Marin Hopper on Dennis Hopper's Inspiring Legacy, and His Love For Photography

CULTURE

MARIN HOPPER ON DENNIS HOPPER’S INSPIRING LEGACY AND HIS LOVE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPY

by DENNIS HOPPER

INTERVIEW

by TATIJANA SHOAN

WEB EDIT

by JEENA SHARMA

Dennis Hopper is a name synonymous with Hollywood. He changed the way movies were made with the quintessential bad-boy film, Easy Rider, and continued to break boundaries in filmmaking with The Last Movie, and Colors. As an early member of the Actors Studio he helped introduce a new generation of actors to method acting and continued to push the boundaries of acting with his performances in films such as, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, True Romance and Hoosiers. Despite his weighty film credentials, Hopper’s true love was photography. As a photographer he captured an insider’s look at LA’s art scene in the 60s with luminary art figures such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. From model Peggy Moffitt, actor Paul Newman, to the freedom marches in Washington, and the love-ins in San Francisco, Dennis Hopper captured how he saw the world and what moved him. His photographs not only reveal something about the time in which he lived, but who he was. I recently sat down with Hopper’s daughter, Marin Hopper, to discuss her father’s photographic legacy.

AS IF: What did photography mean to your father?

Marin Hopper: My father started out wanting to be film director, and James Dean, who he acted with in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, told him to practice by taking photographs to learn how to frame the world around him and to tell stories through a lens. My mother always said that he walked around framing everything with his hands as if looking at the world through a lens. She encouraged him to shoot and bought him his first camera, a Nikon. I really love looking through his photos today and seeing all the truly iconic images, like Andy Warhol and the iris, Peggy Moffitt in the back of a taxicab with Irving Blum, Jane Fonda and Vadim on the beach in Malibu. There are so many important images. When you look through his contact sheets, frame after frame reads like a story. From his days at Ferus Gallery and the early LA art scene, to Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, to movie sets, there is just so much storytelling in his negatives. My father never cropped his prints or manipulated them in any way. What you see in every print is what he saw when he looked through the lens. He really developed a sensibility that led him to directing Easy Rider. He also photographed fashion editorials during the time I was close with Emmanuelle Alt who was the fashion director at Vogue Paris before becoming the editor-in-chief when I was fashion director at Elle. In fact, Emmanuelle recently posted one of my dad’s photos on her Instagram!

He was curious.

Yes, just look at his artist series, his images of rock bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Neil Young. Look at his images of the Martin Luther King marches, the motorcycle gangs, the political rallies, and the San Francisco love-ins. We would spend the weekends in Malibu with Jane Fonda, who happens to be my godmother, and Roger Vadim who was her husband at the time, and he took pictures almost every moment. My father photographed their wedding. His images were like photographer Jean Howard, but during a very different time.

It was bad boy Hollywood rebellious time.

Yes, bad boy Hollywood, there you go, you got it! In the 90s when he got a new camera I remember him focusing a lot on the urban landscape of Los Angeles. He was intrigued by LA gang culture and the tagging and graffiti around the city, and this was the precursor to the film Colors my father directed starring Sean Penn and Robert Duval.

Dennis Hopper. Street Scene, 1961-67

Dennis Hopper. Andy Warhol(with iris), 1963

Dennis Hopper. Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney, Jeff Goodman,1963

Dennis Hopper. Brooke Hayward (with crown), 1961

Tell me about The Hopper Art Trust?

The mission of the trust is to keep Dennis’s photography archives and paintings alive, which are both keyholes into how he saw the world around him. The Hopper Art Trust has a rich vintage print collection that we sell through dealers and at exhibitions, but we also have new prints that are affordable and allow more people to collect his work. He would go from taking photographs, to directing films, to making art with his stills from his films. He wanted to be remembered as a photographer more than anything.

More than an actor or director?

He said to me, everyone will remember me as an actor and a director, but it was my photography that kept me alive my whole life. From when he was kicked out of Hollywood in the 50s, to when he got sick, he always had his photography. His photographs filled him with joy and sustained him creatively. When he couldn’t direct a movie, he had his camera. When he couldn’t get a job as an actor, he had his camera. When he was blacklisted from Hollywood, he had his camera. Photography was the consistent artistic medium. To be an actor and director means you always have to find someone to invest in you, you have to wait for the green light; you have to wait for that job offer. As a photographer he could call his own shots, have a creative voice without anyone else’s approval.

Your father enrolled in art classes for painting at Nelson Art Gallery in Kansas City when he was only 10-years-old. The gallery had an acting class that your father would sit in on to do life sketches of the actors. It’s so rare that someone at such a young age would have such a passion and drive for the arts. Did he ever talk about these years?

I know that he had a difficult childhood, and I think he felt a lot of relief when communicating with the outside world. He needed to have a creative outlet and voice to reach people. He told me he would watch the trains go through his town when he was growing up in Dodge City, Kansas, and would wonder where they were going. He would get his hands on a copy of his mother’s Vogue magazines and see all the parties in New York and wanted to be in the middle of everything and not on a farm feeding chickens. He told me he had the feeling as a child that he really needed to experience the world and be a part of it. He was smart, he was cool, he was compassionate, had a great sense of humor, and was one of the greatest creative minds of his generation. He was also a great listener. We’d look at art together and he would help advise me on how to buy art. He told me to buy what I love and never buy something because someone tells me it’s going to be valuable—it has to be valuable to me. All the lessons I learned about visualization and manifestation, he taught me. He was a big inspiration. My father wanted to be collected and put into museums, he wanted people to understand that he wasn’t just another celebrity photographer, he really dedicated his life to taking pictures, and that is an incredible reveal.

“My father wanted to be collected and put into museums, he wanted people to understand that he wasn’t just another celebrity photographer, he really dedicated his life to taking pictures, and that is an incredible reveal.”

As a teenager your father started working in Hollywood and landed a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers. He became close friends with James Dean, and as you mentioned, it was James who encouraged your father’s photography and film direction. What did James’s mentorship mean to your father?

James Dean wasn’t only a big star, he was also a great artist, he loved jazz and music, he was very interested in art, painting and expressing himself in different ways outside of acting. I think my father really saw the benefits of expressing himself beyond one point of reference. James told my father that he should start taking photographs in order to hone his talent as a director, and my father took those words really seriously and started taking photos to train his eye for telling stories through a lens. And James was a method actor like my father, which was new to the field of acting. They both went to The Actors Studio, and they bonded over that. My father would talk to me about method acting when I was really young. He would say things like, you don’t pretend to pick up the cup, find a reason to pick-up the cup. They were in two films together and bonded on the artistic plane rather than the celebrity plane, and I think that’s what my father loved most about James Dean.

They were Hollywood rebels, outsiders in their own way. And speaking of being an outsider, your father was blacklisted in Hollywood for several years following a fight with a director, which actually pushed him more towards photography.

My father had a contract with Warner Brothers who loaned him out to 20th Century to film From Hell to Texas with director Henry Hathaway who was big at that time and directed several movies with John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Henry also happened to be a very good friend of my mother’s father, Leland Hayward, an important figure in entertainment at that time. My mother had asked her father to get my dad a job with Henry. There was a scene in the movie where Henry wanted my father to put a coffee cup down, light a cigarette, then pick-up the coffee cup and take a sip, then say his line. My father refused to do it Henry’s way. Henry took 50 takes until he went mad, you’re an ass, you’re a jerk, you’re a punk, get outta here! This resulted in my father losing his contract at Warner Brothers and being blacklisted from Hollywood. He loved method acting, but he became righteous with it, and this was after James Dean died. So, my father turned to photography, which kept him going through that terrible time. He also immersed himself in the LA art world and became friends with Walter Hopps, who founded the Ferus Gallery where Warhol had his first show, and befriended artists such as Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Billy Al Bengston.

Tell me about the importance of the Easy Rider years.

My father was preparing to make Easy Rider in New Mexico and on the way to the airport my parents decided to file for divorce. My father says in his photo book, 1712 North Crescent Heights (which I edited and consists of his photographs of my parent’s LA home and the time they spend together between ‘62 and ‘68), the minute I went off to direct Easy Rider I lost everything, I lost my family, and my photography held me together because it was all I had. After Easy Rider, he left LA and moved to Taos, New Mexico.

In ’63, your father met Andy Warhol, starred in one of his films, and years later they collaborated on a piece of artwork together.

My father had the actual painting of Mao in his home in Taos which he shot two bullet holes in, and Andy just loved it and called it their collaboration!

Tell me about their relationship.

I would always ask my father about Andy because he was such a wild and fascinating figure. He always had nicknames for people, he called my mother Brooke Beauty. I always wanted to know more about him and my father would just tell me that Andy never spoke. Andy would be like, ooh, ahh, yes, hi Dennis, but he never actually said anything. My dad took a lot of pictures of Andy and collected his work. My parents gave him a party in our Pop Art house on 1712 North Crescent Drive after his Ferus Gallery show. They served hot dogs, chili, and Coca-Cola, and a lot of celebrities came. LA was perfect for Andy because it was bright, poppy, brilliant, and filled with movie stars—right up his alley! My father and mother both starred in Andy’s film, Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort of.

Dennis Hopper. Bruce Conner with Hullabaloo Dancers,1965

Dennis Hopper. Irving Blum and Peggy Moffitt, 1964

Your father made a few sculptures such as Bomb Drop, and Russian Death Chair, how many sculptures exist today?

Bomb Drop we gave as a donation to MoCA in Los Angeles. Part of The Hopper Art Trust is to make sure that major institutions have pieces of his work. He created a gigantic sculpture of the Salsa Man from the Malibu colony, he created the Standard Oil Guy who was also giant size. When Marcel Duchamp came to LA my father stole the Hotel Green sign in Pasadena and brought the sign to Marcel who signed it, and my father signed it, and it became a collaborative piece. It was very much a Duchampian point of view on what art is. That piece was sold at an auction when he died.

Describe your father’s filmmaking and its significance then and now.

For example, Easy Rider is a film that holds up for a number of reasons. It was hot during a time my father describes as on fire with change, and it was really the first of its kind. It was exploratory and free during a period when people needed change. When my mother told me that the Queen of England had seen the movie I understood how big of a deal this movie was. He captured the spirit of young people expressing themselves and wanting to have an impact on the world. All his films have something important to say about the times in which we live, and he never sugar coated anything. He had no patience for bullshit, and that comes through in his films, which is why they still have a faithful audience today.

Tell me one memory you have of your father that describes who he is.

In the 70s I went to visit him in Taos and he had all these horses and he said to me, one of these horses is yours, pick whichever horse you want. I really loved horses, so I was really excited and picked my favorite one. He would invite neighborhood kids to play with his horses, and some of the kids were playing with my horse and I complained. My father said, if these kids wanna believe it’s their horse, they can believe it’s their horse too. It was really important to him that everyone felt like they had something, were part of something, and it’s not for me to burst their bubble. He was very generous, very democratic, and very liberal in terms of wanting to give back. Another thing about my father is that he was one of the most socially adept people there were. Though he was an outsider, a bad boy, he was always socially correct, which was an interesting thing about him. He could socialize with hard core socialites and business people—everyone loved him. He was very appealing, very savvy, and a great conversationalist which I think is unusual for a lot of artists.

“Though he was an outsider, a bad boy, he was always socially correct, which was an interesting thing about him. He could socialize with hard core socialites and business people—everyone loved him. He was very appealing, very savvy, and a great conversationalist which I think is unusual for a lot of artists.”

Dennis Hopper, Untitled,1961-67

Dennis Hopper, Selma Alabama(boy with flag), 1965

Dennis Hopper. Untitled,1961-67