Once upon a high time Andy Warhol’s films were a revolution. I was a college
student in the late Sixties. I had been educated by John Ford, Howard Hawks,
Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, but the films of urgent interest were those of
Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Warhol. I remember sitting through a
whole evening’s showings of Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. It’s hard
to imagine today, but back then a Warhol film was a glimpse of a new world,
a strange, weird, compelling, funny, scary world. Warhol film was for the
initiated, and so it was also initiatory.
When I was in college in Washington DC, we once drove miles to an obscure
theatre in Maryland to see Bike Boy. After ten minutes it occurred to us
that it wasn’t Bike Boy at all; it was a male porno film. Bike Boy was
opening the next night. To see Warhol films you had to go out of your way.
Not this summer, though, when, to mark 20 years since the artist’s death,
there are ample opportunities to catch Warhol’s films in seasons around the
country (see list below).
A lot of people thought Warhol’s films were a put-on. They thought the same of
his paintings. They were in a way, but they were also art. Warhol was keenly
aware of the practitioners of film as fine art and he wanted to be among
them and beyond them. He had been formed by film – a child of Hollywood who
grew up wanting to be Lana Turner. He quietly worshipped the underground
film-maker Jack Smith, from whom he appropriated the word “superstar”.
In 1967, when he was just becoming hot as a painter, Warhol announced that he
was giving up painting for film-making. For years afterwards he would put
most of the money he made painting into this hobby that would be a career.
(In fact his return to painting would be made to fund the films.) By this
time he had a stable of stars that mimicked that of his favourite studio
MGM, assembled from assistants such as Billy Name and Gerard Malanga, their
friends, including Brigid Berlin and Ondine, people he met on the scene such
as Edie Sedgwick and her Boston crowd, social butterflies such as Baby Jane
Holzer, and those who came to the Factory. Anyone could end up in his films
– including Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Dennis Hopper.
When I arrived at the Factory in 1970 I found a fascinating microcosm of
extravagant personalities. They were so outside the conventional world of
showbusiness that few of them dreamt of making it in Hollywood. Most were
happy to be famous among 1,000 people in Manhattan, but they were still
great stars. They were unhomogenised and unpasteurised and they didn’t need
writers. They could talk your ear off with wit and style. They just couldn’t
stop.
Yet scripts were commissioned, from underground playwrights such as Ronald
Tavel. Sometimes they were followed and sometimes not. Warhol was ambitious
and decided to film Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Tavel found
the book boring and didn’t finish reading it, but he managed to come up with
enough of a script to make Vinyl, Sedgwick’s debut film.
Warhol was a visionary but he was not a natural director. His idea of
direction was saying “do something”. So as the films became more
complicated, a crew evolved and from them a director emerged in the person
of Paul Morrissey. He was hardly a conventional director yet he was able to
do many things Warhol couldn’t do, such as write, tell people what to do,
edit, and tell people to get out of the Factory.
Morrisey’s debut was Chelsea Girls (1966), by far the most ambitious
Warhol film to date, a three-and-a-half-hour split-screen epic that told the
story of various characters residing at the notorious bohemian Chelsea
Hotel. The cast were amateurs, but that was part of the fascination.
Although the Factory’s feature films mimic the elements of Hollywood film
and even its star system, the actors are always themselves in a way that is
striking. Before Warhol we’d seen such marginalised, outré desperados only
in documentaries.
Morrissey said that they were going back to the way Hollywood films were made
before arty directors ruined everything by buying into the auteur theory and
considering themselves the stars. Warhol films were a return to star
vehicles. But they were making their own stars. Morrissey made films about
junkies, prostitutes and transvestites, while paying homage to John Ford and
Howard Hawks and using people who actually seemed to be junkies, prostitutes
and transvestites.
The difference between old Hollywood films and the new New York films was a
degree of realism. The Warhol film injected raw, unvarnished realism into
play-acted scenarios, transforming film-making into an explosive hybrid art.
It’s not dissimilar to what John Cassavetes was doing, except that his stars
had been to acting school. Warhol’s stars came from the school of hard
knocks.
In the Factory I met the superstars I’d seen on the screen – Viva, Candy
Darling, Bridgid Pok, Eric Emerson, Susan “International Velvet” Bottomly,
Ingrid Superstar, Ondine, Joe Dallesandro and many more. The only one I
didn’t meet was Sedgwick, who had bottomed out on drugs, had silicon breast
implants and moved out West.
Lots of the superstars hung out in the back room at Max’s Kansas City. I often
headed down there around midnight, sharing a taxi with Candy Darling, who
lived across the street from me. Candy was a great wit and she would often
hold court at the big round table. I remember one night I had the privilege
of introducing Candy to Divine and the great androgynous comediennes spent
the next hour flattering each other to death. You knew Max’s was hopping
when Andrea “Whips Warhol” Feldman jumped up on a table, yelled “Show time!”
and began dancing wildly, sometimes joined by the model Donna Jordan who
was, with Jane Forth, Patti D’Arbanville and Geraldine Smith, one of
Warhol’s real girl starlets. Andy liked having beauties around, boys, girls
or undecided. I thought Susan Bottomly was the most beautiful girl I’d met
and when she ignored my flirtation I found her even more devastating.
Warhol asked me to be in Women in Revolt (1971). I was supposed to play a
construction worker who ends up getting an enema from Jackie Curtis. I was
relieved when the part went to somebody else. But I believed in the product.
I believed in this remarkably different way of making feature films, this
American version of neo-realism.
It seemed as if it was working. The three Joe Dallesandro vehicles Flesh, Trash
and Heat had success with the critics and at the box office. The last of
these featured Sylvia Miles, who won an Academy Award the same year for her
role in Midnight Cowboy. There was also a small hit with Women in Revolt,
which starred a trio of transvestites, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and
Jackie Curtis, as radical feminists. Surely, I thought, Warhol and Morrissey
would be able to make films in Hollywood, bringing dispossessed
personalities to the big screen, or else Hollywood would pick up on what
they were doing. But the revolution didn’t happen. Not yet.
Europe did take note of what Factory Films was doing, and in 1973 two camp
comic horror films were made in Serbia, Blood for Dracula, and Flesh for
Frankenstein (in 3D). The films were made with real money, with Joe
Dallesandro, the Hollywood B queen Monique van Vooren, and European actors,
including Udo Kier, who played both Count Dracula and Baron Frankenstein and
spoke the memorable line: “To know death, Otto, you have to f*** life in the
gallbladder.”
The Factory sold both for only about $2 million. When Frankenstein went on
to gross more than $50 million, a rift developed between Warhol and
Morrissey that never healed. Warhol went on to make only one more film, Bad
(1977), with his significant other Jed Johnson, who had edited many of the
films. Unfortunately the film lived up to its name, ending an era.
I was wrong about Warhol starting the revolution. But he did speed up
evolution considerably because lots of ambitious kids were watching, such as
John Waters, Jim Jarmusch and Steve Buscemi. A whole generation of younger
directors, actors and casting directors such as Georgianne Walken totally
got it. I was part of it, being inspired by Warhol’s films to make a
televison show, TV Party, on the lowest of budgets, with questionable
sound and technique, but with people like you’d never seen on TV before.
I love bad camera and distorted sound and dead air because they remind you
you’re watching television and it’s not a dream. You’re awake.
— Glenn O’Brien was editor and art director of Andy Warhol’s
Interview from 1970 to 1973 and wrote the column Glenn O’Brien’s Beat
for Interview from 1978 to 1990
Summer of Warhol
Andy Warhol Film Season
Retrospective of Warhol’s film. Bfi Southbank, London SE1 (020-7928 3232), Aug
7-Sep 29
Andy Warhol
Largest collection of Warhol’s work exhibited in Scotland. National Gallery of
Scotland, Edinburgh (0131-624 6200), Aug 4-Oct 7
Andy Warhol Posters
Original posters for exhibitions, advertising and films. Gallery of Modern
Art, Glasgow (0141-229 1996), until Sep 2
Warhol: A Snapshot
Photographic prints of Warhol, using techniques inspired by the Factory, plus
films. The Wapping Project, London E1 (020-7680 2080), until Sep 2
Warhol in Film
Edinburgh College of Art, (www.nationalgalleries.org
0131-221 6000), Aug 4-Sep 9
