The Hip Pocket #39: HOOPER

If this is Burt Reynolds' most personal film, what does that say about him?

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Hooper
Burt Reynolds, Jan-Michael Vincent, Sally Field, Brian Keith, John Marley, Robert Klein, James Best, Adam West, Alfie Wise, Terry Bradshaw, Norman Grabowski, George Furth, Jim Burk, Don ‘Red’ Barry, Princess O’Mahoney, Robert Tessier, Richard Tyler, Tara Buckman, Hal Floyd, Ray Bickel, Rex Benson, R.G. Allen, Mark Montgomery, Linda McClure, Kent Lane, Christa Linder, Kris Goddard, Robert Hackman, John Marshall, Laura Lizer Sommers, Peter Craig
cinematography by Bobby Byrne
music by Bill Justis
written by Thomas Rickman and Bill Kerby
story by Walt Green & Walter S. Herndon
produced by Hank Moonjean
directed by Hal Needham
Rated PG
1 hr 39 mins

An aging stuntman deals with an egomaniacal director, a hot young up-and-comer, and the realities of his own broken body during the making of a spy movie.

Hal Needham and Burt Reynolds clearly had a symbiotic relationship, but they never blurred the lines between their identities more aggressively than they did with their 1978 film Hooper.

You can read this as autobiography for either of them… or both of them. It’s kind of fascinating how flexible but specific this whole thing is. Needham was an uneven filmmaker, but saying that should in no way take away from his remarkable overall career. His directing was just a small part of who he was. Like many filmmakers of his generation, Needham lived a full life before he ever made a movie, and that wealth of experience was reflected in his work. By the time he and Burt Reynolds connected, Needham was already well-seasoned from his years training under Chuck Roberson, who was John Wayne’s primary stunt double. Frequently, young up-and-comers would find themselves adopted by an older stunt professional, and they’d pass down everything they learned via oral tradition and on-set experience, thus ensuring that each new generation of stuntmen was building on the accomplishments of the stuntmen who came before them. Like any craft in Hollywood, the stunt craft is iterative. People are constantly pushing each other to break records, make a bigger explosion, or to shred some new law of physics, and Needham was absolutely part of that tradition. His generation experimented with airbags and special harness systems to push the envelope of high falls for movies, and he quickly graduated from stunt performer to stunt designer and eventually stunt coordinator.