INTERVIEW: Dennis Hopper is to blame for Illeana Douglas’ cinematic life

Illeana Douglas, the accomplished actress from Cape Fear, Goodfellas and HBO’s Six Feet Under, is that rare combination of movie actress and movie lover. Over her career, she has coupled her acting talents with her adoration for the cinematic experience and its many marquee luminaries. From hosting programs on Turner Classic Movies to her recently released memoir, I Blame Dennis Hopper, Douglas lives and breathes quality film.

The actress will present stories from her new book and movie clips from her career at a special event at New York’s Film Forum, Sunday, Dec. 6 at 2:30 p.m. Fans can expect a lively cinematic discussion and a book signing to follow.

The book’s title is quite provocative. How could Hopper, a Hollywood legend, have so much influence? Well, Douglas’ parents watched Hopper in Easy Rider and everything in their lives changed. Suddenly her family were considered “hippies,” and the lifestyle on display in that seminal 1960s film became part of the Douglas household. Even before this transformation, Douglas was exposed to the influence of film. Her grandfather is Melvyn Douglas, the two-time Oscar winner and star of Hud, I Never Sang for my Father and Hal Ashby’s Being There.

Douglas probably has five books in her with a cinematic history like that.

“The whole idea of the love of cinema and film criticism … it’s there at your wonderful places like Film Forum and Cinefamily … but that experience, that like almost middle-class experience, of going to the movies seems to be kind of disappearing,” Douglas said in a recent interview. “And I felt like if I wrote this book in five years, people wouldn’t remember what a drive-in was. So part of it was to reinvigorate people’s love of cinema, of celebrating people like Roddy McDowell and his contributions, and Marlon Brando and Rudy Vallée, even Richard Dreyfuss. And I try to write from a movie fan’s perspective because I always feel that, first, I’m a movie fan first, and then secondly, I have kind of an insider-outsider approach having been behind the camera, in front of the camera and also having ties to classic cinema with my grandfather, Melvyn Douglas, who gave me a tremendous appreciation of film history, longevity and film careers.”

For Douglas, Hopper’s contributions signify perhaps the greatest influence and reason for writing the book. “Easy Rider changed my parents’ life by watching it, changed a generation of filmgoers’ lives, and I felt as if in some ways that my generation was … like children of Dennis Hopper,” she said. “There was a lot of people that were changed by that movie, which was confirmed when I met Dennis Hopper, and I said, ‘I bet you ruined a lot of people’s lives.’ And he basically said, ‘Sorry.'”

The actress, who also acted in Ghost World and Message in a Bottle, said she doesn’t believe a similar cinematic experience would be possible in 2015. There are many quality films that come out, but how many change people’s lives as drastically as Easy Rider changed her family.

“Somebody’s not going to see Star Wars and go, ‘You know what? I’ve decided I’m going to leave my job and go into space,'” she said. “We really looked to the movies in our culture, and now I don’t think movies reflect our culture as much. But I feel as if that, yes, the imprint of that film [Easy Rider] made on me having a somewhat rebellious nature growing up in a very different kind of a background. It wasn’t very structured being around, you know, rock music, and hippies and animals, just experiencing a lot of things that, yes, that absolutely set me up going into acting because I never felt comfortable being part of the establishment, which wasn’t my choice.”

Douglas started her film career in the 1980s after she landed an unusual part in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. She was called upon to offer a blood-curtling scream in the film, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“That scream took me an awfully long way,” she said. “I was working at Peggy Siegal’s film publicity place, and I really loved my job. I wanted to be in acting, but I mainly wanted to be in show business. … I didn’t really know what show business was, but it looked in the movies, it looked really fun. Like, I think I want to be in show business, like all these song-and-dance movies and everything. So I was perfectly happy working in film publicity, working behind the scenes on some of the movies that we were working on, some of the great films of the ‘80s — you know, Moonstruck and The Untouchables. … But, yes, I put on my résumé a special skill: blood-curtling screams. And because when I was in school, I did a play where I had to be murdered, and I was told by the director that I had a great scream. So I put it on my résumé really as a joke because I didn’t have any credits, and I thought, well, maybe somebody with a sense of humor will see this and will think, well, that’s pretty funny. … And that’s how it all began.”

On the cover of I Blame Dennis Hopper, which is now available from Flatiron Books, Douglas can be seen in one of her earliest acting roles: dressed in a white robe, standing on water, left arm extended, right hand holding an open book. She looks like a scholar, or perhaps a figure from mythology. The photo actually has its origins in her grandfather’s work.

“I saw the movie Being There where [a character] is walking on the water, and, of course, I wanted to try to recreate that in my own way,” she said of the film starring her grandfather, Shirley MacLaine, Peter Sellers and Jack Warden. “So I think I took a sheet from my mom.”

Next to the image on the book cover is a later photo of Douglas in Grace of my Heart, her own movie. It’s an appropriate side-by-side comparison because it couples the actress’s career and personal love for cinema. There’s probably no better vehicle for Douglas to display that combination than her many hosting and interviewing responsibilities on TCM.

“I did a couple of things with Robert Osborne, like an evening of movies centered around my grandfather,” she said of her first time on the channel. “And when we did that, that was when they started to realize that I had more than just a love for movies. It was really a passion for me, and so I started getting involved more doing introductions at the film festival and just getting more and more responsibilities. And it just was, for me, just a complete labor of love, and I started doing some more introductions. And then I’ve just been now over the past couple of years under contract with them again doing more on-camera hosting, more film introductions, and I just love being part of the TCM family.”

She added: “I hope that what I can always impart is … this insider-outsider point of view, in that when I interview somebody like Richard Dreyfuss for them, I’ve had the experience that I’ve worked with Richard Dreyfuss, but I also was like a 10-year-old fan of his watching him in the movies. So I always tried to have my commentary be that of a movie lover first but try to shine something about that person and illuminate something about that person that maybe somebody else wouldn’t do. And I think that’s what any film interviewer does. I, in particular, like to try to find some throughline in the person’s work, both by being a fan of theirs, and working with them, and studying them in a sense and then presenting something about them that I don’t think that people have heard before.”

The Film Forum event, where she’ll be interviewed by filmmaker Kent Jones, will couple these stories with film clips from Douglas’ career. She also promises some surprise guests from the movies she’s acted in.

“That’s one of the fun things that I’ve been doing is have people actually show up from one of the movies I’ve been in and read a little bit from a chapter because to me that’s kind of the fun of the experience is having people that read about a chapter they were in,” she said. “And so we’re going to show clips of some of the movies I’ve been in but also some of the movies that I watched that changed my life like, for instance, with Easy Rider. We’re going from Easy Rider to the inexplicable journey of how I then ended up in a movie with Dennis Hopper. So, you know, those are the crazy twists and turns that my life has taken on that hopefully people will find amusing.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Illeana Douglas will be at the Film Forum Sunday, Dec. 6 at 2:30 p.m. to present stories and film clips of her life in the movies. Copies of her new memoir, I Blame Dennis Hopper, will be on sale in the lobby. Click here for more information.