My favorite role is tame considering his career, but his part as the alcoholic dad in Hoosiers is really outstanding. He was such a great actor. RIP, Mr Hopper.

Damn, that sucks. I was just watching Giant the other night. Something about that movie sucks me in every time. Hopper is just a kid in it, but he gives an excellent performance. He was definitely one of a kind.

I only recently saw Hopper in a motorcycle gang-flick that was released the year before Easy Rider. It had way too much of a Beach Party/Eric von Zipper vibe to it (right down to casting the muscular surfer who always played “Boner” or “Fuckhead” in the Beach movies as its hero), but I’m told by IMDB that it’s considered a classic.

Thanks to over-the-air Digital TV, I’ve also caught some of his earliest appearances (“Wagon Train,” “Alfred Hitchcock Hour”) where—like Culp and Caan and Landau and Duvall—he was clearly still feeling his way around, but nonetheless left you with a sense (much clearer in hindsight, of course) that he was The Only Person On the Screen, no matter who he was playing against.

Man, Blue Velvet is one of my fave movies of all time, and Hopper’s Frank Booth is one of the greatest movie villains ever.  Hell, listening to These Dreams by Roy Orbison, I get the willies thinking of Hopper terrorizing the uber-naive Kyle McLachlan in a truly frightening scene from the movie.

RIP Mr Hopper, you were a truly wonderful character.

Kyle MacLachlan was not naive. He did, however, have difficulty accepting that he was the Kwisatz Haderach prophesied in the ancient texts.

Also, he had some issues with the Weirding Voice Amplifier, but he got past those once he switched to gold-plated jacks and plugs.

I just saw Basquiat again recently—his Bruno Bischofberger to Bowie’s Warhol is pretty great, but Frank Booth is the one I’ll remember most.

I wish you guys had told me this sooner. I just did something I might not have done otherwise.

(picks nose)

Mortality, man. Freaks me out.

If Dennis Hopper had died 20 years ago, that would have been tragic. Now, not so much.