Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper

An American actor, filmmaker and artist. Film critic Matthew Hays notes that no other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper.
 
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Permanent Tag: Celebrities Rating: Amazing Hits: 636 Comments: 0 Dennis Hopper: Dynamite Death Chair Dennis Hopper: Dynamite Death Chair It wasn't just a strange night; it was a Dennis Hopper night. It had started at the Rice Media Center, but now, here we were, at the Big H Speedway, where hurtling steel and engine thunder split the air with the thrill of victory and spinout. We weren't here to watch the race, though. We were here to watch Hopper blow himself up. As our half-dozen school buses pulled to a stop in a vacant area on the periphery of the track, the final race of the night was winding down. Some pretty ugly vehicles lurched and slid around that dinky oval track. The raw clay surface was packed to the density of stone and slicked by grease and damp night air, and the cars looked more like go-carts on steroids than something you'd see at Le Mans. As the drivers clashed and jostled for final position, the announcer's amplified voice, nasal and filled with bored indulgence, hung limply in the oily air. "Stick around after the race, folks," he intoned. "Watch a famous Hollywood film personality perform the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act. That's right, folks, he'll sit in a chair with six sticks of dynamite and light the fuse. Will the flagman please come out and flag him as he comes down?" The year was 1983, and Hopper was at the media center to screen his latest movie, Out of the Blue, and deliver a lecture. The film, a classic of nihilism, portrayed the ultimate dysfunctional family. The father, played by Hopper, is an ex-biker-turned-truck-driver who crashes into a school bus, killing all the children aboard, and the mother is a junkie. No wonder their daughter, a seminal punker in a huge leather jacket, finds it difficult to cope. In the end she kills her parents and blows herself up in the derelict school bus. It wasn't a bad film, but it was grim. Hopper's "lecture" wasn't particularly grim, but it certainly was dysfunctional. He was too drunk and stoned to stand in front of us, so he stayed in the projection booth and rambled on for 20 or 30 bizarre minutes. I couldn't tell you what he talked about; I'm not sure he really talked about anything. The one thing that did register, however, was that he wanted to blow himself up in the stadium parking lot. As it turned out, Houston fire marshals wouldn't let him set off the explosion, so Hopper had to take us outside the city limits where he would be allowed to detonate in peace. That's Dennis Hopper for you-always pushed to the limits. Someone rented enough school buses to haul the whole Rice audience to the Big H, on Houston's northside, to watch the explosion. The motif of explosions and school buses remained consistent enough that some of us may even have felt a touch of paranoia as we boarded. At Big H we waited, and at last Hopper stepped onto the track. He'd been with us all evening, yet it was the first time most of us had seen him. He looks taller in real life. Behind him a stunt coordinator and accomplices set up the Russian Dynamite Death Chair. It looked just like a big cardboard box covered with tin foil, but six sticks of dynamite make one heck of a whoopee cushion. At last it was ready and Hopper and his stunt coordinator approached. The coordinator talked to Hopper, gestured to the chair, talked some more, then moved off. Way off. Hopper crouched in the chair. The police pressed the rapt crowd back. Hopper lit a match, and the breezy air went silent with expectation. The wind blew out the match. He lit another, and it too went out. And another. It didn't take much imagination to hear him cursing the damp, brisk air and cruddy matches. He struck the whole pack of them all at once. That did the trick. The sparked fuse sizzled for a moment, then abruptly blossomed into a brilliant flash. We were all slapped by an invisible hand, yelled at thunderously. Dennis Hopper, at one with the shock wave, was thrown headlong in a halo of fire. For a single, timeless instant he looked like Wile E. Coyote, frazzled and splayed by his own petard. Then billowing smoke hid the scene. We all rushed forward, past the police, into the expanding cloud of smoke, excited, apprehensive, and no less expectant than we had been before the explosion. Were we looking for Hopper or pieces we could take home as souvenirs? Later Hopper would say blowing himself up was one of the craziest things he has ever done, and that it was weeks before he could hear again. At the moment, though, none of that mattered. He had been through the thunder, the light, and the heat, and he was still in one piece. And when Dennis Hopper staggered out of that cloud of smoke his eyes were glazed with the thrill of victory and spinout. Jun 1, 2010 5:45 PM






 
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