazz maestro Miles Davis and blues guitarist John Lee Hooker, as well as an ensemble of esteemed musicians to compose an original score. The laidback guitar and deep vocal hums of Hooker encircle Davis’s lazy horn and together they both maintain a steady and competent groove. Coming to Town is a prime example of how the music simmers and floats around the film’s action.

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10. Bank Robbery – Miles David, John Lee Hooker, Tim Lee Drummond, Earl Palmer and Roy Rogers, from The Hot Spot:

Unlike his previous films, The Hot Spot’s composed instrumental score doesn’t give the audience a hint as to the inner workings of the characters minds. Instead, the score sits barely noticeable within the film. However, during a scene in which Madox sneakily robs a bank while the tellers are putting out an apartment fire across the street, the music becomes a focal point as the scene plays out and a tense moment in which Madox comes face to face with a blind bank patron. The music suddenly goes quiet and only the deep hums of Hooker’s voice can be heard as Madox’s moves slowly away. As he slips by and escapes without notice, the full band suddenly kick in once again. It’s perhaps the only example within the film where the music involves itself within the narrative. As a standalone record, the soundtrack is a simmering, sultry affair and without question a musicologist’s wet dream. As a soundtrack to a Dennis Hopper film, with those all-important signposts, and lyrical insinuations absent, it falls flat somewhat.

Just kill all hippies!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS

This year marks the 40-year anniversary of Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue. This movie marked Hopper’s third directorial effort (after Easy Rider in 1969 and The Last Movie in 1971) and, in a filmography of iconoclastic and uncompromising work as an actor and director, perhaps this film marks his most vitally charged and disturbing film. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, a 4K restored DVD/Blu-ray version of the film (click here for more information about the restoration project) is being released later this year by John Alan Simon and Elizabeth Karr of Discovery Productions. An interview with John Alan Simon accompanies this piece.

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Out of his mind

The story goes that at the tail end of the 1970s, Hopper, then an outcast from mainstream Hollywood film due to his substance abuse and wildman personality (see Francis For Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, 1979, for reference), was cast in a small Canadian television film production, which at the time was titled The Case of Cindy Barnes (1980). The film’s inexperienced director, screenwriter Leonard Yakir, soon jumped ship after a few weeks of shooting turned up no usable footage. The project was all but abandoned by the cast and crew. Seeing an opportunity to take over and direct the project, Hopper convinced the producers and backers of the film to give him a shot. With little to lose, they agreed, as long as Hopper could complete the film on time and within budget. Feeling the film was a potential lost cause, they also gave Hopper full creative control.

After taking control of the production, Hopper rewrote the screenplay in a mad rush, and cast the film in a much darker and nihilistic tone than what was originally intended. The film now dealt with the terrifying ordeal of Cebe (Linda Manz), a young teenage girl destroyed by abuse and violence at the hands of her father Don, portrayed by Hopper. In his role as director and screenwriter, Hopper also reduced a number of key characters.

Seasoned actor, Raymond Burr, for example, was a central character at one point in the film’s production, playing the child psychiatrist who redeems the story, but this role was reduced to nothing but a cameo.

The finished film, shot in four weeks and edited in six, and now titled Out of the Blue, became one of the most uncompromising films of the early 1980s. Predictably, it was a commercial failure, although the film was entered in competition into the year’s Festival de Cannes and played well with film critics. However, the film’s failure really came from the provocative subject matter that dealt with child abuse, incest, and the corrosion of the American family unit, which wasn’t a positive selling point to an American audience wishing to embrace a more positive and conservative outlook of traditional family values and patriotic vigor that was endorsed by the Ronald Reagan/George Bush presidential team run that was occurring at the same time. Reagan’s campaign slogan of “Let’s Make America Great Again’ was a reactionary statement to the ethos of Hopper’s generation and the artistic, and sometimes inflammatory work they produced. An effort to take America back to the time before the 1960s and erase that decade’s social gains was in motion.

Out of the Blue had a better reception critically and commercially in the European market, although it remained banned in the United Kingdom until 1987. At the time, The film gathered a cult following with audiences seeking it out at late night theatre screenings and finding pirated videotape copies to view at home.

Hollywood did not come crawling back apologetic, as Hopper had hoped it would. Instead, Hopper had succeeded in producing a film that was so disconnected from the mood in mainstream America that nobody in their right mind would allow his vision of America on screen again until it could be softened.

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Out of the stereo

One of the best elements of Out of the Blue, and one of its real driving forces, is the film’s soundtrack that perfectly syncs with the film’s energy. It seems only fitting that the songs Hopper chose to soundtrack the film would summon up a wide experience of emotions and the loss of childhood innocence and the darkness that followed. From Elvis Presley’s sweet and chirpy My Teddy Bear, to Neil Young’s brooding My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue). Young’s poignant lyrics about how “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” echo the nihilistic ending where Cebe, after murdering her abusive father, kills herself and her mother by blowing up her father’s derelict truck with sticks of dynamite. Hopper captures the darkness that lies at the heart of Young’s song perfectly.

Out of the Blue also incorporates live performances from Canadian punk rock band, The Pointed Sticks. After running away from home to the city, Cebe wanders the downtown and enters into a club and encounters the band performing live. She is invited by the drummer to bash at the skins as the band rattle through a rendition of their song Somebody’s Mom. This is the one act of catharsis within the film. Cebe is allowed to enjoy this one moment, and as we the audience experience the invigorating blast of punk energy, we’re also given a brief reprieve from the narrative.

The triumph of Out of the Blue’s soundtrack is the trajectory that takes music of the 1950s/1960s music, and the ideals of that era towards punk rock and its reaction to those ideals. The countercultural ethos that had originated in the 1960s had morphed into a critical backlash in the late 1970s. Punk, although anti-authoritarian and anti-consumerism, was also deeply anti-hippy. The long hair, flared pants, flowery shirts, and peaceful disposition of the hippies, had mutated into short spiky hair, tight bondage pants, pins, studs, and an aggressive and abrasive posture. The audience of Hopper’s 1969 directorial debut film, Easy Rider, who had embraced peace, love and understanding were now in the firing line of punk rock’s nihilism and Hopper was the one holding the gun.

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Down and out

What became of Dennis Hopper after the release of Out of the Blue is a sad tale, but with a redemptive arc that makes the downfall all the more intriguing. Consumed by booze and drugs, his health deteriorated to such a point that the late 1970s and early 1980s were a wasteland of bizarre drink-fuelled performances. His role in Frances Ford Coppola’s Rumblefish (1983) as the drunkard father to Mickey Rouke’s Motorcycle Boy and Matt Dillon’s Rusty James, is believable only because the drink is literally sweating out of his pores and damping his fill-fitting suit. Hopper was so out of it during the filming of Neil Young’s 1982 musical comedy, Human Highway, that whilst performing knife tricks he severed a tendon in his co-star Sally Kirkland’s hand, which he was later sued for. Yet, perhaps the role that best summarises Hopper’s downfall is that of a failed music manager in German director Roland Klick’s little seen White Star from 1984. Completely shunned by the American film industry, Hopper’s performance in this film is crazed, erratic and mostly improvised due to Hopper either forgetting or not bothering to even read the script. Klick points his camera and lets Hopper run his mouth and method completely unfiltered.

When Hopper did eventually get clean and enter rehabilitation in 1984/85, his career was in shatters. But with a few smaller parts in mid-1980s movies such as River’s Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986), Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hopper, 1986), My Science Project (Jonathan Betuel, 1985), Hoosiers (David Anspaugh, 1986; for which he was Oscar nominated) and Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), Hopper regained ground and respect from filmmakers and audiences alike and set him on the road to becoming a well regarded actor and director.

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Out of time

Forty years on, Out of the Blue still resonates with a kind of kinetic energy that only seems to belong to Dennis Hopper’s work. Every scene that Hopper directs within this film seems ready to explode into violence. Sometimes it literally does, as witnessed when Hopper pours a full bottle of whiskey over his own head in order to intimidate a guy who wants to take him outside for a beating. Or when upon hearing he has been fired from his job at a landfill, drives his excavator into the foreman’s cabin and then cracks open a hip flask as a toast to his destruction.

Most of the time, however, Out of the Blue simmers rage, an underlying and targeted anger towards everything and everyone. What was Hopper angry at? Not being recognised or appreciated as an artistic filmmaker? Not being regarded in Hollywood as a leading man? Allowing the ethos of the 1960s’s hippie movement to sour and curdle into the neoliberal hellscape of Reagan’s America? All of this and more. Most of Hopper’s anger is channelled through Cebe. She becomes the film’s anchor, hating on everyone and everything and by the end of her short and bright journey we, the audience, feel her actions to “burn out” are justified. In her actions, she not only snuffs herself out, but the entire misguided judgement of the previous generation that promoted peace and equality, yet sold it all down the river. Out of the Blue is one long fuck off to the past, present and future, which as Cebe, echoing The Sex Pistols, states is all “Pretty vacant, eh?” Certainly, the mainstream culture surrounding the film might have been vacant, but Out of the Blue explodes with ideas and a vision so bright and vibrant. Four decades haven’t softened it, in fact, the time lapsed has only made it more vital and more relevant.

All the stills in this article are from Out of the Blue.

Reinventing the reel, four decades later

Posted on by victorfraga

Dennis Hopper’s third directorial movie, Out of the Blue, which was released 40 years ago this year and still resonates as a vital moment in independent cinema. John has been involved in the financing, production, sales, and marketing of films such as The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and The Haunting of Julia (Richard Loncraine, 1977) as well as many producer credits on films such as The Getaway (Roger Donaldson, 1994), and took directorial and screenwriting duties on the Philip K. Dick adaptation Radio Free Albemuth (2014).Before his involvement in the film industry, John was a journalist and film critic, with the New Orleans Times Picayune and editor-in-chief of New Orleans Magazine.

In this interview, John discusses his career and his personal recollections of Dennis Hopper’s life and times and the production, release and restoration of Out of the Blue with his production company, Discovery Films. This is an edited version of the conversation; the full audio can be heard right here:

Hoppcasts · Interview recording from John Alan Simon, Restoration Supervisor on Out of the Blue

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Stephen Naish – Firstly, I want to tell you that my own copy of Out of the Blue is a barely watchable rip of a VHS version. If any film needed a restoration, Out of the Blue is it! What drew you to want to restore this film?

John Alan Simon – Out of the Blue is a movie I’ve been involved with for almost 40 years. It was a shelved film when I first saw it. I’d had the experience of successfully distributing The Wicker Man, which I had seen when I was film critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and then a partner and I managed to get the rights to restore and release it, restore in the sense that there had been cuts made against the director’s wishes, and we were able to, in some fashion, reconstruct it.

As a result of the successful release of The Wicker Man, I was deluged with lost or unloved movies to look at. Time Magazine had done a full-page article on me and my rescuing of movies like The Wicker Man and another one called The Haunting of Julia. In any case, I remember exactly the time and place of watching Out of the Blue, alone in a small screening room and I practically fell out of my chair. I thought it was amazing.

There was a lot of difficulty between the producers and financiers of the movie because when the original director was fired and Dennis Hopper took over, as an American, the movie lost it’s Canadian certification for tax purposes, and went from a sure financial winner to a sure loser, and though it played in Cannes as an official selection, it played as a movie without a country. It was also considered very bleak and despairing and dark and uncommercial, but I loved it and I was willing to bet there were more people like me than the ordinary film distributors of the day thought.

I reached out to Dennis, and he and I had lunch and it was an auspicious beginning because he came up to my little office in Beverly Hills and said “Oh wow, man, this is where our production offices were for Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)”. So, it was an immediate synchronicity, and I said to Dennis “I’m not going to it without your help”. We got Jack Nicholson to do a radio spot for the movie, because Dennis had told me how much Nicholson loved the film and we opened in Boston’s Coolidge Corner Cinema and broke the house record.

Dennis and I spent a lot of time together and he was very encouraging to me as a would-be filmmaker. I knew I was a writer and could write, but I really had a lot of qualms about directing and he said he’d teach me. He really was a very generous mentor and he taught me a lot about acting that influenced me later on my first film as a director, which was Radio Free Albemuth, an adaptation of a novel by Phillip K. Dick.

Back in 2010, the prints we had of Out of the Blue were getting worn and I was approached by La Cinémathèque française about restoring the negative of the movie, which was something we’d really wanted to do. The negative was in decent shape, so, along with help from The Thompson Foundation, I supervised the restoration of the 35mm negative and we were able to create two new prints, one of which we gave to La Cinémathèque française for screenings in Europe and the other which we used in the United States.

SN – Tell me about the process of restoration?

JAS – We did a lot of research and I’ve also been lucky in that a friend for a very long time, Robert Harris, who is the foremost preservationist in the world and restored Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), etc, and Bob has always been very generous with his advice on how to do things and where to go, so with his recommendation we ended up at a place for the digital restoration called Roundabout Entertainment in Burbank, California. We scanned the movie in 4K from the original negative and we worked to clean it up. I worked with a guy named Vincent Pirozzi, who really helped me supervise the process. Then I worked with a great colourist, named Greg Garvin, who also did a lot of the touch-ups, and we ended up with what I think is a spectacular 4K digital version of the film.

SN – Why did you turn to Kickstarter for funding, and did you explore any other avenues of funding?

JAS – In doing the Kickstarter, we raised some of the money that we needed for the restoration, and we also raised some privately, reaching out to people who we knew were fans. Interestingly, just before we started the Kickstarter in 2019, Elizabeth (Karr, co-producer) was listening to NPR and heard Natasha Lyonne on Fresh Air say that Out of the Blue was her favourite movie and she loved Linda Manz, so, we were able to meet Natasha and mention the movie. Natasha brought in her friend Chloë Sevigny who was a big fan of Out of The Blue and had worked with Linda Manz on Gummo (1997) for director Harmony Korine who we also knew was a big fan of the movie, and they helped support the film and came on as official presenters to add their voices of a younger generation of film lovers.

SN – The film’s soundtrack is perhaps one of its strongest elements. What has been done to restore the film’s sound quality?

JAS – Restoring the sound quality was challenging. I think it sounds pretty good. I was satisfied more quickly with the visual quality than I was with the sound. When Dennis recorded it it was a low budget movie, and if you watch the movie, he did some after-dubbing of lines of some actors. Anyway, the sound is good, good enough. We kept original mono and that is how people will hear it and see it, but we spent a lot of time cleaning it up and I kept saying can’t we do more, and we did more, but it’s pretty good!

SN – Did you come across any interesting titbits of information in regard to the film that were not common knowledge?

JAS – One funny story is that by the time I was releasing the movie, I had a deal as a writer/producer at Universal, and Dennis and I had been talking about a couple of projects we wanted to sort of write and make together and I said to the head of the studio, Ned Tanen “Hey, I got a couple of things Dennis Hopper and I are talking about”, and I remember the look on his face as he put down his coffee and said “John, if you ever say the words Dennis Hopper to me again you will never step foot on the Universal lot”, and then later I found out that Tanen had been the Production Executive in charge of The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971).

One small tidbit of information is that in doing these restorations you have enormous power to change things, and there was one shot that always felt too symmetrical to me and thought we should move it over and I reframed it very slightly, but I ended up changing it back to be Dennis’s framing. Then there was this one shot near the end of the movie that was so dark and we were able to get enough information from the negative that you can see just enough to see what’s going on.

SN – What extra materials will appear on the DVD release?

JAS – We’re still working on that. There’s an amazing interview that Tony Watts did with Hopper at around the time we released the movie that we’re hoping to include, we did include it on the original DVD release back in 2000. Also, back when we did the original DVD release, Hopper, producer Paul Lewis, and I did a commentary that we’ll be able to use. We’ll have the original trailer, which we’ve done a restoration version of and we’ll have a new trailer, and the Jack Nicholson radio spot. The star of the discs will be Out of the Blue as, I think, Hopper would have loved it to have been seen. When I was doing the restoration, I really tried to channel Dennis, and I felt confident in doing that because when we did the original digital releases, while Dennis was still alive, he always just said “You know the movie, you love the movie, I trust you”, so that meant a lot to me.

SN – Not only does May 2020 mark 40 years since the release of Out of the Blue, but 10 years since Dennis Hopper passed away. What legacy do you think Hopper has left on American culture?

JAS – The legacy that Dennis Hopper has left on the culture is an interesting one. He was always so kind to me in saying that I was the guy who resurrected his career as a director, because Sean Penn saw Out of the Blue in Los Angeles back in 1983 and that was the basis that Dennis was hired to direct Colors in 1988. He also made a good movie called The Hot Spot (1990), but it’s not really a personal movie, the three really personal movies are Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue, which I think is the best of the three as a work of art. I think Dennis came around to that viewpoint, even though he made it under such rigorous circumstances, rewriting the script in a weekend, completely changing it, shooting in four weeks, editing in six, and I think the pressure of that made it very like Dennis, very instinctual.

I think his legacy is from the movies he did as an actor and from the spirit of rebellion that he represented. Back when I was a journalist in New Orleans, I had the soundtrack for The American Dreamer, long before I met him and I remember this quote from it saying “I made Easy Rider sleeping on a mattress, I can always go back to doing that. I’m not going to sell-out to Hollywood.” Dennis had so much integrity as an artist. He shot Out of the Blue in long takes so that no one could fuck with it, no one could go to the coverage, and change it, change his movie the way they changed his friend Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) or Magnificent Ambersons (1942), where they ruined his long shots. And if you watch Out of the Blue, he really managed to make a movie that stands up to today as bleak and nihilistic, but so honest and raw in its performances, and like John Cassavetes, I think he represents the spirit of something I love in American movies, and in Out of the Blue he traced the decline of 1960s and 1970s idealism to the nihilism and decadence of the 1980s.

Some people call Out of the Blue the sequel to Easy Rider and I think you have to look at it that way, as a kind of commentary on it. For me, I just remember how intensely interested in human nature and the nature of art, Dennis was. He called his movies time capsules, and they really are, but because they are such admirable artifacts of their era, they also speak to all times and all cultures and all generations.

John Alan Simon is pictured at the top of this article. The other two images are stills from ‘Out of the Blue’.

Still riding fast half a century on!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

No movie crystallises the time and place in which it was made quite like Dennis Hopper’s 1969 road odyssey, Easy Rider. The film reflects on the schism of war and peace that permeated America in the 1960s. Watching it today, the stench of reefer smoke, stale sweat, beer and the boiling asphalt of the long highway linger on as the film’s two heros Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt (Peter Fonda) drift across the American landscape, chasing down the American Dream on their custom-built motorcycles. There only goal is to get rich, get loaded, hit the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and as Billy exclaims, “retire in Florida”. They call this land home, but the county, at least the mainstream aspects of society, is done with them and their kind. They are the US’s lost sons, rebellious, done with the hokey past and waiting for the future to be born, whilst not actively participating in it.

For the most part, one could watch Easy Rider today through the prism of nostalgia for a more innocent time, one that most viewers of the film would not have even lived through. An almost hopeful and naive optimism runs through the narrative of the film. The optimism is obviously misplaced and its makers know this for the film offers an underlying sadness, a futility in existence, and the improbability of ever living in a truly free society. For example, when Billy and Wyatt encounter a hippy commune basking in the hot desert and watch as they plant there seeds into a rugged dry hilltop, Wyatt declares that their harvest will be successful and they will prevail, even though the odds are stacked high against them. Billy, ever the pessimist, knows they are doomed to starvation and failure.

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Oblique criticism

Easy Rider never directly comments on the true-life circumstances the country was facing at the time; the Vietnam War, the Cold War, riots in the streets of every major city, a President shot dead at the start of the decade.

These events are not witnessed nor spoken of. And the film does not comment on the positive aspects of 1960s’ America; the women’s liberation movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending racial segregation and discrimination. Not only this, but the cultural shifts and events that were peppered throughout the decade that would come to fruition in the following decade (I’m thinking here of Woodstock, Roe v Wade). In Easy Rider’s worldview they did and didn’t happen, or perhaps it just doesn’t matter either way.

At least on the surface, the visual beauty and vibrant colour of Easy Rider did not portray a country in turmoil. Cinematographer László Kovács is perhaps the unsung hero of the piece, effortlessly opening up the spaces and letting the film draw in huge lungfuls of air and lingering on bright and vibrant colours. This is what separates Easy Rider from its biker-movie brethren; the sense of space and time spent rambling down empty freeways gives the film an expanse that engulfs all. Yet underneath this bright and shiny veneer the rot is clearly setting in, as witnessed by the opposition that Billy and Wyatt encounter on their travels. When they pull up to a motel on the freeway, the sign suddenly changes from ‘Vacancies’ to ‘No Vacancies’. They are not welcome. When they enter a roadside cafe, they are faced with a torrent of vulgar abuse concerning their ‘hippie’ appearance and attire. Only in New Orleans are they welcomed and this possibly has a lot to with the expenditure of cash stolen from George Hansen’s battered body (the hicks from the diner extract their revenge) on drinking and dining in a New Orleans pleasure palace.

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Riding into the 1970s

Easy Rider makes it very clear that our heroes are a part of a demonised and unwelcome tribe. It was a monumental little movie that generated enough heat, vision and revenue to change the direction of Hollywood, and independent movies alike, for the foreseeable future anyway. The film allowed the New Hollywood ethos to fully engage and for small auteur movies to be made in the early 1970s, such as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) , Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop (1971), and, of course, Dennis Hopper’s own ill-fated Easy Rider follow-up, The Last Movie (1971). The influence would also reverberate into the 1980s and beyond as smaller movies were steamrolled by the Sci-fi mega-blockbusters of Lucas and Spielberg and their ilk. Oddly enough, students of the New Hollywood themselves. Filmmakers such as David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino would look to Easy Rider’s DIY ethos, if not its exact content, to find success in making independent movies in this era.

For example: the film’s all-conquering soundtracking signalled a new and dynamic approach by incorporating already known and popular rock and folk songs into the mix. Tarantino obviously took extensive notes from Easy Rider when soundtracking his own movies in the early 1990s.

The songs included on the soundtrack to Easy Rider lighten and darken the mood where appropriate with songs such as Steppenwolf’s The Pusher and Bob Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m only Bleeding) casting a grim, deathly shadow over the narrative, whilst Fraternity of Man’s reefer anthem Don’t Bogart Me and The Holy Modal Rounders’ bizarre and joyous If You Want To Be A Bird allow for humorous moments to unfold.

Although in their early-to-mid-thirties, Hopper and his cohorts understanding of youth culture was clear in the choice of music. Every song in some way corresponds with the visual elements. It’s now impossible to hear Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild or The Byrds’ I Wasn’t Born to Follow without envisioning Billy and Wyatt rambling across the American landscape.

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The summary of an era

With all the weight of trying to define the era, it is easy to forget that it is often the improvised campfire interactions of Hopper and Fonda, and later, when they are joined on the road by Jack Nicholson’s George Hanson, which drive the loosely tied plot together. The ad hoc conversations provide some invigorating black humour and insightful, if slightly undeveloped, observations (“I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace”). Without this content Easy Rider could have easily become another exploitation biker movie, it is credit to Hopper and Fonda that they saw an opportunity to use this tried and tested format to also summarise an era.

Following the success of Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda began to distance themselves, both personally and professionally, from one another. A disagreement with screenwriter Terry Southern and between themselves over the authorship of Easy Rider’s screenplay was never fully resolved and fractured the relationship and artistic partnership. Fonda showed up fleetingly in the background of Hopper’s The Last Movie, but after that film, their on-screen alliance was severed forever. A shame as their onscreen partnership and offscreen friendship seemed genuine and relaxed and might have produced more films.

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Make America racist again

Easy Rider is far from perfect. Fifty years on from its release, what has changed? In fact not much at all and Easy Rider, and its director are partly responsible for this sense of stuckism. In the US, President Donald Trump is by and large a broadened out version of the small-town hicks Billy, Wyatt and George encounter at the roadside cafe. No prejudice is left behind. Immigrants, refugees, feminists, the poor, the political left, the unions. Anything ‘other’ is ridiculed as inauthentic and unAmerican to the proposed progress of American might.

In dialogue set round the campfire, George Hanson recalls that “this used to be one helluva good country,” and then goes on to talk about personal freedom. Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again” and Hanson’s point evokes the same principle of looking backwards to a time when America was prosperous and in control of its own destiny. On reflection it’s still almost impossible to decipher what era of American greatness Hanson and Trump are trying to evoke. The assumption is that any era they are discussing is romanticised and vague, at best, and is not any version of America that they ever actually lived through, perhaps never even existed in the first place.

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Pushing the envelope?

Easy Rider was a fair stab at societal commentary for the time, but despite its gallant efforts in attempting to explain that money does not equal personal freedom and anyone who follows that path is doomed, it’s also a deeply flawed film in that it ignored the plight of anyone other than the white hippy and the professional beatnik. Afro-Americans play no role in the film. They are only seen in passing and marginalised to the side of a road in shacks and shanties.

Despite pushing the boundaries, and in fact breaking some (smoking real joints on camera), there were many more that would have made Easy Rider a more inclusive film and a genuine article of the era of liberation.

To take it on face value, Easy Rider still resonates 50 years on. The content may have dated (though capitalism is an issue that so far has never gone away and still plagues us), but its value as an extraordinary piece of independent filmmaking and game changing use of music and visuals, the incorporation of political and societal commentary, and of course the iconic motorcycles and attire means that its place is firmly held as one of the most important and vital films to be made in the short history of film.

As the tagline for the movie stated: “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.” Fifty years on we’re still looking.

This is an edited and expanded extract from Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper

Do cowboys have fantasies?

Posted on by victorfraga

The movie that perfectly crystallised the schism of war and peace in 1960s America, Easy Rider (1969), made its director Dennis Hopper and producer Peter Fonda cultural icons. Easy Rider portrays two hippie drifters (also played by Hopper and Fonda) as they chase the American Dream on custom-built motorcycles across the land they call home, the same land that, ironically, does not want them there. The people they meet and the places they travel through define the 1960s in America. Easy Rider distils sadness, futility, and the improbability of living in a truly free society without ever commenting directly on the circumstances the country was facing, such as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the Cold War.

The film’s success at the box office allowed Hopper and Fonda free artistic rein in the environment of the New Hollywood. Universal Studios were happy to supply the then-unprecedented one million dollars and cede complete creative control to each of these lucrative stars for their next film projects. Peter Fonda chose to direct and star in The Hired Hand (1971), a lyrical, slow-burning revisionist western in which he played a roaming cowboy returning home to his wife after seven years away. Hopper took his million dollars and his entourage of actors, friends, and hangers-on into the high mountains of Peru to make The Last Movie (1971), a tale of the adverse effects of an intrusive film production company on the indigenous people.

Hopper had envisioned the film as being his first directorial work. He and Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1956; pictured below) screenwriter Stewart Stern had begun the process in the early 1960s. However, the film strayed so far from the original screenplay that Stern felt it was not “… an accurate representation” of his work and that Hopper “didn’t use the scenes as they were written in the screenplay and that he chose to improvise with people who were not up to that kind of improvisation,” One could argue that Hopper’s own sense of mythmaking got in the way of producing a straightforward narrative film.

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Too dirty for school

As well as directing The Last Movie, Hopper also played the lead role of Kansas, a movie stuntman who stays behind once the production company has left and goes native with the Peruvian villagers. Perceiving some sort of (black) magic in the movies, the villagers begin to re-enact the pretend violent scenes they witnessed using wooden cameras, only this time the pretend violence they saw during filming becomes very real violence and Kansas is imprisoned and beaten by the villagers.

Both Hopper and Fonda’s films—though brave and in some quarters critically acclaimed—were commercial failures. The Last Movie won the critics’ prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but its original New York screening lasted only two weeks. The film also failed to garner any respectable mainstream press or positive reviews. With the failure of The Last Movie, Hopper’s desire to make important, socially conscious movies came to an end, at least for a while.

He exiled himself in his New Mexico compound and waited for Hollywood to come crawling back for his bankability, or for Hollywood to catch up with his artistic vision. Neither of these things would happen for a very long time.

Despite all of this, The Last Movie is clearly an accomplished piece of art cinema. The film flows on a phantasmagoria of sound and images that conjure up a disjointed yet affecting experience. As Andrew Tracy, in his critique of the film for Reverse Shot, points out: “The overall effect is to remove the viewer from any kind of perspective perch, to erase the illusion of a guiding viewpoint and a stable base of judgment and force the viewer to confront the film as a persistently confounding object.” It is interesting to view the film as per Tracy’s description and to take oneself out of the narrative and observe the film as a singular artistic object.

The Last Movie positions itself as ethnography—a way in which one can study a culture and people by immersion. But this ethnography has now expanded to not just to include the indigenous people present within the film. In retrospect it is an immersive look at film culture of the early nineteen-seventies. The Last Movie is an example of Hopper’s desire to transcend film and art into an immersive and sensory experience.

However, the film’s title would be prophetic, as due to the critical backlash and commercial failure it was to be Hopper’s last directorial film for a nearly a decade. Yet it was also the first and last of its kind for a long time: an art house film made within the confines of Hollywood’s mainstream studio system.

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Dreaming, in retrospect

As a companion piece to The Last Movie, one must also witness the documentary film The American Dreamer (1971; pictured above). This voyeuristic film fills in some of the gaps and answers questions as to why Hopper’s relatively straightforward screenplay became so distorted.

The documentary was directed by Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson. Carson would later go on to adapt the screenplay for Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and write the original screenplay for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986), which would also star Hopper. The documentary chronicles the intense post-production of The Last Movie whilst also taking time to allow a tripped-out Hopper to theorise about life, film, art, religion, and sex. These stream-of-consciousness mutterings bear some resemblance to the madcap statements made by Hopper’s photojournalist character in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1976)

The American Dreamer adds something to the mythical quality that Hopper was attempting to establish around himself. The rambling interviews interspersed with footage of Hopper – bearded and in ragged jeans, gun under arm, walking over windswept landscapes, accompanied by rambling folk songs on the soundtrack – are for the most part evocative of the outlaws and bandits that once roamed the frontier wilderness.

The interviews reveal a great deal about Hopper’s intentions and obsessions regarding his film and with film itself as an art form. It also demonstrates the many distractions and temptations that Hopper faced in the aftermath of Easy Rider’s fame. Drugs, drink, and women begin to pull him away from the task of finishing his film within the given time and budget. One scene in particular is deeply uncomfortable. A group of young girls are bussed in to actively participate in an orgy with Hopper. With his manic stare, shaggy beard, long hair, and surrounded by lovelorn females, one cannot help but see visual similarities to cult leader and serial killer Charles Manson. The American Dreamer is a shambolic attempt to paint Hopper in the colours of an American folk hero. To be fully understood, it has to be seen alongside The Last Movie and in the context of that film’s artistic triumphs and commercial failures.

Thankfully we have an official release and a clean digital transfer of The Last Movie that will hopefully open up the appreciation that this film truly does deserve. For decades the film has been viewed through the lens of its own obscurity. This has meant that audiences have either had to see it via film print at late night screenings or a distorted VHS transfer. If one cannot at least appreciate the narrative (or lack thereof) at least the film’s magnetic beauty can be seen in the glory in which it was intended.

A crisp and brand new 4k restoration of The Last Movie is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 14th.

Find out more about late American artist in the book Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper, also by the author of this piece.