#MOUSTERPIECE THEATER VHS MOVIE#

At the time, Hopper was a barely employed actor-for-hire struggling with substance abuse issues of mythic proportions, in the midst of his second stretch in Hollywood exile after the disastrous reception of his semi-inscrutable “Easy Rider” follow-up, which he’d perhaps prophetically titled “The Last Movie.” (A better film than its reputation might suggest, if a bit lost inside its own head.) Linda Manz in 'Out of the Blue.' (Courtesy Brattle Theatre)īut when original writer-director Leonard Yakir was fired two weeks into production, Hopper swooped in to the rescue and rewrote the screenplay over the weekend, reportedly while listening to his buddy Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps” nonstop and replacing the old title with a line from the album’s opening track.

#MOUSTERPIECE THEATER VHS MOVIE#

Originally titled “CeBe,” “Out of the Blue” was supposed to be an afterschool TV movie for families cobbled together from Canadian tax-shelter funds, chronicling the rehabilitation of a runaway teen thanks to the efforts of an unconventional therapist played by Raymond Burr. Of course, it was never intended to be like this.

It’s in many ways a spiritual sequel to his seminal 1969 “ Easy Rider,” a feature-length elaboration on that picture’s cryptic campfire lament, “We blew it, man.” Hopper frames the film as an almost anthropological study of how 1960s counterculture dreams crashed and burned, conjuring the nihilism of the 1980s. CeBe idolizes Elvis Presley, Johnny Rotten and any other iconoclastic, anti-authority figures she can find, her sneering, “no future” ethos feeling like the only sane response to being born without one. The film stars the miraculous Linda Manz as proto-punk teen CeBe, coming of age in an economically washed out, nowhere suburbia with her alcoholic, ex-con dad (Hopper) fresh from the joint and mom (Sharon Farrell) shooting smack on the living room couch, when she’s not sleeping around with her husband’s friends. Linda Manz and Dennis Hopper in 'Out of the Blue.' (Courtesy Brattle Theatre)Ī movie made by accident that was almost never seen at all, Dennis Hopper’s 1980 masterpiece of alienation “ Out of the Blue” opens at the Brattle Theatre this weekend in a stunning new 4K restoration, preserving the picture in all its ragged, unseemly glory.

Mousterpiece theater vhs