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Hopper

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

James Dean to Hopper
"I saw what you did today. Today you were great."

Jack Nicholson to Hopper
"We're geniuses, you know that?
Isn't it great to be a genius?"

The chopper-riding hippie outlaw in Easy Rider. The prophetic madman in the jungle in Apocalypse Now. The terrifying psychopath in Blue Velvet. The kid gone wrong in Rebel Without a Cause. The actor taken under the wing of James Dean who longed to be the next Orson Welles. The hell-raising director who revolutionized Hollywood. An enigmatic man from Dodge City, Kansas, on an endless quest to realize the American Dream.

Dennis Hopper has been described as a rebel, an icon, an addict plagued by demons, and one of the most important champions of the pop-art movement. Friend to Warhol, muse to David Lynch, mentor to Sean Penn, champion of Ice-T, Dennis Hopper built a career that was a half-century of rebellion waged at the edge of American popular culture.

Tom Folsom's Hopper is a wild ride through Dennis's many lives. Featuring hundreds of interviews with Hopper's fellow actors, artists, musicians, and residents of Taos, New Mexico (where he spent much of his most manic time), as well as his ex-wives and many other people who knew him, Hopper takes you on an extraordinary—and sometimes troubling—journey. From Dennis's early days with his grandparents on a dusty farm in Kansas, where he watched trains go by on their way to Los Angeles, to his formative time in Hollywood as one of a bright new crop of actors straddling the edge of the studio system, to the rebellious 1960s and the start of the independent film movement, to the drug-addled 1970s and beyond, when Hopper staged one of the greatest Hollywood comebacks of all time—Tom Folsom has crafted a biography as unconventional as Dennis Hopper himself.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      You know actor Dennis Hopper. He's the one who made you feel uncomfortable in the films EASY RIDER, BLUE VELVET, and APOCALYPSE NOW. You never knew what he was likely to do, but you did know he'd be 100% committed to his choice. He defined a cinematic genre and lived his real life in the same unpredictable, raw, anarchic manner. This book is about that life. Narrator Ray Porter captures the essence of the book, reading with a hard edge to his voice that makes no emotional connection to listeners. It's unsettling, but that's exactly what Hopper's biography needs. However, Porter spills over into monotony, changing his voice only slightly and infrequently. The result is not unlike a Hopper movie: It's intense and gripping, but the listener needs a break now and then. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 24, 2012
      Folsom, whose previous works include The Mad Ones and Mr. Untouchable, focuses here on actor Dennis Hopper’s monumental successes and failures, like Easy Rider and The Last Movie, respectively, while nicely capturing the essence of other aspects of the actor’s life—his Kansas childhood, rehab stints, and pitch-man career—in short, lively vignettes. Though it is nearly impossible to put down on paper the life of a man who was so motivated by visions real and imagined, Folsom does an admirable job capturing Hopper’s manic and spirited personality in prose, as when he describes the actor’s adopted home of Taos, N.Mex.: “ hidden plateau, damp and lush and glowing iridescent in the hallucinatory light when filtered through the thin alpine air illuminated everything in Technicolor.” Still, even with Folsom’s exhaustive research and incisive perception, the book doesn’t fully explain the mystery of Dennis Hopper, but that in itself is a fitting homage to this once great yet enigmatic entertainer

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  • English

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