Dennis Hopper is very good at playing evil human beings.  One of his best, and most infamous scenes, came in the Quentin Tarantino-penned film True Romance, in which he faced off with Christopher Walken.  In that scene, which is far too racy too discuss here, Walken played to Hopper's character's inherent racism, eventually earning a mercy killing at the hands of Hopper and his mafia henchman.  I bring this up because Hopper has just been cast in the TV adaptation of Oscar-winning film Crash.  The cable channel Starz has ordered thirteen episodes of Crash.  The film focused on the topic of racism in modern-day Los Angeles, and will become only the second Best Picture winning film to be turned into a television show (the first was In the Heat of the Night).  Hopper will play a character named Ben, a maverick record producer.  Also joining the cast is Clare Carey, most recently seen in the now-deceased Jericho, who will Christine, a frustrated mother married to a real-estate developer.  Hopper has recently been on the television show E-Ring, as well as a small, but important role on the first season of 24.

Crash, at least in retrospect, has become a divisive film.  While initially critically-acclaimed, Crash has its critics.  Detractors claim that the film over-simplified the issue of racism, relied on happenstance to the extreme, and reinforced negative stereotypes of Asian-Americans, among other things.  I found the film to be pretty good, a smart meditation on our racial perceptions in the modern world.  While the story-line weaving required a lot of suspension of disbelief, I bought it, for the most part.  Then again, I only saw it once and had no real desire to ever watch it again.

It's unclear how Starz will go about adapting the series into a television series.  While a two-hour film can get away with being about a topic, TV shows generally have to be about its characters.  It might be a little off-putting if the characters on the series take thirteen episodes to deal with their own race issues, as opposed to doing the same thing over the course of a film's running time.  This marks the first original series for the Starz network. 


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
Source: Hollywood Reporter
(Image Courtesy of AP)