At the tender age of 19, Dennis Hopper made his film debut in Nicholas Ray’s teen classic, Rebel Without a Cause. The 1955 film introduced the world to James Dean, the renegade with a heart of gold whose demeanor and style helped plant seeds of the American counterculture. But Dean would not live to see his influence; he died one month before the film was released.
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Hopper was devastated by the death of his friend. Wracked by grief, the young actor became unmanageable. After a confrontation with director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas in 1958, Hopper made Hollywood’s dreaded blacklist. But the young maverick could not be stopped and soon found other means to channel his creative impulses.
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In the 1960s, Hopper began spending time with artists like Andy Warhol, William Claxton, Joseph Albers, and Ed Ruscha. Inspired to get behind the camera, he made a series of photographs of his everyday life, photographing the changing landscape of America as it unfolded before his eyes during the 1960s. Adopting an unconventional approach, Hopper took a wide array of vantage points and quickly became a participant in his work.
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It was a sensibility that he would bring to Easy Rider, Hopper’s 1969 return to the silver screen, which he co-wrote with Peter Fonda and Terry Southern. Conceived as a modern take on the Western, Easy Rider tells the story of two bikers named for Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, and allegedly modeled on Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, who decide to bike from Los Angeles to New Orleans to celebrate at Mardi Gras after scoring big on a drug deal.
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