There are a few things to say about Dennis Hopper - who died at the weekend from prostate cancer - that should be said.1) He didn’t just co-star in Easy Rider. Some media reports seem to have missed out the vital information that he was also the film's director and co-writer and therefore its auteur.
By making the film, which despite its low budget became an enormous success, Hopper effectively created the US Golden era of the 1970s - a period of unconventional scripts, naturalistic performances, daring storytelling. He also of course of course ushered in a new era of film music. At the time it was completely unheard of for a film to feature a soundtrack of wall-to-wall rock.
Even had Hopper never made another film, either as an actor or director, his role as Easy Rider's director alone would have made him an immensely influential figure in American filmmaking. Five Easy Pieces, The Parallax View, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Godfather, Minnie and Moskowitz, Chinatown, Mean Streets - all were indirectly his spawn.
2) His deeply memorable performance as the terrifying Frank Booth 
in Blue Velvet showed that it’s possible to play an over-the-top, larger-than-life character in a way that is thoroughly naturalistic.
Perhaps it’s no surprise the film failed to gain him an Oscar nomination, and not just because the Academy Awards routinely commit crass misjudgements. The Oscar voters love to award a performance where they can clearly see the technique and effort that’s gone into bringing it to life. This is why they adored Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will be Blood. Meanwhile many seemed convinced that Hopper – a man with an immensely colourful personal mythology - was merely playing a version of himself in Blue Velvet.
But there is no “merely” about the ability to pull a performance of such intensity. It is a sign of Hopper’s greatness as an actor that he was able to trick people into thinking that he was simply "being" on screen.
One obit referred to Hopper “chewing the scenery” in the film, but that certainly doesn’t describe the performance I’ve experienced. To convince viewers that a character as bizarre and idiosyncratically monstrous as Frank Booth was a real, three-dimensional human being – if this isn’t acting at its very peak, I don’t know what is.
3) Despite this, Hopper could could also 
play down-to-earth “normal” people with 100% conviction. I point you in the direction of his role as George O'Hearn, the best friend of Ben Kingsley’s love-smitten professor in last year’s Elegy. Hopper, the man we love to think of for all his screen crazies (Apocalypse Now, River’s Edge) as a well-respected, common-sensical poet? He had us believing it.
4) Dennis Hopper effectively “created” the audience for hip-hop in Australia. Yes, this is true. When the film Colors (which he directed but did not appear in) was released in 1988, Australian record companies and 99% of its music critics (with that remaining 1% represented by yours truly) had closed its ears to rap and hop-hop.
Despite the obvious cultural energy coming from Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, Run DMC, et al, this vigorously inventive black American music was treated with near-contempt as an alien form that would never gain any traction in Australia. Until Colors - the first mainstream film with a hip-hop soundtrack.
At a music industry reception shortly after the film's release, the editor of Rolling Stone Australia (a formerly staunch hip-hop denialist) sidled over and murmered something that nearly made me faint in disbelief: “Hey, the Colors soundtrack; you were right about hip-hop."
The album sold more than the expected handful of copies as young kids in suburbs across Australia sensed that a new wind was sweeping through the word of pop culture. Nothing was quite the same again.
Dennis Hopper - respect!
(Sorry about different fonts and odd text layout. Wrote this in Word and Blogspot has kept some of the formatting and not other parts)
