Dennis Hopper, Remembered

I can’t claim to’ve been Dennis Hopper‘s biggest fan, honestly — the guy’s politics, for one, always kinda threw me off — but I was still pretty down to hear the news this past weekend that he’d passed away. It wasn’t a surprise, for sure, considering his fight with cancer, and he’d been looking pretty bad recently, but still.

See, while I didn’t always like the guy, I respected the hell out of him for being beyond-the-pale, out-and-out crazy, the kind of crazy that transcended his actual acting; when he played whackjob characters in films like Blue Velvet, Chattahoochee, and Apocalypse Now, it always felt like he wasn’t really pretending to be these people. They were just a reflection of his actual crazy self. And there’s always his 1983 visit to Rice (before my time in Houston, sadly), where Hopper fucking blew himself up at a local racetrack.

That said, my absolute favorite performance of his is one of his most low-key and down-to-earth: his portrayal of Clarence’s dad Clifford Worley in 1993’s True Romance. The film’s one of my all-time favorites, a sorely underrated classic written by Tarantino but directed by Tony Scott, thank God (I’ve got the screenplay, and it is way over-the-top bloody and not nearly the sweetly-cracked love story the finished movie ended up being), and this scene is a large part of why, as well as why I’ve always at least respected both Hopper and costar Christopher Walken. And no, this is in no way SFW…:

We may’ve had our differences, Mr. Hopper, but I’m sorry to see you go…