![]() The initial cut Hopper presented to Vestron Pictures was two hours long. “Our forms aren’t exactly simpatico,” he says of Foster’s Anne Benton. Bob Dylan briefly cameos as a chainsaw-wielding sculptor based on Laddie Dill. Long-time collaborator Julie Adams plays a gallery owner John Turturro a gawky, giggly henchman with impractical red loafers and Neil Young is in there somewhere, giving his best ex- mafioso. Filming Backtrack that same year, he returned to the habit of casting whichever friends might be passing through. Producers tentatively started trusting him with money again: 1988’s Colors, one of the first movies to anticipate gangsta rap, was a moderate financial success. After overcoming his abyssal dependency on booze and drugs, he got an Oscar nomination for playing the saintly drunk in Hoosiers, though Blue Velvet’s terrifying one was the role that guaranteed steady villain work. Hopper shot Backtrack during an apparent resurgence. ![]() It leapt out at me from a Wikipedia vortex one day: A Dennis Hopper crime thriller where the jazz-loving hit man Milo, also Dennis Hopper, decides to kidnap his target instead of killing her? And this conceptual artist/murder witness is played by Jodie Foster? And the wall-mounted aphorisms (“ MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE”) he studies to track her down were all created by Jenny Holzer, beloved actual conceptual artist? Did I mention the helicopter chase? The filmmakers meant to revisit Out of the Past and, to their chagrin, succeeded. John Waters once called Joseph Losey’s Boom!“the greatest failed art film ever made.” I won’t dispute the superlative this is, after all, a movie featuring Richard Burton in a samurai outfit, Noel Coward as “the Witch of Capri,” and Liz Taylor reciting simmered-mimosa Tennessee Williams dialogue such as “he was wildly beautiful, and beautifully wild.” Backtrack is a less-mythic disaster, the wreckage of a mercurial creator smashing into capitalist imperatives, so terminally modern that the director tried to erase his own authorship-the greatest failed video installation, maybe.
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