Predictably, it was a commercial failure, although the film was entered in competition into the year’s Festival de Cannes and played well with film critics. The finished film, shot in four weeks and edited in six, and now titled Out of the Blue, became one of the most uncompromising films of the early 1980s. Seasoned actor, Raymond Burr, for example, was a central character at one point in the film’s production, playing the child psychiatrist who redeems the story, but this role was reduced to nothing but a cameo. In his role as director and screenwriter, Hopper also reduced a number of key characters. The film now dealt with the terrifying ordeal of Cebe (Linda Manz), a young teenage girl destroyed by abuse and violence at the hands of her father Don, portrayed by Hopper. Feeling the film was a potential lost cause, they also gave Hopper full creative control.Īfter taking control of the production, Hopper rewrote the screenplay in a mad rush, and cast the film in a much darker and nihilistic tone than what was originally intended. With little to lose, they agreed, as long as Hopper could complete the film on time and within budget. Seeing an opportunity to take over and direct the project, Hopper convinced the producers and backers of the film to give him a shot. The project was all but abandoned by the cast and crew. The film’s inexperienced director, screenwriter Leonard Yakir, soon jumped ship after a few weeks of shooting turned up no usable footage. The story goes that at the tail end of the 1970s, Hopper, then an outcast from mainstream Hollywood film due to his substance abuse and wildman personality (see Francis For Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, 1979, for reference), was cast in a small Canadian television film production, which at the time was titled The Case of Cindy Barnes (1980). An interview with John Alan Simon accompanies this piece. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, a 4K restored DVD/Blu-ray version of the film ( click here for more information about the restoration project) is being released later this year by John Alan Simon and Elizabeth Karr of Discovery Productions. This movie marked Hopper’s third directorial effort (after Easy Rider in 1969 and The Last Movie in 1971) and, in a filmography of iconoclastic and uncompromising work as an actor and director, perhaps this film marks his most vitally charged and disturbing film. (In retrospect, that’s a great suggestion.) Instead they focus on scenes of him enjoying a bathtub menage a trois and shooting guns out in the New Mexico desert.This year marks the 40-year anniversary of Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue. The director grows increasingly impatient with the inexperienced documentarians, complaining that they’re distorting the scenes they hope to capture and wishing they’d pay more attention to his still-photography career. (Hopper had, after all, just visited Charles Manson in jail.) They seem to be the ones responsible for trucking in a dozen or more women in for a contrived, prolonged slumber party that brings out the worst in Hopper at some points in his touchy-feely chats with his new ladyfriends, he looks like a man learning how to start a cult. But as we settle into the Taos house where Hopper holds druggy bull-sessions, the filmmakers are too indulgent of his hedonistic posturing. This understandable bit of self-delusion aside, the doc’s first half offers an often appealing look at an artist who describes his “very, very unhappy” and lonely childhood in aching terms and speaks evocatively, if sometimes pretentiously, about his counterculture ideals.
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