On this episode, your host, film critic and historian Edward A. Havens III, talks about the late, great Dennis Hopper, his mostly forgotten 1980 film Out of the Blue, and how it is getting a new lease on life in 2022.
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The original 1983 theatrical one-sheet for Out of the Blue
Dennis Hopper in a scene from Out of the Blue
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On this episode, we take a look back at the long legacy of a forgotten classic, and its modern journey to recapture the limelight it should have grasped upon its initial release. We’re talking about the 1980 Dennis Hopper film Out of the Blue.
I would first like to thank and apologize to John Alan Simon and Elizabeth Karr from Discovery Productions. They sat down with me for a Zoom call a few weeks ago, and provided so much invaluable information about the movie, about Dennis Hopper and about their efforts to bring the film back into the public consciousness. However, the audio file for that recording got corrupted, so I am not going to be able to add any of their thoughts directly into the show as I intended. But John and Elizabeth were such so very kind and giving of their time, and from speaking to them, I know this film was in its best possible hands. So thank you for your invaluable assistance, Elizabeth and John. Now, to get to Out of the Blue’s current renaissance, we need to jump back a few years to explain who Dennis Hopper was, and how he got to where he was when this film came along.
Dennis Lee Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas in May of 1936, where he, his father James, mother Marjorie and brothers Marvin and David would live until the end of World War II. After a spell in Kansas City, the Hoppers would move to San Diego when Dennis was 13, and he would become active in the choir, drama club and speech team. Before graduating from Helix High School, Dennis had already started studying acting at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. After he did graduate, he would move to New York City in 1953, where he would begin studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio.
While at the Actors’ Studio, Hopper would strike up a number of friendships with his fellow acting students, including one student a few years older than him whom Hopper greatly admired, James Dean. Although they would only be in classes together for a few months, Dean and Hopper would, as the older kids would say, get along famously, and when Dean left for Hollywood to make Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, he would get small roles for his friend. Hopper would celebrate his 19th birthday while working on Rebel. Hopper, who admired Dean, was greatly affected by the sudden passing of his friend, but he would find a new friend with another new actor in Hollywood, Elvis Presley. The pair would, as the older kids would say, got along famously, and would raise holy hell on the streets of Tinseltown, although Elvis and Hopper would never become as close of friends as Dean and Hopper.
But Hopper would foster a reputation as being a difficult actor on the set of the 1958 Henry Hathaway film From Hell to Texas. Only 22, Hopper was adamant about how he wanted to play one of his scenes, regardless of how the director, who had been making films for more than thirty years by this point, wanted the actor to play it. Legend has it that Hathaway shot this one scene with Hopper more than eighty times over the course of three days, with Hopper refusing to play it any other way but the way he felt it needed to be played.
For most of the next ten years, Hopper’s credits would be mostly limited to B-movies and television guest spots. But it would be acting in these mostly forgettable low-budget films where he would meet and work with a group of actors who would help change cinema in 1969.
American International Pictures was a low-budget production company founded in 1954, which was mostly dedicated to releasing cheapie movies as double features to the drive-in crowd that would be primarily of interest to teenagers and young adults. Headed by producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, American International Pictures operated on a two-fold formula. The first was something they called The Peter Pan syndrome.
The strategy called for movies that zeroed in specifically on nineteen-year-old boys, based on the expectations that a younger child would watch anything their older siblings would watch, that an older child would not watch anything their younger siblings would watch, that a girl would watch anything a boy would watch, and that a boy would not watch anything a girl would watch. The second part was something Arkoff called… well… the Arkoff Formula. Every AIP movie needed to have six things: Action, exciting and entertaining drama, Revolution, a novel or controversial idea or theme, Killing, a modicum of violence, Oratory, notable dialogue and speeches, Fantasy, fantasies common to the audience acted out on screen, and Fornication, sex appeal for young adults. It sounds silly today, perhaps, but these formulas helped keep the company in business for decades, pumping out movies with titles like The Beast with a Million Eyes, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Terror from the Year 5000, and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. In the 1960s, American International became famous for two types of films. In the first half of the decade, it was Roger Corman-directed adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories featuring one-time stars who were then out of favor, and, in the second half of the decade, movies that exploited the burgeoning hippie culture, focusing primarily on drug use. One of those movies, the 1967 Roger Corman-directed The Trip, would star Peter Fonda and feature Dennis Hopper, from a screenplay written by Jack Nicholson. Upon release, the $100k movie would gross more than $6m. But, more importantly, it would put together three people together who, the following year, would get together to make a little movie on their own, that would end up changing the cinematic universe, even more so than Bonnie and Clyde.
Now, there are a great wealth of material out there about the history of Easy Rider. One could do a two-hour podcast episode about it and only touch the surface of how it all came together. I would highly suggest Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls if you really want to know more about the film, and a number of other films made between 1967 and 1980 that helped to define that generation. I’ve read it multiple times, although I’m not 100% certain I currently own it. I did not consult it in any way for this episode. But here’s the gist about Easy Rider.
During the shooting of The Trip, Roger Corman wasn’t particularly keen on shooting the acid-trip scenes that would have taken place in the desert, so Hopper and Fonda went out to the desert themselves with a camera and shot the scenes themselves, with Hopper directing. The scenes came out better than either of them expected, and Hopper was inspired to direct more. But they didn’t know exactly what they wanted to do, and they were having a hard time getting anyone to give them money to just go make a movie when they didn’t really have an idea of what they wanted.
One evening, while hanging out one night, getting high and fooling around with some guitars, Fonda and Hopper came to realize they had both recently starred in biker movies that had seen some box office success, and they would probably find an easier time raising funds if they made another one themselves. And, sure enough, the first person they turned to, Sam Arkoff of American International Pictures, was on board. After all, The Trip has been a hit for them, as had been The Wild Angels, the 1966 biker film that made Peter Fonda a movie star. But Arkoff was worried about Hopper as director, this movie being his first as director, and he wanted assurances he could replace Hopper as director if he went over budget. Fonda and Hooper instead went to see their friend, Bert Schneider. Schneider had co-creator of The Monkees television series, and he and his partner Bob Rafelson had just branched out into movies by producing the Monkees movie Head, which had featured Hopper in a small role as himself and whose screenplay had been co-written by their mutual friend, Jack Nicholson. Schneider had no problems with Hopper never having directed before, or even that the guys only had at best an outline of what they were going to do.
What they were going to do was take a couple production trucks and a couple motorcycles from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and just kinda film whatever happened to them as Fonda and Hopper rode in character as Wyatt and Billy.
One person who would not be joining them was actor Rip Torn, who had originally been cast as George Hanson, a drunken lawyer the duo meet in jail in New Mexico, and joins them on their trip. Legend has it that while meeting with Torn for dinner in New York City to talk about the movie a few weeks before shooting would begin, the very Texan Torn had become offended by Hopper rating on about a group of rednecks he had encountered while doing a scouting trip for the film through the South. Torn, who would a few months after this incident would attack his director, Norman Mailer, with a hammer on camera during the shooting of Maidstone, and Hopper would almost get into a fistfight in the restaurant, and Torn would quit the project right then and there. But Fonda and Hopper had a backup ready to jump right then, their buddy, Jack Nicholson. Nicholson would not have much time to create a character, especially one that was supposed to be from Texas. He would, in the spirit of the production, just kinda wing it.
But that kind of spirit would get the filmmakers a little bit of trouble, at least when it came to getting the film made and into shape. While the film’s official budget was $350k, Fonda, as the first-time producer of the film, ended up having to dig deep into his own pocket to cover expenses they didn’t expect. Like how to get from location to location, or where everyone was going to stay each night after shooting was complete. But, overall, the shoot went pretty smoothly, all things considered.
Except for the parts where three of the four bikes used by Fonda and Hopper in the movie had been stolen during production, and when they had a wrap party for the movie and sent practically everyone home… and then realized they still had a crucial campfire scene to shoot.
Columbia Pictures, for whom Schneider and Rafelson had worked for years, would purchase the worldwide rights to the film not two months after they finished shooting, before Hopper and Fonda were finished assembling the first cut of the film, for $350k.
So for all intent and purpose, the production had ostensibly broken even for the producers before anyone had even seen the film.
Except for one little thing.
The music.
Hopper and Fonda had ideas on the songs they wanted to use on the film’s soundtrack, most notably the Steppenwolf song Born to Be Wild, which had been released as a single in June 1968 while the film was in production, but wasn’t that big of a hit the first time out. They would also secure songs from The Band, The Byrds, The Electric Prunes and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. They would also try to land an iconic song from Bob Dylan, It’s Alight Man, I’m Only Bleeding, but he was reluctant to allow his version of his song to be used in the film, but he would allow his friend Roger McGuinn of The Bryds to record a version for the movie. Dylan would write a song specifically for the film, called Ballad of Easy Rider. Or, more specifically, came up with the title and wrote the first verse of the song, and then had McGuinn write the rest of the song and perform it for the soundtrack. In all, the production would spend nearly a million dollars, almost triple the cost of the production, in order to secure the rights to the music they wanted.
Hopper and Fonda would spend eight months editing the film down from Hopper’s first assembly cut which, depending on which source you trust, was either four hours long, four and a half hours long, or five hours long. Hopper was insistent on the film having a style unlike anything ever seen in a Hollywood film before, with a number of flash-forwards, flashbacks, jerky hand-held camera work, and jump cuts to create a fractured dramatic narrative not unlike what some people might experience during an LSD trip.
The Cannes Film Festival had invited the film to be a part of their 1969 competition, but with two months left before what would be its first public screening, Hopper was nowhere near finishing editing. Bert Schneider would purchase Hopper a vacation in Taos, New Mexico, and bring in a young editor named Henry Jaglom to finish the edit.
Jaglom would get the film completed in time, and while Hopper initially hated how Jaglom put the film together, the film would wow audiences on the Croisette, and win Hopper the award for Best First Work. Hopper happily accepted his award, and begrudgingly warmed up to the final film after that. Years later, Jaglom himself would have become a writer and director himself, and Hopper would star in Jaglom’s 1976 film Tracks, about a Vietnam vet who escorts the body of fallen comrade to the dead man’s hometown, to be buried with honors.
The film would open at the Beekman Theatre in New York City on July 14th, 1969, and it would set a house record in its first week, only to break that house record in the second week because the Beekman was able to add another show each day. And as the movie opened across the nation, it would break records left and right. In late October, after playing in limited release for fourteen weeks, Easy Rider would become the #1 film in the nation in its first week of a wider release, a place it would hold for three weeks. By the time it finished playing in theatres in early 1970, it would have grossed $41.7 in America and another $20m overseas. It would be the fourth highest-grossing film of 1969, behind Midnight Cowboy, The Love Bug, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Fonda and Hopper, along with co-writer Terry Southern, would be nominated for a Writers Guild Award and an Academy Award, while Nicholson would win awards for Best Supporting Actor from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle.
His nomination by the Academy Awards for the film would be the first of twelve times he would be so honored, although he wouldn’t win until One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his fifth time being nominated. Hopper would be nominated for a Directors Guild Award, and win a Special Award from the National Society of Film Critics for his achievements as director, co-writer and co-star, but no nomination from the Academy would be forthcoming.
Along with Mike Nichol’s The Graduate and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider would become a touchstone both in the public zeitgeist and in Hollywood. The studios realized they could make a lot of money from low-budget counter-culture movies made by less experienced filmmakers that rode the counterculture generation’s ever-growing disillusionment with the government and the status quo. Spiro Agnew, the Vice President of the United States at the time of Easy Rider’s release, would specifically point out Easy Rider as an example of the permissiveness of the younger generation, which, of course, only got people more interested in the film.
Based on that success, Hopper was signed by Universal Studios to make his next film, and he was given complete creative control to make whatever he want. Hopper would head to Peru to make a movie about movies, and challenge how audiences understood and interpreted cinematic storytelling.
The brazenly titled The Last Movie was inspired by Hopper’s working on a film called The Sons of Katie Elder, which was shot in Mexico in 1965. Directed by the same Henry Hathaway that Hopper had trouble with back in 1958, it was during his time hanging out in Durango during his downtime in the production that he started to think about what would happen to the indigenous people of the village when the movie finished shooting and they all went home, while all the sets built for the film remained standing near their homes and church. Back in the States, Hopper would call up Stewart Stern, who had written the screenplay for Rebel Without a Cause, Hopper’s first film as an actor, and the pair started to hash out Hopper’s ideas.
Hopper had actually wanted to make The Last Movie as his directorial debut, but he wouldn’t be able to find anyone willing to finance it until the success of Easy Rider. Universal Studios, after seeing what happened with The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Easy Rider at other studios, started a project where they would give five young filmmakers up to a million dollars to make a movie. Whatever movie they wanted to make, with the promise of little to no intervention from the studio as long as the films didn’t go over budget.
Hopper would be one of the five they would bring aboard for this experiment, along with Peter Fonda, who would be making his own directorial debut with a Western called The Hired Hand, Milos Forman, the celebrated Czech filmmaker who would be making his American debut with a comedy called Taking Off, special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, who would be making his directorial debut with a sci-fi movie called Silent Running, and George Lucas, who would be following up the expansion of his USC student film THX-1138 with a teen movie about one night in the lives of a group of high schoolers in a small Central California town called American Graffiti.
For The Last Movie, Hopper would not only have come up with the story and direct the film, he would play the central role of Kansas, a stunt coordinator for an American film about Billy the Kid that is shooting in Peru, who quits the film after an actor is killed during a stunt gone wrong, only to find himself involved with a group of Peruvian natives who are “filming their own movie” with “cameras” made out of wooden sticks, acting out the violence they observed on the movie set without understanding the violence they observed was movie magic and trickery.
Hopper would spend a good portion of 1970 in Peru shooting the movie, but he would quickly throw out the script and shoot whatever was happening that day, as his friends from Hollywood came down to check out what was happening.
Whether it was Peter Fonda, or Sylvia Miles, a recent Oscar nominee for her role in Midnight Cowboy, or Kris Kristofferson, or Henry Jaglom, or Shock Corridor director Samuel Fuller, if they were there in Peru to visit Hopper, or, more specifically, to come to the cocaine capital of the world to get some fresh supplies, they were in the movie. But he did at least make an attempt at the start of production to make a proper movie. Hopper would lose thirty pounds, cut his long hair and shave his mustache.
Once Hopper finished shooting in Peru, he would head back to his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, to start editing the film. But due to severe drug and alcohol abuse issues, as well as a marriage to former Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips that ended after just eight days, Hopper was having trouble finding his film. He would miss his studio-imposed deadline to have a cut of the film completed by the end of the year, and when he finally did finish putting the film together, a fairly linear storyline, Hopper would get mocked by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director of the avant-garde film El Topo, which was becoming a cult hit around the country at that time, urging Hopper to rethink the film with a more unconventional eye, as he had with Easy Rider. Hopper would tear through his original cut and reassemble it with a more disjointed, non-chronological flow, and a number of tricks used in post-production but not seen in a final cut, like an on-screen card that says “Scene Missing” or music cues that abruptly start in the middle of a song and end just as unexpectedly.
Reinvigorated by this newfound way of thinking, Hopper would turn in his final cut to Universal in April 1971. At the end of their first screening of the film, in one of the screening rooms on the Universal Studios lot, the projectionist would give an ominous portent of things to come. “They sure named this movie right, because this is going to be the last movie this guy ever makes.”
The studio had no idea what to do with it. So they planned to take it to some college campuses around the country and see what the kids thought of it.
At the first of these screenings, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Hopper would literally be chased from the theatre by angry students, dodging flying fists and calls of his being a sexist pig.
It would be the only time the studio would screen it for university students.
Universal would catch a bit of a break, when the Venice Film Festival invited the film to screen as part of its 1971 competition, where it would win the coveted Critics Prize. The studio would book the film to open at the East 59th Street Twins in New York City on September 28th, 1971. The critics would hate it, but at least for the first week, audiences in New York City were curious enough about the film to give it a first week’s gross of $18. But since it was playing on both screens at the Twins, it wasn’t all that good.
Down the street at the Cinema 1, Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge would gross $30k on just one screen there, and in its fourteenth week of release. The grosses would never get better, and after less than four weeks, The Last Movie would be gone from New York City movie theatres. Contrary to what Dennis Hopper may have said in interviews around the time, Universal didn’t just bury the movie after that. It would open in Los Angeles and Chicago and a number of other markets, sometimes under the title Chinchero, which was the working title for the film while it was in production and the name of the town in Peru where Hopper shot the film. But audiences would reject the film and its twisty turny timey whimy ways, and it would gross less than the cost to produce it.
And, as that projectionist said after that first screening for the studio executives, it would be the last movie Dennis Hopper would make.
Or, at least for several years, it would be.
Dennis Hopper would continue to act in movies for most of the 70s, and he’d work with some of the better directors making movies at that time, including Australian director Philippe Mora, German director Wim Wenders, and Francis Ford Coppola, who would bring Hopper to the Philippines for a small but vital role as a photojournalist in his 1979 masterpiece, Apocalypse Now.
While Coppola was finishing his own arduous journey in completing Apocalypse Now, which would effectively re-energize Hopper’s career, he would get a call from his friend Paul Lewis. Lewis was the production manager on Easy Rider, and the producer of The Last Movie, and he was in Canada, about to start production on a movie called Cebe, written by a Canadian writer named Leonard Yakir, who would also be making his directorial debut on the film. Lewis needed a strong actor to play Don, the father of the title character, a fifteen-year-old outcast named Cindy, who was going to be played by the brilliant young actress Linda Manz, who had just made a splash in her film debut as the main character in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Yakir had written a fictionalized version of a true story, about a young girl who had killed her father and a few other people, but had saved from a lifetime in jail by a kind psychiatrist. The film would shoot in Vancouver, British Columbia, and would benefit from a Canadian tax shelter rule called The Capital Cost Allowance, which let Canadian investors take tax deductions for their investment in Canadian-produced movies. The modern Canadian film industry would rise up in 1974, when the government raised the deduction limit to 100%, which created an irresistible tax shelter, and a consequent rise in the number and size of Canadian-made productions.
Along with Manz and Hopper, the film would also star Sharon Farrell, best known at the time as the lead actress in Larry Cohen’s 1974 horror film It’s Alive, and Raymond Burr, Perry Mason himself, who helped the movie qualify for those tax credits by being Canadian.
The film would begin production in the summer of 1979, and Hopper, who was not the star of the film, would spend much of his downtime hanging out with Manz, who was far more mature at 15 than most people twice her age. Hopper would find a kindred spirit in his co-star, who introduced the then 44-year-old actor to the joys of punk rock.
But after eight days of shooting, Paul Lewis realized the footage Yakir was shooting was not usable in any way, and decided to let his director go. Lewis goes to visit Hopper at his hotel room, and the two talk about Hopper stepping in as director. Hopper agrees to take over, but asks for a couple of days to rework the script. Come Monday morning, Hopper arrives on set for his first day as a director, with a completely reworked storyline. Cindy now has a much larger role than before, and there is a new character in Charlie, a friend of Don’s who causes a number of problems for the Barnes family, played by Don Gordon, best known for his roles alongside his buddy Steve McQueen in Bullitt, Papillon and The Towering Inferno, and a regular drinking companion of Hopper’s.
In many ways, Cebe would be Hopper’s personal therapy of working through his issues on camera. Don would now start the film as a truck driver who, as he drives his rig while intoxicated with Cebe at his side, plows into a school bus full of children. Fast forward five years later. Don is now getting out of prison, and he has to deal with the fallout of his actions. His wife, Kathy, has been doing her best to raise their daughter while her husband has been in the slammer, but she does enjoy the company of her and her husband’s friends, and their drugs. During a welcome home party for Don at their house, things get ugly really quickly when Don is confronted by the father of one of the children killed in the crash. And Hopper would use that scene, equally emotionally scarred and ready to explode into a rage at a moment’s notice thanks to his having drunk a number of libations before this man shows up to the party, to lay bare all of his own frustrations with his career and his life.
Another radical change to the story was to reduce Raymond Burr’s character within the story. Once the second lead in the story, his role as the psychiatrist would be relegated to essentially a guest star spot. But Hopper wouldn’t tell Burr this when it came time to shoot those scenes. For seven days, Hopper would shoot all of Burr’s originally written scenes, and then have Manz improvise moments she and Hopper had worked on before, which you can see clearly left Burr confused on-screen during the scenes used in the final cut.
But the film’s shining moments follows Cebe as she hitchhikes from her small town to Vancouver, where she hooks up the members of a punk rock band at a local club, even getting to drum with the band on stage during a performance, before things quickly go somewhere very deep and dark. Hopper and his camera literally follow Manz through the streets of Vancouver, capturing regular people reacting to the actress as she walks around town, allowing natural moments of ordinary people acknowledging there is a camera capturing these moments.
For once, Hopper would be rather economical when it came to editing the film together. He would keep the storyline rather straightforward but vibrantly alive. There is a definite beginning, a definite linear story, and a definite and unambiguous end. There is a great soundtrack featuring the music of Elvis Presley and Neil Young, from whose song My My, Hey Hey would give the film a new title, Out of the Blue. And Hopper would have the film ready in time to make its world premiere as part of the Palme D’Or competition at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, less than eight months after the start of production. The reviews out of Cannes were respectful, but the film would not make a distribution deal coming out of the festival, in part because the film would lose its status as a Canadian tax shelter because of the loss of the film’s original Canadian director and the reduced role of its sole Canadian star, Raymond Burr.
Months would go by, and the film would get picked up for release in other countries like France, but no American or Canadian distribution company was willing to commit any resources to any release, theatrical, home video or cable. 1980 would roll into 1981, which would roll into 1982. And it looked like Out of the Blue would become another movie that was misunderstood and ignored by distributors, destined to sit on the proverbial shelf forever. So Hopper would throw a Hail Mary pass, towards a film critic in New Orleans.
In 1982, John Alan Simon was a film critic and journalist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Several years earlier, Simon and a friend had persuaded Warner Brothers to let them sub-distribute a film for the company that had been released but not received terribly well, Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror film The Wicker Man, starring Christopher Lee. Today, The Wicker Man is a cult classic, thanks in large part to John Alan Simon’s careful handling of the film through his company, Discovery Productions, which included taking Christopher Lee out on the road, market to market, to generate interest in the film. The relative success of their release of The Wicker Man would get them written up in Time Magazine, and from time to time, Simon would get contacted by a desperate second-tier filmmaker who would hope Simon would give their film the same chance. He’d give them all a fair look, but most of the submissions he’d receive, he would be sad to say, were better left unseen and unloved. But getting a personal request from someone of Hopper’s stature really piqued Simon’s interest.
He wasn’t even aware of the film, despite it being the first film directed by Dennis Hooper in a decade. But Simon would soon find himself in Los Angeles on an assignment, and would arrange with Hopper to screen the movie while he was in town. In one of the many screening rooms in Hollywood, this time just off Santa Monica and Highland Boulevards, not half a mile from the Chinese Theatre, Simon sat down to watch the movie, and was blown away by the movie. He’d find it dark and funny, and an interesting juxtaposition between the hippie optimism of the late 60s and the bleak reality of the early 80s. Simon would call Hopper soon after the screening ended. If Hopper was willing to go out on the road to promote the film, like Lee did with The Wicker Man, Simon would help get the film into theatres.
It would take several months to get a distribution plan set, but Out of the Blue would finally open at the New Yorker and Waverly theatres in New York City on April 8th, 1983, more than three and a half years after filming. Whether it was curiosity about Hopper’s first directorial effort released into theatres after a dozen years, the positive pull quotes from esteemed critics like Robert Ebert and Vincent Canby, or if it was the Jack Nicholson radio ad where he proclaimed that this film was a masterpiece, New York audiences would give the film a good opening weekend reception, buying up $26 worth of tickets. Its $13 per-screen average would be the best in the nation that weekend. In its second week, the film would gross $18k, and after the second week, it would lose the New Yorker Theatre as a playdate.
The film would hang on for two more weeks at the Waverly, before it was replaced with a move-over of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. After New York, Hopper and Simon would hit the road, one city at a time, taking their one print of the movie on a road trip not unlike Wyatt and Billy’s trip in Easy Rider, but with far less drugs and nobody dying at the end. But a small independent film from a small independent distributor playing on one screen in one town at a time was never going to be a big success, and by the time Hopper and Simon finished their tour, the film would have grossed less than half a million dollars. That doesn’t sound like a big number, but they would beat the odds. They would take this quirkly, brilliant, misunderstood film, get it into theatres and prove to the film world that Dennis Hopper was back.
And Hopper was back.
In addition to Out of the Blue, he would appear on screens in 1983 in Coppola’s Rumble Fish, and in what would become Sam Peckinpah’s final film, The Osterman Weekend. In 1983, he would appear in Robert Altman’s attempt to make a teen comedy, O.C. and Stiggs, which would sit on the shelf at MGM/UA for four years, because they had no idea how to sell a Robert Altman teen comedy that featured the likes of Paul Dooley, Ray Walston, Tina Louise, Melvin Van Peebles and Dennis Hopper.
In 1985 and 1986, he would shoot four movies that would officially reignite his career: the Tobe Hooper black comedy horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Tim Hunter’s brilliant drama River’s Edge, which saw Hopper work with a talented group of young actors including Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Roebuck and Ione Skye, the basketball drama Hoosiers, with Gene Hackman and Barbara Hershey, that would give Hopper his sole Oscar nomination as an actor, and the one movie he will continue to be remembered for, quite possibly even more than Easy Rider, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. His Frank Booth was iconic, a scary psychopathic gangster who loved his Pabst Blue Ribbon and would constantly pop up on magazine lists of the best characters or best villains of all time.
He would make nearly a hundred more movies as an actor after 1986, and direct four more movies between 1988’s Colors, a gritty crime drama starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall, and 1994’s Chasers, a rather chaste comedy featuring Tom Berenger and Playboy Playmate Erika Eleniak that wants to be a modern gender-reversal version of the 1974 Hal Ashby movie The Last Detail but ends up being something less than the sum of its parts. But 1994 wouldn’t be too bad of a year for Hopper. Six weeks after Chasers had opened and closed in theatres, Hopper would play the bad guy in one of the biggest hit films of the year, once again teaming up with Keanu Reeves in Speed. And he’d keep working. He didn’t care if it was a big Hollywood movie or a little indie film. He didn’t care if was going to be released into three thousand theatres or go direct to video.
He was sober, he was having fun, and he was finally enjoying life.
Hopper would receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in March of 2010, less than five months after it was reported he had been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, and two months before he would pass away at his home in Venice, CA.
Mostly forgotten and unseen after its 1983 theatrical run, Out of the Blue would find a new life as Hopper was about to lose his. Just before Hopper died, John Alan Simon and his partner, Elizabeth Karr, would get an unexpected call from the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. They were going to be running a month-long retrospective of Hopper’s work as an actor and filmmaker, and they wanted to help restore the negative of Out of the Blue and use a new print as the centerpiece of the retrospect. The film would wow a new generation of cineastes, and Simon and Karr would be able to book the newly created 35mm prints at museums and film archives around the world. But after several years, those two prints were starting to show their age, as all 35mm prints will after hundreds of passings through various film projectors.
And in 2019, they would start a Kickstarter campaign to do a new restoration of the negative and create a new 4k scan of the movie, an effort which was spearheaded by Robert Harris, the pre-eminent film preservationist whose work on such films as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo would bring those films back into the public conscience.
One of the people who would let her assistance to Simon and Karr to help the film was actress Chloe Sevigny, who had acted with Linda Manz in Sevigny’s then-boyfriend Harmony Korine’s 1997 film Gummo. Sevigny would not only contribute to the Kickstarter campaign, but would travel to Venice, Italy on her own dime to help present the premiere of the new 4k print of the film at the 2019 Venice Film Festival.
Simon and Karr would also screen the restored movie for Linda Manz, who had left the film business a few years after the movie had been made, to raise a family far outside the glare of Hollywood. Sadly, Manz would pass away after a lengthy battle with lung cancer in August 2020, but not before signing a number of the original 1983 posters for the film, to help continue raising funds for the theatrical re-release Simon and Karr were planning for the film.
And forty years after Hopper finished his cut of the film, the newly restored Out of the Blue would make its theatrical debut at the Metrograph Theatre in New York City in November 2021. Actress Natasha Lyonne, who had seen the film with Sevigny and became a devoted acolyte for the film, would lend her name and support to the theatrical release, as would others like Ethan Hawke and artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel.
As I record this episode in the middle of February 2022, Out of the Blue has just completed an extended run at the American Cinematheque here in Los Angeles, and continues to play in arthouse theatres across the country, and will be making its Blu-Ray debut in March 2022 in the United States from Severin Films, and in the UK later this year from the British Film Institute, which will not only include a wealth of archival materials related to the forty-plus year journey for the film, but will also include an interview with original director Leonard Yakin, who had never spoken publicly about his side of the story until now.
And with that, I thank you for listening. We’ll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 71, Peter Bogdanovich and They All Laughed, is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered in this episode.
The 80s Movie Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.