The Dennis Hopper Poll

I saw this on late-night TV sometime in the 90s. I found the female lead really at sea, I didn't think she carried the film at all. The most memorable scenes were of Hopper working in the garbage dump, wordlessly contending with oceans of trash.

I secretly agree with you about the lead. There are scenes where she’s quite awkward and unconvincing, and I tried to write it off as, the dialogue they gave her wasn’t good. (I think the film had two main screenwriters). She’s more naturalistic in other scenes. But Hopper and Sharon Farrell carry the film imo.

Just started Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles--really, how could it not be great?

Always loved this picture of Jane & Brooke - I think Hopper took it:

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6bf178f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3091x2048+0+0/resize/1200x795!/format/webp/quality/80/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F8b%2F3a%2Ffe45022548499702574aece81e3f%2Frozzo-insert-17-credit-dennis-hopperhopper-art-trust.JPG

In 1965, Hayward’s lifelong friend Jane Fonda and her French director boyfriend Roger Vadim rented a beach house in Malibu for $200 per month. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $1,800 today. That same 1930 house, since renovated, is currently available for rent — for $125,000 per month. You have to have much, much more money in the 21st century to live like a bohemian...

Robert Christgau said something related to that in his review of Brian Wilson's Smile a few years ago: "There are many things I don't miss about the '60s, including long hair, LSD, revolutionary rhetoric, and folkies playing drums. But the affluent optimism that preceded and then secretly pervaded the decade's apocalyptic alienation is a lost treasure of a time when capitalism had so much slack in it that there was no pressing need to stop your mind from wandering."

I mentioned liking Hopper's photography in a post above; the book singles out this photo, "Double Standard," as his most famous.

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AM144A_hoppe_F_20100831180328.jpg

I often think about the beachfront cabin in Big Sur that bohemian/single mom Elizabeth Taylor lives in in the movie The Sandpiper (1965). Would that have any relation to reality at all? I always assumed not…

love that cabin, it's the star of the film

Spooky connection: Hopper's grandparents on his mother's side (whom he was closer to than his own parents) leased their farm from the Clutter family of In Cold Blood fame.

Same night of the acid trip that inspired "She Said She Said" (3/4 of the Beatles--no McCartney, who was off with Peggy Lipton--the Byrds, Peter Fonda; Hopper wasn't there):

As evening came on and the LSD showed no signs of wearing off, someone showed up with a print of Cat Ballou, the recent Jane Fonda hit, to screen for the assembled rock stars. It was the drive-in version, with an irritating, dubbed-on laugh track.

Really? This was when I started to see movies myself, often in the back seat at a drive-in. I was only five or six, but I have no memory at all of movies with laugh tracks.

Never heard of that either.

Just finished the book. Most surprising tidbit was that Miles Davis's tune "So What" on Kind of Blue was named after a frequent Dennis Hopper retort to Davis.

Yeah, that was neat. The part with John Wayne on the set of The Sons of Katie Elder killed me:

Wayne seemed to like Dennis, and the feeling was mutual, despite the fact that they were at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. "He thought of me as his house Commie," Dennis remembered. "He'd get agitated about something and shout, 'Where's Hopper, that little Commie bastard?'"

And later, Dennis's brother's quip about Dennis's brain being replaced in the sanitarium with Ronald Reagan's brain.

But the material about his art collecting was fascinating. American pop art seems like such a fundamental part of art history - and always was in my lifetime - that it's hard to imagine a time when no one was sure if it was worth buying at all, even at $800 a piece or whatever.

He must have been incredibly rich (or at least theoretically, in the value of his art collection) near the end, depending upon how much of it he held on to. Unless he blew it all on drugs...I know I'll get the answer to that later in the book. Quite impressed that his photos were being used for the cover of Artforum in the mid-'60s.

Besides the subject matter itself, a big thing that makes this such a good book is how well Mark Rozzo knows his stuff. He knows movies, he knows art, he knows Hollywood (old and new), he knows celebrity, and he knows pop music--just finished almost a page on "River Deep - Mountain High." Also, he understands what a gigantic, Pete Frame-type constellation that moment is of interconnections and collisions. And he's not oblivious to the downside: Hopper's incredible hypocrisy with Hayward when it comes to certain things, something awful that happens after one of the greatest parties ever, etc.

That’s for sure. With books like this I’m normally jumping out of my seat every other page spotting a typo or a factual error or when the writer gets the chronology wrong. I didn’t catch a single unambiguous error in this book.

This sounds like a better Hopper biography than the paperback I read in the 90s, which emphasized that only snobs cared about Blue Velvet, his real comeback was in Hoosiers.

Real headz know the true comeback was in O.C. & Stiggs.

Finished up. One of the best books I've read on the '60s--takes in a lot. Further to a post on the David Crosby thread, a few people here are quoted as saying Hopper's Easy Rider character is explicitly based on Crosby (and Fonda's on McGuinn). Never one of my favourite films, but I'll give it another go soon. Had no idea Hopper was married for a few years to Zabriskie Point's Daria Halprin (still alive, as is Brooke Hayward). I want to buy a book of Hopper's photographs, but, as expected, prohibitively expensive.

So do you guys think I will like this book?

I buy books from this place all the time--you can get it cheap here.

https://bookoutlet.ca/products/9780062939975B/everybody-thought-we-were-crazy-dennis-hopper-brooke-hayward-and-1960s-los-angeles

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/02/the-untold-story-of-brooke-hayward-and-dennis-hoppers-hollywood-home

Brooke Hayward was a Warhol-level collector/hoarder of anything and everything.

Currently reading "Everybody Thought We Were Crazy..." and liking it a lot. I had no idea Hopper ran in the circles he did pre-Yosemite Sam phase. Funny anecdote about how he and Crosby were similar down to how they pronounced "man" as in "Look, maaaaan..." :)

Man I wouldn't even want to be a fly on the wall when those two were in the same room.

Calling BS on the "So What" story, as appealing as it might be, I mean I just repeated it myself until I looked around for verification.

Here are some experts from another locale weighing in.

But that's wrong that Hopper only went to The Actors Studio in 1959, didn't he first attend several years earlier, before being in Rebel without a Cause? I don't have the book at hand to check.

So in other words it is very possible, just that we have no one else's words than Dennis's at this point to confirm.

I see that Brooke started there in December 1959.

Randomly searching in the book for this I find Henry Hathaway going to a motel to berate Dennis Hopper for trashing a room and asking Jim DIckson's wife, with whom Hopper had been having an affair, to settle him down. This book is Redd Kryptonite!

Again, this is a staple of the Dennis Hopper biography, but Brooke Hayward indicated that Dennis, in fact, had nothing to do with the Actors Studio. Patricia Bosworth was there around the same time as Dennis would have been and could not recall ever having encountered him.

Rozzo, Mark. Everybody Thought We Were Crazy (p. 362). HarperCollins

Which reminds me, Patricia Bosworth's Jane Fonda bio is also pretty good and also quite relevant.

He did appear on Inside the Actors Studio where no doubt he was treated by James Lipton the way that David Crosby would be treated by a ... I'd better not go there.

Was Dennis the ultimate source of the "So What" claim? Who knows, it could be bs but I'd need more evidence either way.

I couldn’t find any other source. Must things I saw said “Hopper claimed….”

Most things

Dennis says

Dennis says
I’ve come to hate Pabst Blue Ribbon

One of these things I read this weekend said that Bob Gottlieb wanted Brooke to do a sequel to Haywired about the Hopper years but Dennis threatened to sue so it never happened.

^It's in that Vanity Fair article by Rozzo I linked yesterday.