Chances are you’ve seen at least one of Norman Seeff’s photographs of the 1970′s and ’80s most iconic personalities. The former doctor from South Africa left a career in medicine to pursue his art and landed in New York City in the early ’70s. He was introduced to the Big Apple’s biggest creative collaborators and shot portraits for the likes of Patti Smith and Andy Warhol to name a few. As his photography expanded he began to attract the names of musicians, artists, and visionaries worldwide, and his now famous images remain some of the most memorable celebrity snapshots ever taken. Click through for a candid look at an enthusiastic John Travolta right before he became a star in Saturday Night Fever, a married Cher and Gregg Allman, a young Steve Jobs, and more. Read More »
This Saturday, October 15 people will be digging into their personal archives celebrating Home Movie Day. For those who don’t have a projector, the event provides an opportunity for people with reels of family memories and thrift shop finds to check them out on a big screen — many for the first time ever. The event will take place at 66 venues across 13 countries where historians, curators, archivists, and enthusiasts will be on hand to provide insight into the uniqueness and artistic relevance of amateur film.
English actor Roddy McDowall — best known for his role in the original Planet of the Apes — was also a home movie enthusiast. He recorded a group of Hollywood pals at random parties in the mid ’60s — and the list of friends reads like a who’s who of Tinseltown during its prime. Watch Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Judy Garland, Rock Hudson, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Andrews, and many more hang out. It’s a great, rare opportunity to see what some famous faces were like off screen. Click through for more.
The entertainment news cycle brings no shortage of casting announcements, but only rarely do we actually get excited about the news that a certain actor has been matched with a certain role. For instance, we were thrilled to hear, earlier this week, that Chloë Sevigny is slated to play Lizzie Borden in an HBO miniseries — and that she has, in fact, been staying at the bed and breakfast in Fall River, MA where Borden may or may not have killed her father and stepmother. Who better to take on such a morally ambiguous role than the woman who is just finishing her run as a delightfully selfish, short-fused (but ultimately well-meaning) character on Big Love?
Sevigny, we concluded, was born to play dark, fascinating roles. And that got us thinking about other actors who are at their best when portraying villains. Our top ten is after the jump.
1. President Obama is in trouble again, this time for having the audacity to wear flipflops while on vacation: “Historians agreed it was the first time they could remember seeing the leader of the free world snapped in a public setting, wearing nothing more than a flimsy strip of rubber on his feet.” [via NYP]
2. “I do believe that people want to believe that someone who deeply cares about the middle class would like to seek public office….We’ve had men who are Ivy League groomed running this country since 1988. We’ve had 22 years of Yale and Harvard and the problems aren’t getting solved.” – Alec Baldwinreveals on tonight’s Parker Spitzer that he’s very, very interested in running for political office
3. Dennis Hopper’s massive art collection — which includes an Andy Warhol screenprint of Mao that the actor notoriously shot two holes in back in the ’70s — is up for auction next week at Christie’s in New York City. [via WaPo]
4. Watch comic book legend Stan Lee — who created or co-created 90 percent of Marvel’s characters — accept a much deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. [via THR]
5. Attention Ferris Bueller’s Day Off fans with some money to burn: Cameron Frye’s modern glass house is now on the market for $1.65 million. Unfortunately, it does not come with his dad’s 1961 Ferrari, two-fifty GT California. [via Gawker]
Best known for his film career, Dennis Hopper was also a photographer, artist, collector, and fixture of the creative community for over half a century.
James Dean first introduced Hopper to the Los Angeles art world after the two met on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. He went on to produce a wide body of visual art while working as an actor and director on classic movies like Easy Rider. As an artist, Hopper’s talent was most obvious in his photography, which documented his creatively charged milieu and reflected his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.
Double-disc set 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests collects the tracks that Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips wrote and performed live to accompany the Pop art icon’s legendary films.
Dean & Britta were originally commissioned to soundtrack the silent films by the Andy Warhol Museum, which allowed them to select their 13 favorites from the vast Screen Tests archive. Their final selections included clips of Factory regulars Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, and Nico, with the resulting music ranging from new compositions to a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Not a Young Man Anymore.”
Questioning the notion of beauty, German photographer Martin Schoeller takes pictures of female bodybuilders, whose feminine heads seem grafted to muscular bodies, and close-up portraits of celebrities that show every pore and wrinkle on their famous faces. Following in the tradition of August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Thomas Ruff, Schoeller prefers a stark reality to the realm of fiction. The bulging muscles and sculptural forms of his female bodybuilders are surreal, while the sagging chins and flawed skin of Clint Eastwood, Chris Rock, Paris Hilton, Kobe Bryant, Sarah Palin, Dennis Hopper, and other boldface names show that even the stars are less than perfect.
Art reporter Lindsay Pollock (one of our Twitter Followables) posted some tasty gossip this morning concerning an upcoming show at Los Angeles MOCA, the first under the forthcoming directorial leadership of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. Pollock has a Los Angeles source that puts Dennis Hopper — not Edward, mind you — on the shortlist for LA MOCA’s inaugural show under Deitch, in an effort to incorporate “broad appeal” into the museum’s exhibition schedule. Dennis Hopper, in case you were wondering, is not just an actor but an avid photographer. We’ve got work samples and a Hopper primer after the jump. UPDATE:The exhibition is confirmed, with Julian Schnabel as curator.
1. While you were sleeping, MGMT dropped their trippy new video for “Flash Delirium,” complete with an Austin Powers puppet. [via TwentyFourBit]
2. When he returns to New York for his upcoming show at Deitch Projects, a reformed Shepard Fairey plans to ask before he pastes. [via ArtsBeat]
3. Meanwhile, a Dennis Hopper survey is on the short list of inaugural shows to be presented under new director Jeffrey Deitch at LA’s MOCA. [via Lindsay Pollock]
4. FOX is launching a new reality dating show, My Parents Are Gonna Love You, that sounds something like The Bachelor meets Punk’d — but the joke is on the poor parents. [via THR]
5. June Havoc, Gypsy Rose Lee‘s sister and the real life inspiration for Gypsy the musical’s “Baby June” character, has died at 97. [via WaPo]
A cat playing the piano is funny, but a sequence of cats playing an atonal composition by Arnold Schoenberg is both brilliant and absurd. One of the latest works from digital artist Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstucke, Op.11 is a compilation of fragments from found YouTube videos that captures a variety of cats walking on piano keys, each producing a note. Edited together, they recreate a dynamic piece of modernist music.
