Word: hoppers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hopper's name was taken off Hollywood's blacklist, and with studio financing, he went off to the jungles of Peru to make another visionary film, prophetically titled The Last Movie. Image rich but incoherent, it vanished almost overnight and so, as far as Hollywood was concerned, did Hopper, who went into a self-imposed exile in Mexico and Europe, where he acted in a few movies, and in Taos, N. Mex., where he had a house...
...Hopper's new films are done his way. Some, like last year's My Science Project and last summer's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, are best left off the resume. But one film -- David Lynch's Blue Velvet -- cannot be dismissed. An illustrated guide to Krafft-Ebing, Blue Velvet is perhaps the first film since 1972's Last Tango in Paris to scandalize its audience. At the end people are as likely to erupt in boos as to burst into applause...
...Hopper plays Frank Booth, a murderer, maimer, drug dealer, champion cusser, beer guzzler, helium snorter and Roy Orbison fan. Chiefly, though, Frank is a psychopathic sadist who tortures and humiliates a nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) for his sexual pleasure. "When I got the part, I wanted to reassure David that I could handle the role, that I understood the character," says Hopper. "I called him up and said, 'I am Frank.' I've been told that that remark caused the other actors some consternation...
That remark, yes -- plus a not altogether undeserved reputation as the Wild Man of Hollywood; Hopper has been shocking and irritating movie people for more than 30 years. Born in Dodge City, Kans., he achieved success at 18 when a TV role brought offers of contracts from seven studios. "I believed I was the best actor I knew at my age," he says. "That is, until I saw James Dean % on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. I realized I didn't know anything. I wanted to know his secret. 'Don't act it,' he said. 'Don't indicate...
...following five years in Manhattan, studying with Lee Strasberg and appearing in more than 140 TV shows. He also met and married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Producer Leland Hayward, and she introduced him to her friend Peter Fonda. Teaming for a series of low-budget motorcycle movies, Hopper and Fonda were ready to turn in their Harley-Davidsons when they decided to make just one more, for the money. "We saw it as a western, only on motorcycles," says Hopper. "We were the strangers in town, the outlaws." With Easy Rider, which Hopper directed, these cocaine-sniffing, drug-dealing...