Dennis Hopper dead

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news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100529/people_nm/us_hopper

Hollywood hellraiser Dennis Hopper dead at 74

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper, best known for directing and starring in the 1969 cult classic "Easy Rider," died on Saturday from complications of prostate cancer, a friend of the actor said. Hopper was 74.

The hard-living screen star died at his home in the coastal Los Angeles suburb of Venice at 8:15 a.m. PDT (1515 GMT), surrounded by family and friends, the friend, Alex Hitz, told Reuters.

In a wildly varied career spanning more than 50 years, Hopper appeared alongside his mentor James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant" in the 1950s and played maniacs in such films as "Apocalypse Now," "Blue Velvet" and "Speed."

He received two Oscar nominations -- for writing "Easy Rider" (with co-star Peter Fonda and Terry Southern), and for a rare heartwarming turn as an alcoholic high-school basketball coach in the 1986 drama "Hoosiers."

But his prodigious drug abuse, temper tantrums, propensity for domestic violence and poor choice of movie roles often made him a Hollywood pariah.

Hopper felt over-indulgence was a requirement for great artists. He once claimed he snorted lines of cocaine "as long as your arm every five minutes, just so I could carry on drinking ... gallons" of alcohol.

Still, his legacy rests securely on "Easy Rider." Regarded as one of the greatest films of American cinema, it helped usher in a new era in which the old Hollywood guard was forced to cede power to young filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

The low-budget blockbuster, originally conceived by Fonda, introduced mainstream moviegoers to pot-smoking, cocaine-dealing, long-haired bikers.

"We'd gone through the whole '60s and nobody had made a film about anybody smoking grass without going out and killing a bunch of nurses," Hopper told Entertainment Weekly in 2005. "I wanted 'Easy Rider' to be a time capsule for people about that period."

Hopper and Fonda were joined on screen by a then-unknown Jack Nicholson as an alcoholic lawyer, but it was not a harmonious set. Hopper clashed violently with everyone and Fonda later described him as a "little fascist freak." Their friendship was destroyed.

Hopper's 1971 directorial follow-up, "The Last Movie," shot amid what he later called "one long sex and drug orgy" in Peru, was a flop.

He was often gripped by paranoid delusions. In 1982, while filming "Jungle Warriors" in Mexico, he ran naked into the jungle, convinced World War Three had started. He was put on a plane home but jumped out onto the wing as it was about to take off, fearful that the plane was on fire. Upon his return, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for three months.

He starred in bad movies just for the money, such as "Super Mario Bros." and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," and turned down important projects that could have enhanced his legend, such as "Taxi Driver" and "Reservoir Dogs."

Hopper also found himself typecast as the psychotic villain thanks to such films as "Blue Velvet," in which he played a gas-huffing rapist, and the 1994 smash "Speed," in which his character rigged a city bus to explode.

Hopper mellowed somewhat in later years, becoming a Republican and a pitchman for the likes of Gap and Nike.

Outside of Hollywood, he was a noted photographer, painter, sculptor and art collector. He lived in a warehouse-style compound in the coastal suburb of Venice, in a neighborhood that was gang-infested until a decade ago.

Hopper fell ill last September. He continued working almost to the end, both on his cable TV series "Crash" and on a book showcasing his photography. But his final months were also consumed by a bitter divorce battle with his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy.

Indeed, his private life was never dull. His marriages included an eight-day union in 1970 with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, who later told Vanity Fair that she was subjected to "excruciating" treatment.

Hopper is survived by four children. Funeral arrangements were pending.

(Editing by Vicki Allen and Alan Elsner)
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just because:
Easy Rider Marijuana and UFO's


hmm hmm hmmm....

not Hopper related, but...

[P(D)enny La(i)ne]

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Dennis Hopper Film Left Big Legacy to UFO Researchers

www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/dennis-hoppers-easy-rider-left-big-legacy-to-ufo-researchers/19498976

(June 2) -- Dennis Hopper may have passed away, but along with his many film appearances, he has left an important legacy to UFO researchers.

That's the belief of Vancouver-based paranormal researcher Jon Kelly, who says the script that Hopper and "Easy Rider" co-star Peter Fonda wrote for the 1969 counterculture classic helped introduce a lot of information about UFOs to a massive audience.

Kelly points to the campfire scene where Hopper (who played Billy) and cast member Jack Nicholson (George) discuss extraterrestrials and their presence on the planet.


CSU Archives / Everett Collection
In the 1969 film "Easy Rider," actors Dennis Hopper, pictured, and Jack Nicholson discuss the possibility of alien visitors to Earth.
In the film's dialogue, Hopper states, "I saw a satellite, man. And it was going across the sky. And it flashed three times at me and zigzagged and whizzed off, man. And I saw it."



To which Nicholson replies:

"That was a UFO, beamin' back at ya. Me and Eric Heisman was down in Mexico two weeks ago -- we seen 40 of 'em flying in formation. They, they, they've got bases all over the world now, you know. They've been coming here ever since 1946, when the scientists first started bouncin' radar beams off of the moon. And they have been livin' and workin' among us in vast quantities ever since. The government knows all about 'em."



In spite of Billy's protests to the contrary, George continues:

"Well, they are people, just like us -- from within our own solar system. Except that their society is more highly evolved. I mean, they don't have no wars, they got no monetary system, they don't have any leaders, because, I mean, each man is a leader. I mean, each man -- because of their technology, they are able to feed, clothe, house and transport themselves equally, and with no effort.

"Why don't they reveal themselves to us is because if they did, it would cause a general panic. Now, I mean, we still have leaders upon whom we rely for the release of this information. These leaders have decided to repress this information because of the tremendous shock that it would cause to our antiquated systems.

"Now, the result of this has been that the Venutians have contacted people in all walks of life -- all walks of life. [Laughs.] Yes. It, it, it would be a devastatin' blow to our antiquated systems -- so now the Venutians are meeting with people in all walks of life, in an advisory capacity. For once, man will have a god-like control over his own destiny. He will have a chance to transcend and to evolve with some equality for all."

Interestingly enough, during the scene, it's Nicholson's character, a straitlaced ACLU lawyer, who is the true believer that ETs are here on Earth, while Hopper's character, a drugged-out biker, is the skeptic.


Kelly thinks this scene is very significant to modern UFO research for a variety of reasons.

"Some of the themes brought forward in this scene were, at the time, made by people who were considered marginalized kooks," Kelly said. "To have them in this movie is revolutionary, and the consistency of what Nicholson says has stood the test of time."

Kelly suggests the nature of what Nicholson says, especially about the government's knowledge of aliens, is so on-target that he speculates the film may have been targeted by people in the know to be an instrument of disclosure.

"You have to ask yourself, 'Where did this information come from?' " Kelly said. "There is a strong possibility that other sources aligned with the movie decided to use it as a venue to disclose these ideas."

Kelly points the finger to Nicholson, who he suspects may have seen a UFO earlier in his life.

However, Kelly is more fascinated by what Nicholson unconsciously says during the same scene.

Kelly is a proponent of "reverse speech," the idea that a person's true unconscious feelings come to light when played backward.

To that end, he claims that when you reverse the line, "They, they, they've got bases all over the world now, you know. They've been coming here ever since 1946, when the scientists first started bouncin' radar beams off of the moon," you can hear Nicholson say, "The mark. A new Babylon. The ion whirlwind."

To the naked ear, this sounds like gibberish, but Kelly says "the ion whirlwind" that Nicholson is supposedly referring to is something called "mini-black hole Star Gate propulsion," which is how some people believe UFOs are propelled.

"In layman's terms, people who study UFOs have noticed that supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light," he said. "The theory is that the particles are accelerated by tightly twisted magnetic fields close to the black hole. In addition, astronomers have watched material winding a corkscrew-outward path."

He believes this may explain how UFOs are powered and also how they are able to shift dimensions so that they seem to disappear and reappear.

If this backward sentence by Nicholson truly explains the basics of UFO propulsion, the natural question is, how did he get the information?

The UFO rumor mill has long speculated that certain Hollywood stars were allowed access to top-secret data. In fact, some people claim that President Richard Nixon personally drove Jackie Gleason to a base to look at the carcasses of dead aliens. Still, Kelly admits that Nicholson wasn't a big enough star before "Easy Rider" to warrant such special treatment.

"There are two possibilities," Kelly said. "Either he was a CIA plant -- a New World Order insider -- or he pieced together everything on his own without realizing it."