{"id":126705,"date":"2025-09-10T03:38:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T03:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/126705\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T03:38:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T03:38:09","slug":"the-one-kind-of-movie-dennis-hopper-always-wanted-to-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/126705\/","title":{"rendered":"The one kind of movie Dennis Hopper always wanted to make"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dennis<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Warner Bros.)<\/p>\n

Tue 9 September 2025 18:45, UK <\/p>\n

Given\u00a0that Apocalypse Now\u00a0and\u00a0Easy Rider\u00a0star\u00a0Dennis Hopper\u00a0<\/a>had the most unbelievable propensity to shovel drugs into his system and glug remarkable amounts of alcohol during his film career, it\u2019s almost a wonder that he lasted long enough to have fame, lose it and then find it again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At one point, he let it slide that he was consuming half a gallon of rum, three grams of cocaine and some 28 beers just in order to keep functioning on a daily basis, and yet he still managed to put in some scene-stealing performances in the likes of John Wayne western True Grit and the astonishing prison drama Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hopper went from doing TV in the 1950s to the occasional movie, to co-writing and directing the counter-culture classic Easy Rider<\/a> with Peter Fonda, a drug-influenced road trip on two wheels that made a star out of Jack Nicholson when it was made for less than half a million dollars in 1969.<\/p>\n

That film proved to be both a blessing and a curse for Hopper. It received a Best Screenplay nomination at the Academy Awards, grossed $60million worldwide at the box office and has gone down as one of the most important movies made in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

However, he struggled to deal with the success and the fame that followed, and when he was handed money to make the ill-fated\u00a0The Last Movie\u00a0in 1971, it proved a misstep. Hopper was given complete creative control over the project, which was filmed in Peru, co-starring Easy Rider\u2019s Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson.<\/p>\n

\"Dennis<\/a>(Credits: Far Out \/ \tCannon Releasing)<\/p>\n

Hopper was on so many drugs during the production that it took him another six months to edit the movie, and by the time it was released, it was a commercial and critical disaster and affected Hopper so badly that he wouldn\u2019t make another film for eight years until Francis Ford Coppola brought him on board for his Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the early 1980s, Hopper\u2019s drug use had reached such horrific levels that he even staged a public suicide attempt by lying in a coffin and surrounding himself with sticks of dynamite before disappearing into the Mexican desert. He then finally checked into rehab.<\/p>\n

By the end of the decade and into the next, Hopper staged a quite remarkable comeback, appearing in David Lynch\u2019s Blue Velvet<\/a>, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, directing movies like the police action drama Colors with Robert Duvall, and then starring in movies as diverse as Super Mario Bros, Waterworld and Keanu Reeves\u2019 runaway bus smash Speed.<\/p>\n

That last film represented a bit of a dream come true for Hopper, who for a long time thought he would miss out on the genre he really wanted to do, saying back in the day: \u201cI would love to do a big action picture, I really would,\u201d Hopper said. \u201cI\u2019m never gonna be offered one, probably, but I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any kind of movie I can\u2019t make.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was certainly true, as over the next 20 years, a newly sober Hopper threw himself into all kinds of different films, in addition to a huge amount of poetry and painting. He even appeared on a track from a Gorillaz album, doing spoken word on \u2018Fire coming out of the monkey\u2019s head\u2019.<\/p>\n

He died at age 63 in 2010, but will go down as one of the most creative artists to emerge from the counter-culture of the late 1960s<\/a>, substance abuse or not.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Warner Bros.) Tue 9 September 2025 18:45, UK Given\u00a0that Apocalypse Now\u00a0and\u00a0Easy Rider\u00a0star\u00a0Dennis Hopper\u00a0had the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[59934,59935,96,20461,2839,22972,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-126705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-dennis-hopper","tag-easy-rider","tag-entertainment","tag-francis-ford-coppola","tag-movies","tag-speed","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}