Edie Sedgwick/Rene Ricard (as Andy Warhol)filmed November 1966 (LD260)
The Andy Warhol Story is one of Warhol's "lost" films - mentioned in a few sources, but largely unknown and unseen. Although Lupe is generally credited as Edie Sedgwick's final Warhol film, The Andy Warhol Story is actually the last film that Edie Sedgwick made for Andy Warhol - almost a year after Lupe.
After Lupe, Edie left the Warhol crowd for the Dylan crowd - with Dylan's manager hoping to turn her into a singer and/or actress. However the plans never materialized and Sedgwick started visiting the Factory again "asking for pills and money". According to Victor Bockris, "Andy always gave her a few dollars and an Obetrol if he had a spare one on him" and "put her in one last movie, to try, as he said, to 'help her out'." (LD260) (Warhol, himself, always denied giving drugs to Edie.)
Paul Morrissey:
"Rene Ricard was supposed to be Andy and Edie was in it with him. She was in a bad way, and we thought we could help her, even though she had been so mean to do what she did [leaving Warhol]. Andy really liked her and I did too. We thought it might work, but it wasn't any good. All Rene did was look in the camera and say nasty things about Andy, and it was really embarrassing because he thought he'd be funny. I remember very well Andy just not finding it funny at all, but anybody else in that circumstance would have turned the camera off and he wouldn't." (LD26)
According to Rene Ricard, it was Rene who insisted on using Edie Sedgwick in the film:
Rene Ricard:
"I made a film with Edie about nine months after she left the Factory. Andy suggested, 'Let's do a movie with you as me in it. The Andy Warhol Story.
I really hated Andy by then. I realized his was a passive exploitation - that it could be humiliating and horrible. He had been asking me to do this for a long time and I had refused. But one night I took an Obetrol - a very powerful twenty five milligram amphetamine pill, the best. They were very hard to get, rare and very good.
It's a good high, very gay, very lovely speed.
That night we were making this Tiger Morse movie, part of a twenty-four hour four-star movie in which I was supposed to be an extra. 'Don't do too much talking', I was told. Well, the pill got me hysterical and I was amazingly good at it. Andy fell in love with me for it. Once again he said, 'Oh, you're so good tonight; let's do that movie I've wanted you to do.'
So I finally said okay. The only reason I agreed to do his film was to get even with him.
I said, 'Okay, let's go to my place and do it.' I was living in a very beautiful apartment on Fifth Avenue with Avery Dunphy, who was being kept in this luxurious place by a doctor who was mad for prissy Wasps. Mirrored coffee tables, a huge white silk-satin couch.Beautiful, right? What Avery wanted to be was chic -which was all anybody wanted at that time. Having Andy Warhol make a movie in that apartment, even though it wasn't his, was very chic. I called Avery and told him what was happening - that we were on the the way. I told him, 'I want orchids. I want the place filled with orchids.'
He asked, 'Well, where am I going to get orchids at this time of night?'
I told him about a place in the East Sixties that's openuntil mid-night. I figured I'd do it right. Right? I didn't have any money, but at least I could have orchids.
Besides, I was trying to get even with Andy. So Avery went out and bought the most exquisite orchids you've ever seen. He bought orchids to die over. I know the difference between good orchids and vulgar ones, and these were expensive and good - from Hawaii or Vietnam, which is where Paris gets its orchids.
When we all got to the apartment, Andy asked, 'Who do you want in the film with you?' I said 'I only want Edie Sedgwick. Who else is there in your life but Edie Sedgwick?' Andy said, 'I don't know if we can get her.' I said, 'I won't do it without her.'
I took another pill and I got wired. Wired! There's a point when you take speed when you talk a lot, and yet there's also a point where you take too much and you don't talk. That's the point that second pill got me to.
So Andy got Edie on the telephone and offered to pay for her taxi, and about three hours later Edie turned up. I didn't want to make the movie when I saw her. She was wearing a dirty blond fall. She looked like the cheapest piece of filth.
Here was my Edie, my Edie, and I was making a movie with her - co-stars! No longer was I an extra, and she looked like hell! She was wearing a kind of Marimekko type dress, and mean! She, too, hated Andy at that point: she had been eighty-sixed.
When she was with the fairies, she was on speed and she was Edie, she was 'on'. When she was with Bobby Neuwirth, who was a hetero, she was on downs, and Edie on downs was not pretty.
Well, when she arrived at the apartment, the cameras started rolling. I had my own personal vendetta against against Warhol, and so did she. And I was playing Warhol. So I played him the way he behaved to the people under him. She played herself according to how she felt about him then. The things she said to me were horrible. I don't remember them. I don't even remember what I said. I was awful. I have nightmares about what I did in that movie... saying things about Andy that were true, how he disposed of people.
Paul Morrissey, who was behind the camera, was white with rage. I went through the paintings... how Andy doesn't actually do the paintings himself. Stupid things like: "Gerard get me an egg. Do you want to know howI paint my pictures, you people out there?' I'd crack the egg in a glass and then I'd say to Gerard: 'Cook it!' That's how I paint my pictures.'
We did one reel and stopped. Then Andy in his sick, masochistic, dreadful way - after all, here were these two people on camera saying the most ghastly things about him - said 'Let's do another reel.' He had been standing holding his fingers in his mouth, which he does when he's anxious, and he was loving it... getting the truth.
So we did another reel, and in this one it got violent. Edie started it. At some point I gave her some orchids. I said, 'You're not dressed up enough for this movie. So do something. Take these flowers.'
She took them and crushed them. I got very upset. And I - me, Rene Ricard, not the Andy Warhol me - was just made demented by that. I love orchids. It was a personal thing from me to her. I said, 'You really need to fix yourself up, my dear. Put them on you somewhere.'
She cried out, 'I hate them! I don't want to be beautiful!'She wrecked the flowers. Edie was hating me. We were both hating each other because of the roles we were playing... I loved Edie, but I couldn't stand being in a movie with her the way she looked. She was horrible in the movie, and mean. The things I was saying were so horrible.
Paul Morrissey suddenly reached out from behind the camera and ripped my clothes off me - a new white silk shirt and new pair of white linen pants. He ripped them. The camera was turning. Paul was out of the frame. I guess he was livid because of the things I was saying about Andy.
So we finished the film - two reels. Edie rushed home. I didn't care about her at that point. My clothes were a ruin. I was a mess. I was wiped out by the pills. Dazed.
You'll never guess what happened then. Andy Warhol at that point was close to a guy called Rod La Rod. He was handling the sound on this film. They asked me to see the rushes in the Factory. I sat there watching it - Paul, Andy, Rod and a few of the other serfs were there -and I saw what they had done to it. Edie's voice is there, but when I speak, you can't hear it. They were in glee." (EDIE285-7)
According to Victor Bockris in his book on Warhol, Edie looked "as tawdry as Ingrid Superstar" and "the movie was such a torturous document of Edie's disintegration that the one time it was shown at the Factory, those watching begged Andy to turn it off." (LD260)
The Andy Warhol Story is also mentioned by Callie Angell as part of the Andy Warhol Film Project under the auspices of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. According to Callie, Edie "apparently appeared in The Andy Warhol Story (or Rene as Andy), an unreleased and reportedly vicious two-reel feature made in 1966, in which both Rene Ricard and Edie pretend to be Andy Warhol." (FAW25)
THE CHELSEA GIRLS (1966) to SUMMER 1966: ANDY WARHOL SHOOTS THE CHELSEA GIRLS
B/W & Color/16mm/sound/24fps3 hrs. 15 mins (split screen)(filmed summer 1966)(two segments scripted by Ronald Tavel)
Marie Menken/Mary Woronov/Gerard Malanga/International Velvet (Susan Bottomly)/Ingrid Superstar/Angelina "Pepper" Davis/Ondine (Bob Olivio)/Albert Rene Ricard/Ronna Page/Ed Hood/Patrick Fleming/Mario Montez/Eric Emerson/Ari Boulogne/Brigid Berlin
Music: The Velvet Underground/Lighting: Paul Morrissey & Billy NameCamera: Andy Warhol/Executive Producer: Paul MorrisseyProducer: Andy Warhol/Video Version: Paul Morrissey(video version copyrighted 1993 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Paul Morrissey)
The Chelsea Girls was Andy Warhol's his first major commercial success and catapulted many of the participants into superstardom - Ondine, Nico, International Velvet (Susan Bottomly), Brigid Berlin and Mary Woronov. When Mary Woronov's mother saw the film she sued Warhol because her daughter had not signed a release. Warhol eventually paid all the actors $1,000.00 each to sign a release. (DB)
The Chelsea Girls is made up of various scenes shot at the Chelsea Hotel, the Factory and at various apartments including the Velvet Underground's apartment on West 3rd Street in the Village. Nico, Brigid Berlin and Susan Bottomly (International Velvet) lived at the Chelsea Hotel at the time the film was made. Brigid said that she spent about one night a week in her own room and the rest of the time visiting other people in other rooms. (DB240)
At the premiere of the film at Jonas Mekas' Cinematheque, the film sequences were listed on the program accompanied by fake room numbers at the Chelsea Hotel. These had to be removed, however, when the Chelsea Hotel threatened legal action.
At least two of the segments listed in the original program for The Chelsea Girls were deleted from the film - The Afternoon and The Closet. The Closet starred Nico and Randy Bourscheidt and is now shown as a separate film.
The Afternoon starred Edie Sedgwick. According to Paul Morrissey, Edie later asked for her footage to be taken out of The Chelsea Girls, saying that she had signed a contract with Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. (EDIE283)
The Their Town segment of The Chelsea Girls featured a script by Ron Tavel based on an article, "The Pied Piper of Tucson," in Life Magazine in March 1966 about a serial killer. (AD30)
Nico, Brigid Berlin and Susan Bottomly (International Velvet) lived at the Chelsea at the time The Chelsea Girls was made. Brigid said that she spent about one night a week in her own room and the rest of the time visiting other people in other rooms. (DB240)
Ronna Page, the person who Ondine verbally and physically assaulted in The Chelsea Girls, was actually a friend of Jonas Mekas who had sent her to the Factory. She also hung around with Gerard Malanga and appeared in Warhol's film Bufferin with Malanga. She accompanied Gerard to poetry readings as well as appearing onstage with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable when they played the Boston ICA in 1966. (GMW56-9)
Warhol shot the footage for The Chelsea Girls from June to September 1966. It was generally improvised except for two scripts sent in by Ron Tavel who mailed the scripts to Warhol from Los Angeles - one being the "Hanoi Hannah" segment featuring Mary Woronov. In August 1966, Jonas Mekas asked Warhol for a film to screen and Paul Morrissey and Warhol assembled 12 of the films they had shot into The Chelsea Girls. According to Victor Bockris the reels of film were shown on two screens in order to reduce the time of the film from 6 1/2 hours to 3 hours 15 minutes. (LD256)
The Chelsea Girls opened at the 200 capacity Film-Makers' Cinematheque on September 15, 1966. It returned there for a second week from October 19 - 25, and again from November 6 - 9, with many of the performances sold out. Due to the film's popularity, the Film-Maker's Distribution Center (FDC) booked the six-hundred seater Cinema Rendevous at 110 West 57th Street to show the film. The FDC had been founded by Jonas Mekas and his underground film cronies in order to distribute underground films to commercial theatres.
On December 1, 1966, The Chelsea Girls opened at the Cinema Rendezvous - "making it the first underground movie to get a two-week run in a midtown Manhattan art theater." (DB248) The estimated investment for the release was $ 15,000, which included cinema rental, advertising and publicity expenses. It netted $5,000 for this screening which was split equally between the FDC and Warhol. After its run at the Rendezvous, it was moved to the Regency Theater of Broadway at 67th Street, playing three daily performances for more than a month. It then moved to the York Cinema on the East Side, with the FDC making arrangements with the Art Theater Guild who had art house cinemas throughout the country. (DB249)
The film cost approximately $1,500 - $3,000 to make and in its first nineteen weeks of release in New York, it grossed approximately $130,000 at the box office. Following reviews of the film in the national press, it was booked into cinemas in Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, San Diego and Kansas City. (DB249) When the film played Boston, the cinema was raided by the vice squad and the manager found guilty of four charges of obsenity and fined $500.00 for each charge. According to David Bourdon, Andy was "delighted" as it meant that he would be able to say that the film had been "banned in Boston" - "traditionally a publicist's dream." (DB254)
When the film was initially released, Newsweek praised it as the "Iliad of the underground". Not all reviews were so favourable however. Rex Reed said, "Chelsea Girls is a three and a half hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the inside of a toilet bowl." (LD258)
Gary ComenasWarholstars
POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL (1965)
to JUNE 19/20, 1965: POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL PREMIERES AT ASTOR PLACE PLAYHOUSE
BW/Sound/66 mins at 24 fpsEdie Sedgwick and Chuck Wein (off screen)(filmed March-April 1965)
Andy Warhol:
"Whatever anyone may have thought, the truth is I never gave Edie a drug, ever. Not even one diet pill. Nothing. She certainly was taking a lot of amphetamine and downs, but she certainly wasn't getting them from me. She was getting them from that doctor who was shooting up every Society lady in town." (POP108)
Poor Little Rich Girl was originally conceived as part of a series of films featuring Edie Sedgwick which Warhol started shooting in March 1965 called The Poor Little Rich Girl Saga. It included Restaurant, Face, and Afternoon, as well as this film. The title is the same as a 1936 movie starring Shirley Temple who Andy idolized in his childhood. (FAW20)
The film takes place in Edie's apartment. Andy and Gerard shot two rolls (approx. 70 mins) of Edie as "she lay on her bed, talked on the phone and walked around her room, showing off her clothes and describing how she had spent her entire inheritance in six months." (L&D221)
When the rolls were processed, they were completely out of focus because of a problem with the camera lens. They re-shot the two long takes, adding it to the first reel so that the first 33 minutes of the film are completely out of focus as Edie wakes up, orders coffee and orange juice, smokes cigarettes does her excercises, takes pills and puts on make-up - all done in silence, except for the background music of an Everly Brothers album. (FAW22/L&D221
EMPIRE (1964)
to JULY 25 - 26, 1964: ANDY WARHOL FILMS EMPIRE
BW/Silent/8 hrs, 5 mins/16 fps(filmed July 25/26, 1964)
Mary Woronov (2008):
"Okay. It's freezing in New York. I'm staying at the Gershwin, a MIdtown hotel straight out of Raymond Chandler. They are having a Warhol festival, everyone gets a free silver wig and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses. All week, there are two to three of Andy 's early black-and-white films running 24/7 on the lobby walls. It's 2 a.m. and on the wall beside me is the Empire State Building. I want to go to bed, but instead, I sit down and my brain floods with feelings about the past when Daddy took us to the top of the tallest building in the world, about America, my tragic country that was great but is not great anymore, and about the city I can no longer afford to live in. All this takes about three seconds because I promised myself a long time ago I would never cry in a hotel lobby. But the building continues to demand my attention. And, unlike a painting, it is not dead. It's living, like a window that sees only the past. 'This is brilliant,' I blurt out, and four different people tell me to shut the fuck up. But my brain is bubbling over. I realize that Andy never meant to do a film. he was doing a painting. Pop art put the image back in painting and Andy took it even further and put the image on film instead of canvas. He wasn't directing, he was painting. It's only taken me 40 years to realize that these films were never meant to screen in a theater, where I thought they were boring. They were meant to hang on a wall. They are Andy's greatest paintings." (MX)
Empire was filmed on the night of July 25-26 from 8:06 pm to 2:42 am, from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life building. According to Gerard Malanga, "It was John Palmer who came up with the idea for Empire. John, Jonas Mekas and I changed the reels for Andy. He barely touched the camera during the whole time it was being made. He wanted the machine to make the art for him."(L&D207/FAW16/www.moma.org/collection/depts/film_media/blowups/film_media_023.html)
Gerard Malanga:
"On a somewhat hazy afternoon - Saturday, to be exact, 25 July 1964 - a group - Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, Jonas Mekas, Marie Desert, and John Palmer - enter the Time-Life Building, corner of 50th/Avenue of the Americas, with bags and boxes of camera equipment in tow, and ascend to the 44th floor headquarters of the Rockefeller Foundation, to be met at the front door by Henry Romney, a Vice-president of the foundation. Henry ushers us into his office, which offers an unobstructed view of the Empire State Building, 16 blocks to the southeast. After a few minutes of schmoozing, we begin breaking out the equipment, separating cables, film-loading bags, tripod, and boxes of Eastman Kodak raw stock, and with meticulous care, fix the Auricon camera onto the tripod's metal plate. This is the first time Andy would make use of this highly professional, though antiquated piece of equipment." (GMW85)
The film begins with a totally white screen and as the sun sets, the image of the Empire State Building emerges. The floodlights on its exterior come on, the building's lights flicker on and off for the next 6 1/2 hours, then the floodlights go off again in the next to the last reel so that the "remainder of the film takes place in nearly total darkness." (FAW16)
According to Gerard Malanga, the first two reels were actually overexposed because "Andy was exposing for night light, but it was all guesswork." (L&D207)
Andy used a camera with sync sound for the first time in Empire. According to Victor Bockris, Jonas Mekas "had brought the Auricon newsreel camera he had just used to film the Living Theater's production of The Brig. (L&D207). According to Gerard Malanga , the Auricon had been rented from F & B Ceco on West 43rd Street - the rental arranged by John Palmer. (GMW90)
Gerard Malanga:
"The Auricon, a 16mm single-system sound camera, had the distinct advantage of accommodating a 1200-foot magazine, allowing for a 35-minute take at the flick of a switch. Ironically, the camera was chosen not for its sound capacity, but in cutting time while reels were being changed to assimilate the nearly exact ratio of reel time to real time, as first theorized by John [Palmer] - '1 to 1' - adhering to a Warholian principle already established to an initial degree with the film, Sleep a year earlier." (GMW90)
Empire was originally intended to be a sound movie with Henry Geldzahler, Gerard Malanga, Jonas Mekas and John Palmer talking in the background. (L&D206) John Palmer had been a student at the same college as Gerard Malanga - the Wagner Memorial Lutheran College, Staten Island, New York. During his senior year in 1963, Gerard was editor of the college's literary magazine and John Palmer had contributed some writing. John Palmer would later go on to direct and write (along with David Weisman), the non-Warhol film, Ciao Manhattan starring Edie Sedgwick.
Gerard Malanga:
"John Palmer, a young filmmaker, should rightly be credited with the concept for the film, Empire. It was John's ingenuity and proficiency that most impressed Warhol to go ahead and rent the movie camera needed to see this project through. John was considered something of a 'wunderkind' among the underground filmmakers, like Ron Rice, Jack Smith, and Harry Smith... It was also through John's acquaintance with Henry Romney, that we would secure Henry's office for the making of the movie. John had met Henry through Frederick Eberstadt, a society photographer he assisted shortly after arriving in New York from Hartford, fresh out of high school." (GMW88/90)
During the filming, the lights in the office from which they were shooting were temporarily left on. In the beginning of three reels, images of the film crew can be seen reflected in the window, next to the Empire State Building. Warhol's reflection appears at the beginning of Reel 7. (FAW17)To "break the monotony" of the filming, Gerard Malanga "decided to notate a few minutes worth of conversation verbatim".
Gary ComenasWarholstars
Fuente de todas las reseñas: www.warholstars.com
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