When Dennis Hopper came to Birmingham

Jun 15 2010 By Roger Shannon

The recent death of actor and film director Dennis Hopper has stirred memories of the time he spent in Birmingham, writes Roger Shannon.

I was two years into working at Birmingham Film Workshop, housed at the renowned and sadly missed Birmingham Arts Lab, and was able to watch at first hand the doyen of American Independent Cinema, who along with the Hopper entourage set up camp for a week in down town Aston.

It was March 1982, when Dennis Hopper blew into town, and for all those at the Birmingham Arts Lab during that week, Hopper’s visit is etched in the memory like a crazy, unforgettable dream.

He was a guest of the Arts Lab, which was celebrating his career as an actor and director with a comprehensive retrospective of his movies complemented by an exhibition of his photography, the first occasion this had been put on in Europe.

The Arts Lab exhibited 22 of the 420 photographs by Hopper, held by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Its selection included portraits of friends from the 1960s as well as memorable pictures of civil rights marches, of movie locations and Hollywood friends.

The Birmingham photographer, Pogus Caesar, remembers discussing image-making with Hopper at the exhibition.

He said: “I was a young man interested in photography and was struck by Dennis Hopper’s images and dedication to his craft. The advice he gave me will always be remembered: ‘Don’t try to take the perfect picture, your job is to record.’”

His reputation for being difficult preceded him – the National Film Theatre in London had even cancelled an event there, as they expected him not to show up, but show up in Birmingham he did.

Peter Walsh, the Cinema Programmer at the Arts Lab and now head of cinema at the Irish Film Institute, recalls why he did so.

“Firstly, Dennis wanted to spend some time with his father, who was dying, and secondly he was impressed by the notes that Richard Combs had written to accompany the retrospective programme I’d assembled.”

The Hopper entourage included his mother and father, his partner, his PA/girlfriend, his daughter, then studying in London, and her boyfriend.

Every day they would take over several tables in the Arts Lab coffee bar, arriving in the morning with bags full of drink, and entertaining all and sundry with their genial and articulate conversation.

All the Arts Lab could afford was Dennis’s room at the Midland Hotel, and the story of how the other rooms were paid for – or not – is now lost in time.

Dennis and entourage had apparently run up a bar bill of £1,000-plus, an enormous sum for the time, and had left town, unwittingly, without settling it. The Arts Lab picked up the tab after some negotiation.