Tagged: Dennis Hopper

Blue Velvet: Dennis Hopper’s Black Leather Jacket and Bolo Tie as Frank Booth

Dennis Hopper on the set of Blue Velvet (1986). Photo credit: Jim Bridges.

Vitals

Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, sadistic drug dealer

Lumberton, North Carolina, Spring 1985

Film: Blue Velvet
Release Date: September 19, 1986
Director: David Lynch
Costumer: Ronald Leamon

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

After his early low-budget debut Eraserhead (1977) and adaptations The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984), David Lynch finally unleashed many of his cinematic signatures when the neo-noir thriller Blue Velvet premiered forty years ago today during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), one week before its wider release.

Blue Velvet‘s themes of disturbing violence and surreal absurdism among a neo-nostalgic Americana backdrop became Lynchian trademarks, as well as his cast of frequent collaborators like Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Jack Nance, and Isabella Rossellini. The movie also revitalized Dennis Hopper’s stalled career through his explosive, Golden Globe-winning performance as the chilling criminal Frank Booth—a psychopathic, amyl nitrate-addicted Roy Orbison fan with serious mommy issues. Continue reading →

Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider

Dennis Hopper as Billy in Easy Rider

Dennis Hopper as Billy in Easy Rider (1969)

Vitals

Dennis Hopper as Billy, cowboy-styled biker and cocaine smuggler

Across the southern United States from Los Angeles through Louisiana, February 1968

Film: Easy Rider
Release Date: July 14, 1969
Director: Dennis Hopper

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

The late Dennis Hopper was born 86 years ago today on May 17, 1936. The iconoclastic filmmaker had been acting on screen since the ’50s before he made his directorial debut with the groundbreaking Easy Rider.

Filmed early in 1968 but not released until the tumultuous summer of ’69, Easy Rider had been conceptualized by Hopper with screenwriter Terry Southern and fellow actor Peter Fonda, who would join Hopper on screen as the pair of freedom-loving bikers we follow across the country following a lucrative cocaine sale. There’s plenty more drug use along the way, from a few LSD tabs scored from a fellow traveler to introducing the wild-eyed lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) to marijuana, but the substances are secondary as Easy Rider allegorizes the death—or, perhaps, the contemporary redefinition—of the American dream. Continue reading →