The Guardian published a long, bizarre story yesterday on Dennis Hopper. The story seems to have been spun out of a brief meeting over chocolate cake at the Serpentine Gallery in London (which, as author Stuart Jeffries puts it, "has managed to seduce Hollywood's most enduring screen psychopath to greet guests to its [annual] fundraising party"), and is thus suitably heavy with Hopper's musings on art. But there's one very strange paragraph right in the middle, in which the actor/filmmaker/photographer/Ameriprise shill responds to a question about his involvement in a heretofore-unannounced franchise film:
[Hopper] certainly isn't in the mood to discuss any of the half a dozen films he is due to appear in this year, a roster which is due to include a performance in Speed 3, even though I have plenty of questions about that. Surely his character Howard Payne died in a decapitation incident in the last reel of Speed 1? "It's a river of shit," he tells me pleasantly but firmly, "from which I have tried to extract some gold."
I'm sure no one would be surprised to hear that Hopper (who long-ago abandoned any allegiance to hippie ideology and now considers himself a Republican) would take a role sheerly for the "gold." I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that the geniuses who brought us Speed had come up with a way to bring Howard Payne back from the dead. What is a little surprising, is that this topic would come up casually in an interview, considering that there's really been no legitimate indication that Speed 3 is actually being made.
For starters, it's *not* one of the half-dozen films on Hopper's slate, as per his IMDb profile--in fact, there's no IMDB entry for Speed 3 whatsoever. There's been no item about a third Speed movie on any reputable blog or in either of the major Hollywood trades. The *only* source I can find that backs up the idea of a third Speed is an unattributed item tacked onto the end of Hopper's Wikipedia profile, which reads:
Jan DeBont, director of Speed and Speed 2: Cruise Control, has enforced Hopper's contractual obligation to star in the third and final installment of the trilogy Speed 3: Highway to Hell, ressurecting [sic] the legendary character Howard Payne. Shooting begins this October. Speed 3: Highway to Hell is set to release in the summer of 2009.
So tell me if I have this right: a Guardian reporter went into an interview with Dennis Hopper, quoted a mysterious unsourced (and poorly spelled) Wikipedia entry, got a "no comment", and then ran the no-comment it as if it confirmed the Wikipedia non-story? Is that even legal?
Originally posted on:
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