“The American Dreamer” (1971) is a portrait of Dennis Hopper at a crossroads. Filmed during the editing of “The Last Movie,” his directorial follow-up to the decade-defining “Easy Rider,” it shows the actor and filmmaker struggling with the pressures of his newfound success and the possibilities of failure in the future. The film is a documentary only in the broadest sense of the term. Hopper appears as himself in the film, and its directors — Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson (who died in 2014) — make cameos as well, often arguing with Hopper about the direction of scenes or the pervasiveness of the camera, completely self-aware about breaking the conventions of non-fiction film. At one point, Hopper discusses talking to Charles Manson, who told him he felt like he had been acting in a movie with no cameras. The connection is clear.Unavailable for many years, the film has recently resurfaced in a new restoration, which is showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on October 11. Ahead of the screening, ARTINFO spoke with Schiller — who, aside from making films, has spent time as a photographer and journalist — about how “The American Dreamer” was created and what happened to the film before it was rediscovered.I wanted to first talk about your career before “The American Dreamer,” and how it led to the film. Well, I was a magazine photographer for Life, Paris Match, and the Saturday Evening Post. And in the late 1960s, it became apparent that the magazines were going out of business, because the advertising dollar was moving from general circulation magazines to television. Television could define the audience better than a general circulation magazine. So there was a very famous picture editor at Life magazine named Dick Pollard, and he took a bunch of young photographers together on a walk through Central Park, and said, “You guys need to find a new profession because we’re not going to be in business in three or four years.” So, at the very beginning, I decided I would become a book publisher. A couple of writers from Life magazine and myself started to publish books. But at the same time I realized there wasn’t enough money in book either. You were dependent upon royalties, and you never knew if a book was going to sell or not — so I decided to make documentaries on subjects that interested me. It was like a walk across the street, one street corner to another. But I didn’t know how long the walk was going to be.What was the first film you made?The first film I made was a Super-8mm movie on the director Elaine May, when she was directing the film “A New Leaf,” with Walter Matthau. The second film I made was on a music group called Pacific Gas & Electric, a bus trip they were taking from New York to Lexington, Kentucky. On that bus trip I met another filmmaker, L.M. Kit Carson. And Carson said to me, you should make a film about Dennis Hopper. He just made “Easy Rider,” he’s like at the top of Mount Olympus.Were you familiar with Carson’s previous film work when you met him?I was familiar with “David Holzman’s Diary.” I had either seen it or something, but I was familiar with that film. He was a real experimental documentary person. I wasn’t experimental. I was more business.So did you just call Dennis up and tell him the idea?I don’t remember exactly what happened. Annie Leibovitz, a friend of mine, who was working at Rolling Stone at the time, also said, you should make a film about Dennis Hopper. Now, why were they telling me I should make a film about Denis Hopper? Because they had seen my little film about Elaine May. So Kit and I decided to do that [film]. I had a concept that I had wanted to do with Paul Newman, who I had photographed on many movies, which was a movie star who submerges himself in his own myth. Paul didn’t want to do it; he thought it was too risky. So I said to Kit, let’s do this with Dennis — the man who submerged himself in the myth of “Easy Rider.” Kit said, you don’t have to do that; he’s already doing that. That’s how he’s living his life. So we went out to Taos to meet Dennis.Was there a structure in place for the film? Or did you just show up with cameras?We had a business contract with Dennis. We agreed upon the dates, and he didn’t restrict us on how long or what we could film. If we had ideas of something that should be filmed he was open to that. But very soon after we started filming in Taos I discovered we weren’t making a documentary. We were making a film about an actor playing himself in a documentary. Very much like the great film “Nanook of the North,” which everybody thinks is a documentary, but is not. Within a day of shooting, it was obvious Dennis was playing Dennis.Which is something you joke about in the beginning of “The American Dreamer,” when you arrive at Dennis’s door and somebody behind the camera says: “Just act natural. Pretend we’re not here.” That was Kit. That scene was not the first scene we filmed. In fact, that was the last scene we made, or almost the last scene, when the film was all over. I think we even had a rough cut, and discovered we didn’t have an opening to the film. We were sitting around — myself, Kit Carson, and Dennis might have even been there — and we realized we needed a way to get into this guy’s life. I can’t tell you honestly who said it, but one of us said, “Let’s just knock on his door. Maybe he’ll open the door and be nude.” I said, “That’s a great idea.” Somebody else said, “Maybe he’s taking a bath and we follow him down the hallway and into the bathtub.” And then Kit says, “Well, since we know Dennis is playing Dennis already, I’ll tell him, ‘Act natural!’”What was the working relationship like with Kit Carson?We were joined at the hip. He was the intellectual. I was not an intellectual. He could talk to Dennis and about the meaning of certain moments. He was never directing, but without Kit I could have never made the film. That’s why there’s a scene in the film of Dennis and myself having a fight. Because I wanted to show I was not the intellectual.When you filmed Hopper, he was editing “The Last Movie,” which was his follow-up to “Easy Rider.” And at one point he compares himself to Orson Wells, calling “Easy Rider” his “Citizen Kane” and “The Last Movie” his “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which was a commercially unsuccessful very much like “The Last Movie” would ultimately be. It’s almost as if Hopper was hoping it would be a failure. I think Dennis knew it was going to be a failure. We all knew. We would be looking at the film, again and again, and nobody knew what the movie was about. It was all in Dennis’s head. The short and long of it is that nobody said that to Dennis, but he started talking about Welles in that context because I think Dennis knew it was going to be a failure. Not a failure artistically, but a failure at the box-office.The editing of “The American Dreamer” is great in the way it jumps back and forth in time, almost at the pace of Dennis’s brain. Let me say this. I come from being a photojournalist. So I shot still stories out of context and then put them in context for a multi-page layout. So I was saying to myself, “Why do I have to follow the same rules?” So when cutting this film, I went forwards and backwards in time. Nobody lives their life in continuity. Yes, you get up in the morning; yes, you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But you never know what’s going to happen.How was the film eventually released and what happened to it over the years?This was the first film released on college campuses. [Robert] Redford owned a company called EYR Programs, and I had met Redford on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” — I directed and cut the still montage that’s at the center of the film. The short and long of it is Redford said, “I have this company, why don’t we release it on college campuses.” Dennis was all for it. So the film was released, and basically the film did extraordinarily well. It went through the roof. Then other films took over. I went on and made a documentary that won an Oscar, “The Man Who Skied Down Everest.” It’s not a very good documentary, why it won an Oscar I don’t know. I was a work-for-hire. And then I went on with my life, and other films became more important. Then when Dennis bought back the rights to “The Last Movie” for Universal — he finally earned enough money to buy it back — he started to say, “Anytime you show ‘The Last Movie’ you have to show ‘The American Dreamer.’” Then Kit and I decided to give the film to the Walker Arts Center to preserve it. They raised money for the restoration of the film, and that is allowing for this release.
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