In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

59 Gallery Interview: Dennis Hopper Lawrence Linderman/1972 From Gallery, December 1972. In the last decade, perhaps no American director has had such a significant effect on U.S. filmmaking as Hollywood’s most gifted enfant terrible , Dennis Hopper. In Easy Rider, his anthem of the Aquarian Age, Hopper captured the imagination of a generation—while also demonstrating that low-budget films could result in unprecedented, high-level profits. Produced at a cost of only $425,000, Easy Rider had already grossed nearly $50 million prior to its re-release this fall. Additionally, the movie also rescued the sagging cinema careers of its three stars—Peter Fonda, Hopper, and Jack Nicholson—all of whom had then seemed destined for screen anonymity. On the wave of the film’s success, the trio of easy riders went their separate ways—Nicholson into Five Easy Pieces and stardom , and Hopper and Fonda writing their own tickets to direct and act in their own films. Of the three projects, the most eagerly awaited was Hopper’s The Last Movie. In fact, a full year before its release, such diverse publications as Life, Esquire, and Rolling Stone had already devoted cover stories to it. Before The Last Movie opened in America, it won the only prize presented at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, and all the ballyhoo seemed justified. But then a funny thing happened on the way to an Academy Award: After brief and virtually unnoticed runs in two cities, The Last Movie was shelved by Universal International Pictures. Angry about the treatment accorded his film, Hopper expressed his ire in terms loud and clear enough to make him a movie industry outcast. However, since he’s usually been in the studios’ bad graces—and vice versa—it seemed nothing more than a matter of personal history repeating itself. Born in Dodge City, Kansas on May 17, 1936, Dennis Hopper has long been one of Hollywood’s most combative—and talented—film figures. At eighteen he made his acting debut in Rebel Without a Cause, but two 60 dennis hopper: inter views movies later his reputation as a troublemaker on the set caused him to be blacklisted in Hollywood. Locked out of motion pictures, Hopper developed a passion for painting, becoming an authority on the Italian and Flemish Renaissances. Employable again eight years later, Hopper began appearing in exploitation films such as The Trip, in which he costarred with Peter Fonda. While Fonda was on a promotion tour in Canada for the movie, he telephoned Hopper in Los Angeles to suggest they make a film about two bikers who, after a big dope score, ride from California to Florida, there to retire on an orange farm; before they can, however, two duck poachers shoot them. The result, considerably refined, was Easy Rider. While the film marked the highpoint of Hopper’s professional fortunes , it also marked the end of his eight-year marriage to Brooke Hayward . Hopper’s second marriage, not long after, to Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and The Papas, lasted all of five days. “I was lucky,” Hopper recently told a journalist. “It could have lasted five years.” In 1970, he met Daria Halprin, the darkly beautiful star of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, at the Belgrade Film Festival in Yugoslavia, and less than two years later Hopper became a married man for the third time. To interview the fiercely independent filmmaker, Gallery sent contributing editor Lawrence Linderman to visit Hopper at his home in Taos, New Mexico. Reports Linderman, “The disparity between Dennis Hopper ’s public image and private personality is nothing less than startling. In place of the violent, unstable, but gifted megalomaniac he’s usually depicted as, I met an engaging, outgoing guy who seemed almost serene; Hopper reminds me very much of a couple of former boxers I’ve known who, having reached unexpectedly gratifying points in their lives, no longer regret a single moment spent in the ring. Dennis and Daria live in a small two-story adobe house set a few minutes outside of Taos on a huge expanse of Indian land. Hopper was an early collector of Pop Art, and the walls of the place are solidly lined with the work of Andy Warhol , Jasper Johns, Bruce Conner, and others, plus a good deal of Indian art as well. Daria keeps an electric percolator filled with coffee during the day, and after Hopper and I each poured a cup, we sat down in the living...

Share