Free Hopper by Tom Folsom Page B

artist. Luring him away from the sanctuary of the hallowed Actors Studio, the bitch dog of Hollywood nipped at his heels. In need of some cash, Hopper slapped a bumper sticker on his Plymouth, THE ONLY ISM FOR ME IS ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM , and hit the road for the shoestring factory.
    The Actors Studio had taught Hopper simple sense memory exercises that allowed one to experience sensations from the past while performing. Looking up from his crinkled newspaper, Strasberg would fire his Svengali gaze and instruct students to wipe the slate clean by shaking off all tensions. Then they were to ask: What was I wearing? What was I touching? Can I see anything?
    On the set of Key Witness , MGM’s low-budget thriller, Hopper played a switchblade killer, Cowboy, who wreaks havoc throughout East LA on his Harley-Davidson V-Twin Knucklehead. In addition to movie motorcycle lessons, he practiced his craft on a Vespa, racing Steve McQueen along the dirt firebreaks from Coldwater Canyon to the Pacific.
    â€œWe had so many wrecks my Vespa looked like a crushed beer can with wheels,” bragged Hopper, acquiring the fashionable Italian scooter after getting his wheels taken away for too many speeding tickets.
    The techniques of the Method were at his fingertips for his big love scene with a clingy sex fiend, perky in her bullet bra under a tight turtleneck. Action! She ran her fingers through Cowboy’s hair. Cowboy reared back and smacked her. He’d just come back from a “bop,” a battle, and no sharp fancy nails were gonna get stuck in his slick hair when he was all shook up.
    In a flash, Cowboy split, screeching off in his Chrysler with the fins, going so fast out of his bad boy garage headquarters—“Muggles, open the door!”—the fat man who played the LAPD detective had to leap out of the way to keep from becoming roadkill.
    â€œYou have to keep your touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing really acute,” Hopper explained of his method. “Which makes you totally bananas.”
    The proof was on film. Hopper definitely swung, bossing around his kooky hophead henchmen, but he wasn’t anywhere near the mother of all Strasberg’s exercises. Having seen actor after actor taken off the Studio stage in a straitjacket once they suddenly hit their emotional memory, Hopper finally dug what Jimmy meant. It could destroy him. Crash and burn. The thing was so dangerous it took years to build up to, years cut short by scurrying back to Hollywood.
    Dragging himself out of bed at ten o’clock in the morning to dip into the stark tracts of Nietzsche poolside, Hopper took a final stab at keeping the pulse of Manhattan alive by trudging through modern absurdist plays in the California sun. He covered canvases in thick black oil paint, but it was no use, the sunlight kept shining in.
    â€œMan, I felt like a fly killing myself on a window,” said Hopper.
    His only escape was to submerge himself in LA’s underground art scene at the Ferus Gallery, harkening to ferus humanus , the wild man. Introduced to an underground art world of strangers like Wallace Berman, a shaggy Topanga Canyon mystic who kept an American flag decal on his back door— SUPPORT THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION— Hopper’s worlds converged.
    Landing his first leading role in Night Tide , a no-name, microbudget horror film directed by occult enthusiast Curtis Harrington and shot for $50,000 cash on the fringes of weird LA, Hopper played a sailor who falls for a sideshow mermaid on their first date in her nautical-themed apartment atop the Santa Monica Pier carousel. After a hearty mackerel breakfast under draped nets and hanging starfish, it should’ve been smooth sailing had it not been for Marjorie Cameron.
    With her flaming red hair and sorceress looks, Hopper was convinced that Marjorie was an out-and-out witch. The Ferus artist was notorious for her drawing of a wicked beast humping a woman with a forked