Hopper, Tom Folsom
Hopper, Tom Folsom
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Hopper
A Journey into the American Dream

Author: Tom Folsom

Narrator: Ray Porter

Unabridged: 13 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/05/2013


Synopsis

James Dean to Hopper
"I saw what you did today. Today you were great."Jack Nicholson to Hopper
"We're geniuses, you know that?
Isn't it great to be a genius?"The chopper-riding hippie outlaw in Easy Rider. The prophetic madman in the jungle in Apocalypse Now. The terrifying psychopath in Blue Velvet. The kid gone wrong in Rebel Without a Cause. The actor taken under the wing of James Dean who longed to be the next Orson Welles. The hell-raising director who revolutionized Hollywood. An enigmatic man from Dodge City, Kansas, on an endless quest to realize the American Dream.Dennis Hopper has been described as a rebel, an icon, an addict plagued by demons, and one of the most important champions of the pop-art movement. Friend to Warhol, muse to David Lynch, mentor to Sean Penn, champion of Ice-T, Dennis Hopper built a career that was a half-century of rebellion waged at the edge of American popular culture.Tom Folsom's Hopper is a wild ride through Dennis's many lives. Featuring hundreds of interviews with Hopper's fellow actors, artists, musicians, and residents of Taos, New Mexico (where he spent much of his most manic time), as well as his ex-wives and many other people who knew him, Hopper takes you on an extraordinary—and sometimes troubling—journey. From Dennis's early days with his grandparents on a dusty farm in Kansas, where he watched trains go by on their way to Los Angeles, to his formative time in Hollywood as one of a bright new crop of actors straddling the edge of the studio system, to the rebellious 1960s and the start of the independent film movement, to the drug-addled 1970s and beyond, when Hopper staged one of the greatest Hollywood comebacks of all time—Tom Folsom has crafted a biography as unconventional as Dennis Hopper himself.

About Tom Folsom

Tom Folsom is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld. Folsom is also a writer, director, and producer of documentaries, and his work has appeared at Sundance and on A&E and Showtime. He lives in New York City with his wife.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Terry on March 11, 2013

Tom Folsom's marketed-as-gonzo biography of actor/filmmaker/artist/art collector Dennis Hopper tries hard to imitate the fragmented, above-it-all prose styling of Nick Tosches' 1992 Dean Martin bio DINO. But Folsom's book has its genuinely insightful moments; the chapters on Hopper's mostly-unseen,......more

Goodreads review by Marti on September 14, 2023

Having read books by and about Peter Fonda and the whole "New Hollywood" era, I can say that Dennis Hopper is an even worse human being than I thought. However, he was an inspired genius as an actor and as a director. I would really like to see The Last Movie, which he directed in 1970 in Peru with......more

Goodreads review by David on February 14, 2014

Hopper: A Journey Into the American Dream by Tom Folsom (IT Books 2013)(Biography) is the first biography of Dennis Hopper that I've run across, and I was excited to find it. After all, Dennis Hopper is an original Hollywood rebel and outlaw; the stories would have to be great. Alas! It was as thoug......more

Goodreads review by Leenda on May 09, 2013

Quick read. Little disjointed - time hopping. Refers to some people by nicknames or "common info", instead of proper names, so I sometimes had no idea who was being discussed. But otherwise an interesting read.......more

Goodreads review by Bob on September 11, 2023

Tom Folsom brings a little bit of gonzo journalism to his biography of Dennis Hopper. It is almost a necessity in trying to capture the manic personality who became a cult figure in films, TV, art and outlaw motorcycle culture. There are other biographies of Hopper that go into greater depth and det......more