In the future, everyone will be Andy Warhol for 15 Minutes

That last should be I Shot Andy Warhol, of course.

Isn't Jared Harris in "I Shot Andy Warhol"? Anyway, like I'm not going to vote for him in whatever he's in.

x-post duh

like i'm not going to vote C. Glover whatever he's in

Jared Harris made the biggest impression as a character for me, in part because Crispin Glover and David Bowie are already characters (and I doubt I'll ever see Factory Girl).

Well, yeah, C.Glover is usually great, but I disliked his Warhol as v v inaccurate - like, Warhol was renowned for having a complete phobia of being touched, and there were all these scenes of girls crawling all over him which was a bit OOC.

(my BF at the time I saw that film was a total Warhol fanatic and got very annoyed at that and was continually pointing out things he disliked about the representation and indeed the film. Which actually made the film a lot more fun than it would otherwise have been.)

But, like Jared Harris is my second or third favourite pointy-nosed ginger in the world, and hey, also added bonus of Yo La Tengo playing the Velvet Underground, what's not to love? I really need to see that film again, it's been too long.

Harris is great--my favourite line is when he looks at Solanas's play and says, "Oh, wow--you should come type for us." Factory Girl is really pretty good; George Hickenlooper, who died last year and who did the excellent Rodney Bingenheimer documentary.

there are some i haven't seen, but, for how much fun he is, & in recognition of the gulf in quality between that & all other performances by him, bowie in basquiat by a mile

I dunno, the problem with Factory Girl is, well... crucial parts of it are almost totally FICTIONAL? But, you know, don't let any little details like facts get in the way of a biopic.

I've always thought Bowie did a pretty great job but I really do remember Harris standing out so I voted him. I've never seen Factory Girl though.

The Doors is an idiotic cartoon and best enjoyed as such tho plus i am uncritical kyle maclachlan and crispin glover fan so, but Harris is probly right in terms of common sense.

Harris no question. Bowie has a lot of fun playing David Bowie playing Andy Warhol.

I dunno, the problem with Factory Girl is, well... crucial parts of it are almost totally FICTIONAL?

Especially the Dylan stuff, where Dylan comes off as this upright paragon of domesticity. I'm sure all of these films are very loose with facts, though--except the Oliver Stone, of course.

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Come celebrate his birthday with these guys!

https://www.earthcam.com/usa/pennsylvania/pittsburgh/warhol/?cam=warhol_figmentstream

Who’s watching the Netflix thing?

“No way a wife of mine is going to have her picture painted by that, that New York flakeball.”

Never heard this General Public song before.

Did I just see Bulle Ogier and Barbet Schroeder in this going to the Basquiat-Warhol opening?

2 Episodes in and really enjoying it, OP's music is great too.

i don't have Netflix but the older i get the more i love and appreciate Warhol

It's curious, with Warhol, I enjoy his art but I've never been greatly moved by it, perhaps that's the whole point, of course.

But I'll always go to see any exhibition, I've seen a good few now, in one place or another.

I'll also happily read any book about him or the factory, the Bockris one, the diaries, or even those vain factory stable autobiographies, like Ultra Violet's.

I think the best one I've read is Bob Colacello's 'Holy Terror', but it really just deals with the more corporate later period, the Union Sq Factory era, still pretty wild though.

Good post. Have been meaning to read Holy Terror, Josefa recommended it on the VU thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69LBWo1cbIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJUEa3ZTiw0

https://mudseasonreview.com/2017/05/art-issue-29/

https://www.wired.com/story/andy-warhol-diaries-artificial-intelligence-voice/

“We tried models combining 80 to 75 percent of the AI voices and 20 to 15 percent of Bill’s performance,” Rossi said in the Wired interview. “In the end, Andy’s voice throughout the series presents a variation of ranges on this interpolated model.”

I got a few minutes into the first episode a couple of weeks ago and bailed. I don't know--I just didn't want to hear excerpts dramatized and read by an actor. I have the book, never read it.

Kinda wish someone would make a Blu-ray of the 'Andy Warhol TV' episodes, maybe 15 years back there was an exhibit in London with a funny little installation where you sat on boxes with headphones and watched different episodes, I spent a long time there and loved the way the cheap video equipment made everything look. First thing I saw when I sat down was this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msb6MZ-fBfA

Hell yeah, Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes was such a cool show. There were only five episodes!

Ah yes, but there was also a cable show called Andy Warhol's TV, which ran to two series.

https://warholstars.org/andy-warhol-tv.html

That looks wild, never seen it

You haven’t watched this doc yet? Seems like it might be of interest to you, but maybe you don’t have the stream subscription.

I haven’t, no. Someone warned me that it featured interviewees who never even knew Warhol blabbing about him.

There are probably a handful of those, but the lion's share of the interviewees were pretty closely connected.

I wonder if Alamo Drafthouse Kim's Video will have a copy of I Shot Andy Warhol?

XXP - I would say that while there may be a couple of people who never knew him directly, academics/curators and people who work for the institute, most everyone who was interviewed did, and there's very little fat on the interview responses.

What is so great is the surfeit of footage, lot's of it home super-8/video stuff from his archive, which brings certain situations to life.

Right, good point about the curators. With them, even if they didn’t know him directly, they certainly knew enough about his personal life to be able to comment, it wasn’t like they were just making things up of whole cloth. Although in the end there was the whole controversy about the interpretation of one of the Last Supper paintings but I thought that was interesting.

I mean, that lady who works for the museum/archive custodian of the boxes, what a cool job.

Pretty interesting:

I liked the Netflix Warhol Diaries show and learned some things but I don't think sadness and loneliness were Andy's defining personality traits. I saw him as upbeat and optimistic. I thought the scope of the show was a bit narrow pic.twitter.com/bXhoKz4GqC

— Cʜʀɪs Sᴛᴇɪɴ (@chrissteinplays) March 27, 2022

The post or the thread?

just the post, didn't read the thread

Although now I have and that's fairly interesting too. Someone pointed out that Warhol lifted free weights daily. True, but I think that was just a brief phase?

In the doc he mentions working out with Basquiat a lot. Then if you look in the diaries themselves it turns out he has a trainer named Lidija Cenjic for many years, so not a brief phase. Don’t know about daily though, but it doesn’t seem that far off.

With all due respect to Chris Stein, along with some but not all of the responders to his tweet, he is missing the point. He is talking about Warhol’s public persona. This is mostly about his more personal side, in particular his relationships with two boyfriends and Jean-Michel Basquiat. A lot more sadness and loneliness related to that for sure. Don’t know if anyone said those traits were “defining.”

One thing somebody does get wrong is saying Andy “went to mass every Sunday.” Andy did go to church every Sunday and most other days as well, I think, but he never went to mass for various reasons. They did get photos of the interior of the correct church though.

Maybe not so much regularly on other days but he did like to go on the off hours.

Good points. You get some of that sadness about his personal life in the actual diaries, though I assume he or editor Pat Hackett kept a lot of that out intentionally.

Yes, exactly. He was specifically requested by one friend to be left out of the diary. He and Pat basically followed this. Some stuff still got in a little bit and there a few of those editors notes when needed but there is also a lot of “let the diary speak for itself.” The doc, um, fleshes out a lot of that.

“The diary can write itself.”

In the cold light of the weekday I can safely say I really enjoyed this doc. Made me feel good about any time I spent thinking about him and The Factory et al and made me want to think about them some more. I just came across a funny thing about Moe Tucker being one of the typists of Andy's supposed 24-hour tape-recorded novel of Ondine holding forth, Moe refusing to type the swear words and Paul Morrissey having a word with her.

For which labours, in addition to a weekly fee, she was compensated, as was Jed Johnson and many others, by being on Andy’s tab at Max’s for all she could eat and drink.

Thought I'd drop by and share a thing I wrote about Mr W's Diaries, a long-held obsession of mine. Only two episodes into the Netflix series (I watch slower than I read) but so far it illuminates and expands on the book. Agree with everyone who commented on the overall tone of sadness. As though Andy desperately wanted to connect w/other people on a deeper emotional level yet couldn't quite get there.

https://markcoleman57.medium.com/andy-me-living-vicariously-through-the-andy-warhol-diaries-4d43c98cd135

As always - thanks for reading!

You're quite welcome! Read it before when you posted it elsewhere, now reading it again. Good stuff.

Full disclosure: Andy and I stood in the same room at a Manhattan night club several times during the Eighties. And how many other people can say that?

Jed Johnson established himself as an interior designer; he died in the 1996 TWA Flight 800 crash.

Thanks for the link!

So much to think about.

Just finished the last episode, the first half of which was a slow-motion freefall towards the inevitable, I have enjoyed and will watch it again soon.

It definitely filled in a lot of areas that I was unaware of, such as the importance of John Gould, I wish more artists' biogs were structured like this, less of the spurious talking heads, more footage/clips/photos, time given over to the more emotionally resonant colleagues, the loss etched into the face of Jay Johnson, for instance, was greatly affecting.

I was disappointed when they cast aspersions on Pat's motives, right near the end, and I feel she was quite right to be ticked off, it felt a little cheap, and if there was strong evidence, at the time, that people felt she had steered the narrative one way or another then they should have had more people speak up about it.

I know what you are saying in this last, but maybe in the end that made it stronger, airing that out. Speaking of this last word, it was also interesting to hear what the Warhol diehards said about that when pushed and hear John Waters refer to them, at least I think he meant them, as the "Warhol cult." Although maybe he didn't mean them in particular but it kind of worked in that they were defending some sort of particular image of him.

Even though it was a simple sentiment, I felt the most righteous thought at the end was the curator lady that stated that no matter how many films/docs/books there are, we'll never get to the core truth of him.

In lieu of the AI voice, they could have had John Cale recite Warhol's narrative moments.

When I heard 'A Dream' again after reading the diaries I realised how beautifully and accurately Cale had nailed the tonality of Warhol's diary voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsCx5Iej6HY

As stated on another thread, I never listened to that album until yesterday. Yeah, I like Cale's take on Andy. Feel like he has aged gracefully and is pretty thoughtful and sensitive when commenting on his fallen comrades.

xp Yes. I'm watching now and have thoughts. But I am wishing there was more of a Warholian inflection and rhythm to the AI voice, and you're right, Cale really gets the tone right there.

True Confession: Lou is a serial killer! I actually went into the diaries to see if "Trouble with Classicists" or "A Dream"
were drawn from specific diary entries.

Even though it was a simple sentiment, I felt the most righteous thought at the end was the curator lady that stated that no matter how many films/docs/books there are, we'll never get to the core truth of him.

Trying to remember which artist Andy got annoyed at for explaining his paintings.

XP - Yes! Totally agree.

The part of his life that I feel I haven't yet gotten any kind of perspective on is the transition from Raggedy Andy, the eager-to-please commercial illustrator to the quiet, voyeuristic sentinel of the sixties Factory, perhaps I should crack open that Bockris book again.

I haven't looked at the Bockris book. I have the Blake Gopnik book which is really long but has a lot of detail so good for reference. Think Gary Indiana really hated it, hated it.

Last year I read Blake Gopnik's doorstop-length Warhol biography, which delved into that early 1960s period at length. Overall I wouldn't recommend Gopnik's bio; he's an art critic hence knowledgeable about Andy's art practice but also seems hostile or even contemptuous about Warhol - both person and artist - as the book grinds on and on. John Giorno's memoir Great Demon Kings details the poet's sexual relationship with Andy in er graphic detail as part of a fascinating deep dive into the entire early 1960s underground art/creative scene in New York. That book I recommend.

Bob Colacello's Andy memoir Holy Terror parallels the Diaries but I found it tough going. He seems even-handed in the documentary but Colacello must've written this book when his feelings about his old boss were still raw. Bitter about being underpaid, unappreciated and manipulated. Which is understandable but what I found unsavory about Holy Terror was the endless sucking up to what he terms New York Society. By the end, after he leaves Interview, Colacello basically says "nah nah nah Andy Pat Buckley and Nancy Reagan liked me better." Andy: "I told Bob he should just marry one of those old bags."

Here's a link to the Interview magazine archives. It's worth registering for free to get full access. The late 70s disco-era issues are a decadent time capsule, though not without melancholy undertones of what's to come https://archive.org/details/pub_interview

Awesome thank you!

I'd be interested to know your takes on Victor Bockris' book and if you have read Factory Made by Steven Watson?

Impressed that you read that whole book from beginning to end. You are a good homework-doer!

Also somebody else told me they had watch the Halston miniseries and doc as well as a tie-in.

I watched the Halston doc, and there as in the Warhol doc it’s maddeningly inexplicable what they see in Victor Hugo

The Halston doc is great, as are all the Basquiat/Haring docs that are floating about

Yes, Victor Hugo was the reason it came up. So the doc but not the miniseries. What about House of Gucci?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqXI6WU5cyA

Oh, what, wow

Veering off-topic here but I just read Eve Babitz’s 1980 piece on Fiorucci - the store and the company- which is wonderful, but LONG (60 pages or so)

Interesting. Where did you read that?

In her essay collection ‘I Used to Be Charming’

It’s by far the longest piece in the book

Would read!

I stopped in the middle of an episode and spent a minute online tracking down the edition of Esquire with Andy disappearing into the soup can on the cover (May '69) to read the article 'The final decline and total collapse of the American avant-garde'

https://galeriemagazine.com/halston-house-andy-warhol-new-york/

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/always-leave-them-wanting-less-andy-warhol/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/books/review/warhol-blake-gopnik.html

Yeah, that has definitely put me off the Gopnik book, is it really that bad?

What I'd really love to read is a big version of Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings On Fire, but on a broader scale, taking in Glass/Reich/The Kitchen/Chatham/Branca/No Wave, Gordon Matta Clark/Trisha Brown/Laurie Anderson, The Downtown 500 Scene/Haring/John Sex/Jeffery Deitch, RuPaul/Nelson Sullivan, Arthur Russell et al

I think if you already know everything there is to know and try to read that book from start to finish yes, it really is that bad. But if you are like me and don't know everything and just use it as a reference to dip into, then not quite so bad.

In any case, last night borrowed the Wayne Koestenbaum bio, which is much better written and shorter by a factor of 4 or 5.

On this day in 1987: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/02/nyregion/warhol-is-remembered-by-2000-at-st-patrick-s.html
Be sure to read until the end.

Does anyone know exactly which version of Nature Boy is used on the opening titles?

It’s Nat King Cole obv. Did he record it multiple times?

Ha, if I Google that first hit is a YouTube of him singing that but then the lyrics to “Mona Lisa.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw

Bonus video for Commodore Amiga diehards that showed up in my feed next to that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Hd3uWKFKY

Although this might be more your speed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfPUCTQJnb8

Might as well follow through according to the rule of three:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoiTjDWISS8

Call me for your lover's alibi, kids

Now kind of want to see someone do a deepfake take on Star Trek TOS in which, say, the Enterprise computer talks in the voice of AI Andy.

Also waiting for Josefa and m. coleman to come back and voice their takes before I (re)state mine.

All right, then. I found it perfectly watchable. I reckon it works best as a supplement to reading the actual Diaries. Obviously just putting visuals to the whole thing is extremely helpful, and it seems they did a good job of amassing & organizing a ton of photographic documentation. It's good at supplying context to the main romantic relationships in Warhol's life, although the incessant focus on his love life unbalances the doc. I didn't need to see 6,000 pictures of Jon Gould. What about his other close friends (not the ones who are also interviewees)? Also would have liked to hear more about what compelled him to go out every night during his peak partygoing period. And most of all I wanted more about his sense of humor and irony, and his unique gift for observing behavior. Bc these are the things that come through most clearly when I read the Diaries.

I would've liked to hear a little more about the logistics behind Pat Hackett's work on the Diaries as well.

There's a lot of projection of contemporary attitudes and concerns onto Warhol in the doc. And some pushback against it. But that was kind of a distraction.

Some of the analysis of his art struck me as dubious, but what're ya gonna do.

It’s Nat King Cole obv. Did he record it multiple times?

It sounds like it's just him and a guitarist, no band; I can't trace this version.

Are you trolling? Listen to the video I posted.

I can’t argue with any of your points, Josefa, I just accepted that this was how they decided to tell the story. Although truth be told I didn’t really care for those commentators who didn’t know him and weren’t curators either.

Yeah there are a million people who did know him but aren't in it, so that makes you wonder. Some people just won't talk, I realize. And I know there's a budget to worry about with these things.

I mean the doc is quite enjoyable and I'd recommend it to anyone. The filler material doesn't take away from the many good and relevant quotes that are also in it. It's just the overall emphasis of the thing is not exactly where I would've wanted it.

Also I should say that from first hearing Netflix has a documentary based on The Andy Warhol Diaries, this was far better than what I expected.

It is happening again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/09/arts/design/warhol-auction-marilyn-monroe.html