HOPPER
For tickets to all five HOPPER films, purchase series packages HERE! $20 for members/$27.50 for non-members!
The odyssey of Dennis Hopper was one of Hollywood's longest, strangest trips. A onetime teen performer, he went through a series of career metamorphoses — studio pariah, rebel filmmaker, drug casualty, and comeback kid — before finally settling comfortably into the role of character actor par excellence, with a rogues' gallery of killers and freaks unmatched in psychotic intensity and demented glee. Along the way, Hopper defined a generation, documenting the shining hopes and bitter disappointments of the hippie counterculture and bringing their message to movie screens everywhere.
With friends Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson in front of the camera, Hopper decided to direct his own movie, and secured over $400,000 in financing to begin filming a screenplay written by novelist Terry Southern. The result was 1969's Easy Rider, a sprawling, drug-fueled journey through an America torn apart by the conflict in Vietnam.
His role as the feral, psychopathic Frank Booth in David Lynch's masterpiece Blue Velvet was among the most stunning supporting turns in recent memory, while his touching performance as an alcoholic assistant coach in the basketball drama Hoosiers earned an Academy Award nomination. While acclaimed turns in subsequent films like 1987's The River's Edge threatened to typecast Hopper, there was no doubting his return to Hollywood's hot list, and in 1988 he directed Colors, a charged police drama starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall.
Hopper contracted prostate cancer in the early 2000s, and died of related complications in Venice, CA, in late May 2010. He was 74 years old.
--Jason Ankeny
Films and Events in Program...
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USA
,
1969
,
94 min.
Director:
Dennis Hopper
Tuesday & Wednesday, August 3 & 4 at 7pm
Brand New 35mm presentation - Tossing wristwatches away, two bikers hit the road to find America in Dennis Hopper's anti-establishment classic. After a major cocaine sale to an L.A. connection (Phil Spector), free-wheeling potheads Billy (Hoppe...
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USA
,
1988
,
120 min.
Director:
Dennis Hopper
Tuesday & Wednesday, August 10 & 11 at 7pm
35mm Presentation -
Colors stars Robert Duvall and Sean Penn as partners on the LAPD's gang crime division. Duvall had hoped to spend more time with his family, but he's pulled back into active service because of a step-up in gang acti...
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USA
,
1986
,
115 min.
Director:
David Anspaugh
Tuesday & Wednesday, August 17 & 18 at 7pm
35mm presentation -
Hoosiers tells the true story of a group of underdogs who become champions. Set in the 1950s,
Hoosiers is about a hard-luck, unemployed college basketball coach (Gene Hackman) who gets a chance to coach a sma...
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USA
,
1986
,
99 min.
Director:
Tim Hunter
Tuesday & Wednesday, August 24 & 25 at 7pm
35mm presentation - The nude, strangled body of a teenaged girl lies on the edge of the river. Her murderer is her boyfriend, Samson. All the kids in Samson's dismal, dead-end town know who committed the murder. Trouble is, no one bothers to ...
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USA
,
1986
,
121 min.
Director:
David Lynch
Tuesday & Wednesday, August 31 & September 1 at 7pm
35mm presentation - Director David Lynch crafted this hallucinogenic mystery-thriller that probes beneath the cheerful surface of suburban America to discover sadomasochistic violence, corruption, drug abuse, crime and perversion. Ky...
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