Read this great remembrance of Hopper from his biographer, who started on Hopper's official biography twice, then had to face Hopper scrapping it. See "An uneasy ride with Hopper", LA Times.
"... [1985] was the year I began to notice a ghostly figure nervously hovering at Westside art openings. It was difficult to recognize the manic performer I'd admired in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and Wim Wenders' "The American Friend." That outrageous hipster of "Easy Rider"? Nowhere to be found in this anxious loser.
I soon discovered that the gallery crasher was Hopper, that he'd fled his Taos, N.M., home of more than a decade, attended a minimum of three Alcoholics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous meetings a day, and narrowly escaped being institutionalized while straitjacketed in a psychiatric ward. And he was broke — at that time, Hollywood considered him unemployable.
Seemed like a potential story for my then-employer, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner daily newspaper.
Upon visiting Hopper for that story: "Uh, like, man, sorry, you gotta come in through the garage." His limp handshake trembled. His paranoid eyes avoided mine. A washer and dryer stood at the foot of the stairs to his Venice studio. Hopper stooped to ponder the dryer's crammed contents. "Know anything about these things?"
"Not much." I felt his laundry: wet. "Check the lint trap?"
"Lint trap? What's a lint trap?"
"It allows hot air to circulate." The lint trap wouldn't budge. I pried at its edge with my keys until the trap cracked loose. I scraped out the crusted lint.
"Wow, man," Hopper gasped. "Thanks so much, man."
Thus began a tortured, 10-year relationship. My resulting Herald story about a rehabilitated Dennis Hopper was reprinted globally, perhaps because of the wild and crazy quotes: "I didn't consider myself an alcoholic, I just drank all day long.... It wasn't my liver, my kidneys and all that stuff that went. It was my mind."
New York Magazine interviewed Hopper recently: "...once for his role in 2008's Elegy and again last September about his second career as a photographer."
Hopper was a great actor and director, but also a photographer and artist. He knew a lot of young artists before they became famous, taking their photos... and buying their art. His multi-million dollar art collection, is housed in a magnificent fortress-like Frank Gehry-designed house in the Los Angeles suburb of Venice. I recall seeing photos of it once in a magazine, it was a spectacular collection.
Hopper: " I really started taking photographs of artists. They wanted me to take photographs. They wanted posters and things. I was hanging out with them. I photographed the ones I thought were going to make it. I wasn't really working as an actor during this period, and I thought, Well, if I'm not going to be able to work as an actor, I might as well be able make something that's going to be credible. So I took photographs of Martin Luther King and Selma, Montgomery, as history, and selecting artists that I thought would make it. I met most of the Pop artists before they ever had shows." From New York Magazine.
See Vanity Fair - Dennis Hopper's Photos, and Hopper in Alabama, 1965, photographing Martin Luther King Jr.
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