“Movies about artists, I just think it’s hard,” he said, the “oh, wooow” wonder coming through in his voice. “How do you make that compelling? Just, like, somebody doing something?”
In 1978, when Owen Wilson was 10 years old, his father had a meeting with Mitchell Wilder, the founding director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. Robert A. Wilson was a consultant to the museum, and Wilder came to him hoping he could inject some juice into the then 40-year-old institution. As it happened, Richard Avedon had just been on the cover of Newsweek—the magazine had slapped a daring self-portrait on the front page, making Avedon the first photographer ever to snag some of the most exclusive real estate in media at the time. Wilson, who ran KERA TV in Dallas and contributed to local newspapers and magazines, knew the amount of buzz that an Avedon show in Texas could generate, and suggested they offer the toast of Manhattan a commission for their little museum. He and Wilder went to Avedon’s studio and made the pitch: Come to Texas and take some pictures of normal folk in the country. Avedon, ready to switch things up from shooting the usual models and starlets, said yes.
When the photographer arrived in Sweetwater, Texas, for the world’s biggest rattlesnake roundup, he was accompanied by a new assistant: Laura Cunningham Wilson, Robert’s wife and the mother of Owen and his brothers, Luke and Andrew (both of whom would eventually become actors too). The trip generated some of the most iconic images of Avedon’s career, and the show at the Amon Carter broke attendance records. And when Avedon decided to keep on exploring the American West, he brought Laura Wilson with him.
“She worked on that Avedon thing for 10 years. That was a big thing. She’d leave to go for weeks at a time—and sometimes she would take one of us,” he said. “I went to Montana, Wyoming. And I kind of hit it off with Avedon. I love reading. I was a pretty big reader as a kid, and I read those Louis L’Amour Westerns, and he liked those also. And then one time he even sent War and Peace. I still haven’t read it. But I remember his note, saying, ‘This is a little different from Louis L’Amour, but I love it, and maybe you’ll enjoy it.’”
In the years since, Laura Wilson became a renowned photographer in her own right, regularly publishing her photos in magazines (including Vanity Fair), having shows of her work at institutions such as the Amon Carter and the Harry Ransom Center in Austin—and in 2019 she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. But Avedon, her teacher, always loomed large in the family. Years later, not long before Avedon’s death, Wilson and Anderson asked the photographer to shoot the main image for The Royal Tenenbaums, with the star-studded cast set against the classic Avedon white background. There’s also a subtler Easter egg in the film: The photo of Owen Wilson’s character, the novelist Eli Cash, on the cover of a magazine shows him holding a rattlesnake in the exact same manner as one of the subjects Avedon shot in Sweetwater, Texas. Wilson’s mom was the assistant, and the work is currently in the collection of the Amon Carter, thanks to Wilson’s dad.
Wilson’s mom also exposed him to the work of a New York artist who had decamped to an isolated desert town deep in the heart of West Texas.
“My mom photographed Donald Judd right before he died at Marfa,” Wilson said. “And I just loved the way Marfa looked. And his installations, and the Chamberlains there. And he was kind of a cool-looking guy. I have the photograph that my mom took of him up in my house.”
His parents helped out a lot when it came to his future profession too. At the University of Texas, Owen and Luke linked up with a fellow movie obsessive named Wes Anderson, and Owen and Wes cowrote a short film called Bottle Rocket, which they showed to Dallas actor and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson—a friend of the Wilsons’ and a cowriter of Paris, Texas. Carson helped put the short film in Sundance and get it in front of director James L. Brooks, who loved it and moved to Texas with his team to workshop the full-length script and get filming underway. When it was finally released, the movie got rave reviews, and it was enough to encourage them to start work on the next Wilson-Wilson-Anderson collaboration: Rushmore.
In November 1997, right before Rushmore started filming, Wilson went to a Rolling Stones concert in Las Vegas, and ended up meeting the artist Ed Ruscha, who was there with Shafrazi. Wilson was a fan of Ruscha—he, his brothers, and Anderson loved the work Brave Men Run in My Family, which hung in their favorite restaurant in Santa Monica, Ivy at the Shore—but he had never heard of Shafrazi.
“I think he came up to me because he loved Bottle Rocket,” Wilson said. “He had somehow seen Bottle Rocket even though not many people saw it. And he had wild enthusiasm for it.”
The two immediately struck up an unlikely but intense friendship. Shafrazi had one of the hottest galleries in SoHo, showing work from the estates of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring as well as Kenny Scharf, Donald Baechler, and the photography practice of Dennis Hopper. Shafrazi was also one of the art world’s most excitable figures, a guy with a pinball machine of a brain capable of hours-long coverations—Wilson joked that he’d be a great US senator because of his ability to filibuster—and a voracious cultural appetite.
Wilson recalled introducing Shafrazi to his parents when they came into the city for the premiere of The Royal Tenenbaums.
“You know how Tony is kind of like a tornado—he comes blowing in, shirt untucked and his suit and tie askew, perspiring a bit, and I greet him warmly,” Wilson said. “And I said to him, ‘This is my mom.’ And you know parents worry about their kid. And my mom said, ‘And how do you know Owen?’ And then Tony said, ‘He’s my best friend. We’re best friends.’”
Shafrazi also introduced Wilson to Peter Brant, the mega-collector who produced Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic Basquiat, and Ed Harris’s 2000 film Pollock.
Brant is also a producer on Paint, a warm, funny film in which Wilson stars as Carl Nargle, an artist in Vermont with his own painting show on the local TV station. Each day, Nargle paints a picture over the course of the 30-minute run time, and parlays his local celebrity into trysts with fans in his smoky RV. But when a younger female artist begins to steal his viewers with her own show, he has to reckon with the reasons why one becomes an artist in the first place.
