Illeana Douglas, or “Don’t Cry for Me, Dennis Hopper”

So Charles Manson, who sent shivers up our spines back in 1969, is dead. Which hardly brings his victims back to life. And, around the world, bad things are happening to good people. Politics? Don’t get me started. But I'm still feeling the glow of Thanksgiving weekend, so who am I to dwell on the negative?

Instead, I’m giving thanks for a wonderful woman named Illeana Douglas. You may have caught her in movies like Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and To Die For. You may have seen her rare leading role in Allison Anders’ music industry indie, Grace of My Heart. If you love old movies, you’ve surely watched her grandfather, Melvyn Douglas, in the course of his great career. Illeana idolized her father’s father, and it was partly under his spell that she chose to spend her life on movie sets.

But her own father hit upon a far different life for himself. And movies were entirely to blame. It was with her father in mind that Illeana chose the title for her 2015 memoir: I Blame Dennis Hopper.  You see, back in 1969,  Illeana’s parents went to see Easy Rider, and nothing was ever the same thereafter: “After my father saw Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, he started, well, acting like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.” This meant quitting his 9-to-5 job, growing a floppy mustache, and endlessly playing “Born to Be Wild.” It also meant abandoning the family’s nice Colonial house in suburban Connecticut in order to start his own commune, a place full of dope-smoking freeloaders who had grown Dennis Hopper mustaches of their own. And it meant an all-purpose stoner response to every situation:  “This is what it’s all about, man.”  Illeana’s account of the break-up of her parents’ marriage is both heart-breaking and hilarious. It ends with the author, on a movie-set, meeting the real Dennis Hopper and discovering he was probably not to blame, after all. Because the life-lessons she’d learned in the course of her eccentric upbringing were pretty cool indeed. 

Other chapters in I Blame Dennis Hopper reflect the fact that Illeana is the ultimate movie fan, someone who views the world in terms of the way that movies (and movie stars) have shaped her outlook. I’m not sure I agree with her theory that “all movie lovers have some sort of void or sadness in them that movies fill.” But she certainly makes a good case for the power that screen stars have over those of us who sit in the audience. Here’s her comment on Liza Minnelli: “We look up to movie stars. We believe in them, because they are larger than life, and it makes us believe in ourselves when no one else does.”

And here’s her down-and-dirty encapsulation of her own existence: “My life is like a movie. At first it was a Busby Berkeley musical with everybody happy and dancing, and then it was like a French film that I didn’t understand, but I looked really good, and now it’s like a seventies disaster movie where I’m screaming, but no one can hear me.” 

Speaking of screaming, that’s one of Illeana’s special talents. A blood-curdling screech brought her to the attention of Martin Scorsese, who used it to good advantage in The Last Temptation of Christ and became her main man for a number of years. I don’t know about her love life now, but I know she keeps busy as an actress, writer, producer, and director. And then there’s her podcast, on which I was lucky enough to be a guest. It’s called, inevitably, “I Blame Dennis Hopper.”

Steve Buscemi: A Guy Without a Ghost of a Chance

It all started when I was booked to appear on Illeana Douglas’s podcast, I Blame Dennis Hopper (about which more later). Illeana is both an actress in films and a lover of films, and her enthusiasm has led me to check out several movies that feature either her or her beloved grandfather Melvyn Douglas (who won his first Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1963’s Hud and his second for 1979’s Being There). That’s how I came to watch Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001), in which Illeana plays an ultra-sincere but naïve art teacher who interacts with the film’s heroine in an important way.  

Ghost World, based on the comic book by Daniel Clowes, is the story of two brand-new high school graduates, Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson). Awkward social outcasts, they strike a rebellious pose, priding themselves on being too good for their classmates as well as the residents of their non-descript suburb. (Note to Angelenos: the bleaky contemporary streets can be found in Santa Clarita.) For a while the film goes on in this vein, showing the two girls making vague attempts to find work and an apartment to share, while unleashing catty remarks on anyone who comes within earshot. But things start to change when, just for the hell of it, they play a dirty trick on a lovelorn man who’s had the bad sense to put a personal ad in the local paper.   

That ad is placed by an obsessive record-collector named Seymour, and he’s played by Steve Buscemi, an actor who is always worth watching. Gradually Enid comes to know Seymour. Though he’s dweebishly unattractive and acutely conscious of his own failings, he has a passion for early jazz that’s contagious. While Rebecca works at her dreary job and obsesses about the amenities of her future apartment, Enid is soaking up new aesthetic ideas. These contribute to the work she does in the summer school art class she must take in order to complete her graduation requirements. She’s got real talent, but her unorthodox approach is going to set her up for eventual failure. 

Meanwhile, she’s coaching poor Seymour in finding love, only to become acutely jealous when he seems to have succeeded. The relationship of these two—the rebellious young woman and the morose, anxious middle-aged man—plays out in surprising ways, and ultimately becomes the film’s heart. 

Birch, so memorable as Kevin Spacey’s disillusioned daughter in 1999’s American Beauty, is a memorable presence. But for me the movie belongs to Steve Buscemi, who seems as though he can’t help attracting odd and remarkable roles. In many of them, he dies in grotesque ways—see him ending up in the woodchipper in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. Sometimes he gets away with murder (check out his role as Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs and his recent TV portrayal of a corrupt politician in Boardwalk Empire), but whether he’s fundamentally cowardly or fundamentally brutal he generally comes across as a nogoodnik. That’s why I cherish his rare lovable role, like that of the nebbishy Donny, sidekick to John Goodman’s Walter, in The Big Lebowski. As Seymour in Ghost World, Buscemi is capable of bursts of destructive rage. But for the most part he’s a good guy who knows he’s a loser. He badly wants love, and is capable of great tenderness when he thinks he’s found it. But things never quite seem to resolve in his favor. Having learned from his example, Enid may eventually finds her way out in the the larger world. But alas poor Seymour—he remains stuck in place.

For Illeana Douglas, who introduced me to Ghost World.