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David Stratton's Stories of Australian Cinema is set to premiere on the ABC this year over three episodes. Before that broadcast (the date of which is still under wraps) a theatrical cut will be distributed by Transmission.

Produced for the ABC by Stranger than Fiction's Jo-Anne McGowan (Art+Soul) with support from Screen Australia, Screen Nsw, Adelaide Film Festival and Transmission, Stratton describes the project as "very personal".

"It.s not a history of Australian film at all. It.s called David Stratton.s Stories of Australian Cinema, and it's really just that. Without wanting to sound too pretentious about it, it.s sort of my journey coming to Australia from England, running the Sydney Film Festival for eighteen years, fighting censorship, [and] being at the Sydney Film Festival just as the Australian New Wave was happening with the Peter Weirs and the Gillian Armstrongs and the Fred Schepisis.

Dennis Hopper’s long film career began with the 1955 teen angst classic Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean, and he helped usher in Hollywood’s New Wave as director and star of the counterculture anthem Easy Rider in 1969. He later became a respected character actor, specializing in such off-beat villains as the drug-addicted, obscenity-spouting Frank Black in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), crazed bomber Howard Payne in the 1994 action-thriller Speed with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and Deacon in Kevin Costner’s soggy post-apocalyptic saga Waterworld (1995).

Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas on May 17, 1936. He moved to San Diego, California with his family in the late 1940s, and began studying at the local Old Globe Theater while attending high school. He soon signed with Warner Brothers and was featured in a small role in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause. He was later featured as Jordan Benedict III, the...