It was the year that Oliver Stone became a household name. For better…and for…nah, for worse.

The Academy’s best picture nominees of 1986:

Platoon: The eventual winner. I’ve seen it a few times, and it’s a very ambiguous movie. Buried somewhere in this morality tale, is, I’m sure, a message. It’s real subtle, though

Hannah and Her Sisters: Woody Allen in fine form. Great ensemble cast. Best Supporting Actor winner Michael Caine called the Academy and said, “I’m going to miss the ceremony mates. I’m in Jamaica making the BEST MOVIE EVER.” He was wrong.

Children of a Lesser God: I think, I think…this might have been a play before it was a movie.

The Mission: There is nothing particularly wrong with this movie, but would it have killed them to make it a teensy bit fun?

What should have been nominated? Easy.

Stand By Me: I’ve got friends who say it hasn’t aged well. I hope they get hit by a train and me and our other friends can go looking for them.

Blue Velvet: Daddy likes to watch this movie.

Lucas: Funny, heartbreaking, and painfully honest. Charlie Sheen was on a roll this year. Here, he excels as a sensitive, nice jock. Get that…a high school football player in a Hollywood movie who’s not a total douche. And Winona Ryder. Oh my, Winona Ryder. Same friend who hates Stand By Me: Dude, she’s heinous in that movie! Me: Fine. More Winona for me.

Hoosiers: Can’t…watch…too…much…awesomeness…head…exploding…

And the winner for what shoulda’ won best picture? Hoosiers.

Watching a movie like Hoosiers, even for the second, or, oh, one millionth time, one gets the feeling of what it might be like… To be God. Even atheists can be somewhat down with this. Just wrap your head around the idea of an all-knowing, benevolent, kind and loving Being, even if you consider it a fairy tale. He knows how it’s going to end. He knows our foibles, our sins, our mistakes … and his knowledge of our deepest, darkest, most lamentable secrets is nothing short of intimate.

Now suppose He’s rooting us on every step of the way.

We cringe when Shooter (Dennis Hopper) shows up drunk at the game, staggering onto the court, embarrassing his son. The millionth time we see it, the cringing increases by a factor of, well, a million. And although we know, even on first viewing, that Jimmy Chitwood will indeed sink a shot to win the Indiana state championship, we are no less thrilled when it happens. In fact, the movie sets it up so that we demand it, with Coach Dale (Gene Hackman) calling a different play, for a different player. It’s obviously a psychological ploy by Dale and in turn by the filmmakers. Dale wants Jimmy to demand the ball just as the filmmakers want us to want Jimmy to demand the ball. He was the kid that refused to play. After a tragedy in his family, his guardian Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) helps him decide that maybe basketball has been just a bit to important to Jimmy and it’s time to unlace the Chuck Taylors for a while.

But Jimmy loves basketball. And he’s got the prettiest jumper ever put on film, at least this side of Jesus Shuttlesworth in “He Got Game.” But Jesus was played by Ray Allen, so, yeah, he’s got a bang-up jumper. Jimmy was played by Maris Valainis, who didn’t do much after Hoosiers and who, in reality, had been cut twice from his own high school team.

There are perhaps too many great moments to count. I love the conflicted Myra Fleener, who loves basketball almost as much as she hates it. I love the authenticity of those little sweatbox gyms; you can practically smell the wood from the planked floors and the leather from those old slick basketballs. The meeting in the barber shop, where a bunch of men who couldn’t be bothered to coach the team, tell Dale what kind of team he ought to be running. And hoisting the whole thing on his shoulders is, of course, the indisputably great Gene Hackman, whose Coach Dale yearns for a redemption that he may not have the right to earn.

We’re rooting for him every step of the way.

About that oft forgotten and abandoned piece of real estate called Indiana?!

It’s shot in a landscape-portrait, documentary style that memorializes a smaller than small town high school, basketball team?!

A movie suspended in a repeatedly evangelical universe that counts prayer as the major source of miracles?!

That set of profoundly un-Hollywood ideas had me thanking God for them as I watched ‘Hoosiers’ today.

Hadn’t I seen it before?

Well, portions of it.

That, however, was when I was merely on my way to one of the great fast-tracks for losers, full-blown alcoholism.

At that time, I was in too much of a hurry to contemplate even the possibility of being a loser.

The ultimate message of ‘Hoosiers,’ delivered with fully committed reverence from all involved, declares that losers, when joined in teamwork with fellow losers, can help make each other winners.

Of course, that is the underlying message of Alcoholics Anonymous: let go let God … and He will find you your “team”!

That initially preposterous premise has been miraculously affirmed in my life and those of countless other fellow boozers.

My life can be roughly sketched as a trip from being the haunted character played by Gene Hackman to that fall down bum of a drunk so irresistibly embodied by the late, one-of-a-kind, legendary child of the Sixties, Dennis Hopper.

My passionate commitment to having “range” as an actor spilled over into my life and … well, I was never one to live by half measures.

There’s a conundrum posed by Hoosiers, a mystical challenge that echoes in repeated contradictions!

One never gives up on human beings, even though they defy every ounce of your good advice.

Every human being, including those slaughtered in the womb by abortion, are Ordinary Miracles.

The Liberal opposition to capital punishment is based on that … but these PEDS, Progressive Enlightened Despots, still want abortion.

Abortion is the ultimately homicidal pedophilia!

Recently I learned that many people don’t acknowledge their own contradictions about life.

Progressives, like their favorite President Barack Obama, trot out their sympathy for criminals and Gaza terrorists and butcher their own infants with legalized abortion while they do it.

Then again, they haven’t had the mysterious privilege of having attended regular meetings with a bunch of fellow alcoholics.

The ravages of multiple heart by-pass surgery make my voice now sound like I still drink.

I haven’t had a drink for over six years.

The scars of the booze and cigarettes on my voice I now wear with pride.

You can actually hear it in the voice quality of a number of exceptional actors and actresses.

 Yup, they’re either heavy drinkers … or have been.

My favorite ex in the world of wine and whiskey is Elaine Stritch.

I adore that woman!

NO ONE could sing ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ with the torn genius of Elaine Stritch!

Ethel Merman could possibly get close.

The difference between Stritch and Merman, the better singer, was the profoundly piercing acting genius Elaine has that Merman could never approach.

Check this out to see what self-flagellating but excruciatingly hilarious pain exists in Elaine’s Unsurpassable Public Rendition of Ladies Who Lunch:

—–

There she is!

After hearing it, replay it to hear her voice on the word “laugh” when she says “everybody laugh” … or “hat” when she says “does anyone … still wear … a hat?”

There’s the kind of tragic insight you’d expect watching the star of Euripides’ Medea!

Or the terrified look on her face when she says, following one of her pain-soaked rages, “I’ll drink to that!”

Does that tell us anything about the infinite and painfully earned wisdom of Elaine Stritch?

And when she hollers, “DIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS”!!

Only surpassed by the drunken and desperately belligerent but heart-stopping noise of “Riiise! Riiise! Riiiiiise! … NINE OF THEM!

My favorite Shakespearean actor, William Hutt of Canada, performed King Lear and, upon dealing with the death of his beloved daughter, Cordelia, did much the same thing with the seemingly infinite repetitions of the word “never … never … never … “

In Stephen Sondheim’s COMPANY, Elaine Stritch was a veritable, standing, desert dry martini itself singing to her own demise!!

A female King Lear!!

Every syllable, sound and silence is such nakedly sublime self-loathing … “One For Mahler!”

For the fashionable prejudices against Mahler – shared I think by Sondheim himself – shared by more than those who can look down on The Ladies Who Lunch, read this.

When an audience is faced with such TRUTH!!!!!!

Here that applause???!!!!

That audience had heard from a Divinity only reached when you’ve passed through Hell!

What inspiration does it come from?

Infinite knowledge of the problems of addiction … and work, work, work … just agonizingly hard, excruciating work!

—–

That particular recording nightmare may have occurred because of … perhaps … one too many?!

Everyone in the studio – from Sondheim to the Conductor and many of the musicians – had heard Elaine AT HER BEST!

They and she were not going to settle for anything less.

The rewards are dripping from one of the most complete five minutes of music and theater I will have EVER seen in my 69 years — for I had seen Sondheim’s Company live and … well … my own, incomparably bitter and alcoholic mother was all over that stage.

Little did I know at that time I would surrender to the same addiction.

Elaine and I met on a Law and Order episode, during which she asked me, “Michael, what is the most erotic thing in the world?”

I quoted Kissinger and said, “Power?”

“No”, she said.

“Talent!”

In that respect, Elaine Stritch is still one of the most erotically dramatic stars I have or will ever have seen.

I don’t fall in love again when I view her Ladies Who Lunch performance.

I drop into awe!!

An aging theater GODDESS … “IN ONE” as they say … ALL BY HERSELF!!

It’s not just the naked power of her voice but the shamelessly nude honesty of its unforced and unpremeditated pianissimos … and its pauses … its bold and merciless silence.

And of course, the mesmerizing, hypnotic rhythms of Sondheim’s accompaniment, all underpinning the suspense over what Elaine Stritch’s Joanne can come up with next?!

It is, I think, Sondheim at his greatest and no one could serve that genius as unstintingly as Elaine Stritch did with Ladies Who Lunch.

Elaine and I are both from Detroit, Michigan … and, as Lily Tomlin once said, “I left Detroit when I found out where I was!”

Why?

Detroit, when Elaine and I lived in it, was just the biggest Hoosier-like small town in the world!

I’m 69 now and she’s 84 … and we haven’t seen each other for years.

But then again, I’ll never see Dennis Hopper … ever again!

Unless, of course, we’re actually allowed to meet on “the other side!”

Dennis and I worked together in a film called Reborn so this little tribute to him came too late.

God willing, Elaine, like hopefully Sidney Poitier as well, can sense my gratitude to God for having had the privilege to have worked with both of them and to have known them both as friends, if only for a short while.

As for Dennis Hopper, we both only had one brief scene together which went with unexpected simplicity and ease within only a few takes.

Other, much bigger stars have actually pushed the envelope of self-indulgence to vastly higher levels than Dennis did with me.

The only inconvenience he ever caused me was a late night impulse to hear his favorite rock musicians at about 3 a.m.

We were shooting Reborn in Galveston, Texas and the motel we were all housed in had paper-thin walls.

I and my wife Anne sat bolt upright in bed!

I finally got up amidst all the noise and went into the hall, knocked on Dennis’ door.

He opened it and immediately began his apologies, “Hey, man, I’m sorry, man … really sorry but I just had to hear my music, ya know? And when ya gotta hear yer music, ya know …. “

“Right, Dennis,” I said, “But could you turn it down, please … low enough so we can sleep?”

“Yeah, sure, man … sorry, no problem!”

Dennis was never a major problem for me during the brief time we worked together.

As for Elaine, the last time we spoke, she knew I’d begun drinking and she had finally overcome her own addiction and … well … I got the firm suggestions I deserved.

I didn’t really listen, of course.

Alcoholism is a dark tunnel only the addict would understand. Its initial welcome is heaven itself.

The exit from the tunnel, if there is one, is filled with the hell of many cold turkeys and pitch black despair about everything.

Only God, as far as I’m concerned, can get us out of it.

If you don’t believe in God?

You’ll die from the addiction to alcohol.

The saving grace, however, is that you learn how eternally blissful an addiction to God can be.

If you don’t believe me, check this out!

—–

Via The Telegraph: [emphasis added]

Against Hollywood typecasting, [Hopper] was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Republican Party. “I’ve been a Republican since Reagan,” he once said in an interview. “I voted for Bush and his father. I don’t tell a lot of people, because I live in a city where somebody who voted for Bush is really an outcast.”

Let us all now pause for Patrick Goldstein to scurry up an article trashing Hopper as an untalented whiner. It’s also worth mentioning that Hopper wasn’t quiet at all when he chose to support President Obama in 2008.

Here’s something else you might not have read about Hopper. Many of his obituaries include a colorful anecdote about an angry John Wayne chasing him around the set of “True Grit” with a loaded gun. But did you know Hopper credited Wayne with saving his career?

Via Wikipedia by way of a 1994 interview with Charlie Rose:

In a December 1994 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Hopper credited John Wayne with saving his career, as Hopper acknowledged that because of his insolent behavior, he could not find work in Hollywood for seven years. Hopper stated that because he was the then son-in-law of actress Margaret Sullavan, a friend of John Wayne, Wayne hired Hopper for a role in The Sons of Katie Elder. This role enabled Hopper to begin making movies again.^[8]

Hopper had a supporting role as “Babalugats,” the bet-taker in Cool Hand Luke (1967). Hopper acted in mainstream films including The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) and True Grit (1969). Both of these films starred John Wayne, and in both Hopper’s character is killed. During the production of True Grit, he became well acquainted with Wayne.

Tuesday, June 8th,the  irreplaceable Turner Classic Movies pays tribute to the irreplaceable Dennis Hopper with five films. Don’t miss “Easy Rider.” It will blow your liberty-loving mind,uhm, man.

Oriignal Source: 1975 Mugshot

We all knew this was coming but that doesn’t lessen the blow. Dennis Hopper was a legend, an irreplaceable force of personality on screen, and a true Hollywood iconoclast who changed everything.  Below is an obituary from the AP and a wonderful tribute video put together by Matt Zoller Seitz, a critic and filmmaker.

Hopper had been ill for a while, and so sensing this inevitability I wrote something of a tribute just this last month. Great actor. Great director. Great American. Terrible loss.

God bless the wild man with the gentle soul. May he rest in peace.

—–

AP:

Dennis Hopper, the high-flying Hollywood wild man whose memorable and erratic career included an early turn in “Rebel Without a Cause,” an improbable smash with “Easy Rider” and a classic character role in “Blue Velvet,” has died. He was 74.

Hopper died Saturday at his home in the Los Angeles beach community of Venice, surrounded by family and friends, family friend Alex Hitz said. Hopper’s manager announced in October 2009 that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

The success of “Easy Rider,” and the spectacular failure of his next film, “The Last Movie,” fit the pattern for the talented but sometimes uncontrollable actor-director, who also had parts in such favorites as “Apocalypse Now” and “Hoosiers.” He was a two-time Academy Award nominee, and in March 2010, was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

After a promising start that included roles in two James Dean films, Hopper’s acting career had languished as he developed a reputation for throwing tantrums and abusing alcohol and drugs. On the set of “True Grit,” Hopper so angered John Wayne that the star reportedly chased Hopper with a loaded gun.

He married five times and led a dramatic life right to the end. In January 2010, Hopper filed to end his 14-year marriage to Victoria Hopper, who stated in court filings that the actor was seeking to cut her out of her inheritance, a claim Hopper denied.

“Much of Hollywood,” wrote critic-historian David Thomson, “found Hopper a pain in the neck.”  

You can read the full piece here.

—–

The above video compilation is about as perfect an encapsulation of his career as you could hope for. Hopper’s a complicated guy who changed everything with his directorial debut “Easy Rider,” blew it all with the disastrous “Last Movie,” and then slowly climbed his way back to a career filled with a number of iconic performances. His portrayal of Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet” is one of my all-time favorites, his confrontation with Christopher Walken in “True Romance” is the stuff of legend, and what a testament to his range that this is the same actor who wrenched our hearts in “Hoosiers.”

There’s a taste of all those moments in the video, and much, much more. I would also urge those of you haven’t seen “Easy Rider” to give it a look. Not only is it a hands-down masterpiece regardless of your politics, but thematically it’s much more in line with conservative ideals (later in life Hopper would become a Reagan Republican) about liberty than anyone wants to admit to, especially the left. Just the fact that our easy riders don’t wear motorcycle helmets feels like a revolutionary statement in this burgeoning era of the oppressive nanny state.

You frequently read about how a film captures something. Well, few films capture the unique free spirit of America like “Easy Rider.” And the fact that our two protagonists are so wildly imperfect and misguided but still searching for something pure only made Hopper’s journey closer to our own. We’re not all cocaine dealers but we are all looking for our chance to get out from under:

Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em.

Truer today than in 1969.

While I’m at it, let me recommend “Colors,” a 1988 film about Los Angeles street gangs Hopper directed that should’ve dated badly but hasn’t, and his unforgettable turn as Lyle From Dallas in “Red Rock West,” a steamy, suspenseful piece of modern noir co-starring Nicolas Cage and the great J.T. Walsh.

Hopper’s pretty sick these days, fighting a terrible battle with cancer. Let’s hope he beats it. He’s only 74. Compared to Eastwood he’s a kid.

Allow me to explain. I’m not from around these parts. I grew up in Scotland, spent a decade in Russia, and arrived in the US three years ago. As something of a night owl I soon found myself confronted with America’s strange, televisual dream-world of nocturnal gibberish, and the even more perplexing national obsession with the personalities, rivalries and ratings battles that played out between the competing purveyors of this gibberish. The big one of course was Leno vs. Letterman, but who could forget the death struggle for comedic dominance between Conan and Craig Ferguson? Then there was the mystery of Jimmy Kimmel, floating around like some moth that had lost sight of the moon, detached from these wars as if no one expected him to succeed anyway. And lurking in the deep, deep darkness was the awful horror that is Carson Daly: charmless, entirely unfunny and visibly drowning in his own misery. 

What was most striking about these shows however was that they were all crap: boring, repetitious, filled with padding, and containing an endless stream of plugs for films and CDs delivered by sublimely tedious celebrities. I couldn’t understand why there were so many of these chat shows, why anybody watched them, or why — with so many writers — the hosts were at best only ever mildly amusing, and intermittently at that. Most of all I couldn’t understand the cult of David Letterman. 

Now I’d heard of Letterman long before I arrived stateside. Back in the late 80s/early 90s a UK chat show host named Jonathan Ross was accused of ripping off Letterman’s format for his own late night broadcast. It didn’t harm him — Ross is still going strong, paid millions by the UK taxpayer to periodically offend the nation, and his show is currently broadcast on BBC America. I also have vague recollections of Letterman actually taping his show in London in the early 90s. This was considered an event and was broadcast on British TV; I switched off after about ten minutes. In fact, the influence of American culture on Britain is such that the legendary battle between Leno and Letterman for the throne of Johnny Carson was reported in our papers, even though we couldn’t watch the shows in question on our TVs. Why we were supposed to care I am not sure; after all, how many Americans are interested in the ratings battle between “Coronation Street” and “EastEnders“?

Arriving in the states, however, I kept hearing the name: Letterman, Letterman. So I decided to give his show another stab. But every time I tried to sit through an episode this is what I saw: a smug, lazy old bore, seething with suppressed rage and bitterness. The bitterness was intriguing: it always is when you see it in highly successful people, such as Letterman’s equally over-rated comrade in entertainment, the legendary Paul McCartney. In McCartney I understand it, however: he’s jealous of Lennon, who everyone knows was the greater talent in the partnership. But what’s eating Letterman? Is he still angry about Leno? Or is it that he’s filled with contempt for what he does, considering himself above the whole chat show schtick? Who knows? Who cares?  Even when he caused outrage with his comments about Sarah Palin’s daughter I was more shocked by how complacent, how lazy he was. With an army of paid writers, this is the best he can come up with? 

Lord knows I tried to understand Letterman, to grasp his place in the entertainment fundament. I heard he was ‘good in the 80s’ and thought that perhaps the cult of Letterman was like the cult of Iggy Pop (five good records, the last one recorded over 30 years ago) or Dennis Hopper (“Easy Rider,” “Blue Velvet,” then nothing) both of whom retained goodwill from a rabid fan following on the basis of long faded achievements. One lunchtime I even watched half a Biography channel special, hoping it would help me appreciate Dave’s illustrious past. There was something about an alka- seltzer suit in there, I recall. But to tell the truth I was more interested in the story of his relationship with his former head writer, Merrill Markoe, who apparently created many of the popular spots on his show. Even the soft-soap bio-channel approach made it look like he’d treated her badly. 

Anyway, even with this blackmail scandal, I still can’t muster much enthusiasm for David Letterman: I’m more into the Jon and Kate meltdown, to be honest. Thus I am forced to conclude that perhaps Letterman is one of those aspects of American culture that just don’t translate for a foreigner. You need to have been born here for him to make sense, to have been steeped in the legend of Ed Sullivan, of Johnny Carson, to have been raised in the ancient mysteries of late night chat show nostalgia. Letterman is for the natives, like Root Beer or Beef Jerky. 

Except I quite like Beef Jerky.