I Shot Andy Warhol

I Shot Andy Warhol rockets Lili Taylor, Jared Harris and director Mary Harron into their 15 minutes.

To say a film could claim "knowledge" of silent media-monger Andy Warhol and gun-toting prophet Valerie Solanas is absurd. It can only guess, dip. The docu-cine-slammer I Shot Andy Warhol is a concentric-circling toe-dabbing into the waters of pop art's ace flyer/manipulator and his doppelganging fierce feminist warrior/assassin — or, in the words of Jared Harris (the actor playing Andy), the story of "two sexual misfits who didn't like what they saw in the mirror."

What ISAW sees — obsession with fame, art, sex, guerrilla psychology, mental illness, attitude, '60s hairdos — isn't very nice. The Factory wasn't nice, nor was 1968, the year of violence that gave us the deaths of MLK, RFK and Andy. ISAW's emotional bleakness is in constant battle with the bright tones of the pop era. As Solanas said in her groundbreaking SCUM Manifesto, the absolute basis for this film, "a degenerate can only produce degenerate 'art.'"

Sitting with the triumvirate most responsible for the film — director/writer Mary Harron, the ubiquitous Lili Taylor (Solanas) and Jared Harris — I hear commitment to the notion that fame is a killer, that art must be made at all costs but that freedom of expression isn't always free.

Jared Harris seems as uncomfortable talking about himself as Andy was, his wispy brownish hair made dramatic by silver rim glasses and a mischievous smirk.

"I honestly thought Warhol was a bit of a fraud. [But] once you get into it, you understand why he was revolutionary. He is the modern idea of what fame is. He did to himself what the old studio system did to its stars — package it, make it accessible."

From the mountains of preconceived notions available on Warhol, Harris got his first taste from his director.

"I watched this documentary Mary did on him. He was so uncomfortable with himself. I didn't look like him but when I put the wig on I suddenly got tears in my eyes. Tears of regret, not just because he wasn't very good-looking but because I realized that's what he faced every morning when he looked in the mirror. He had such an appreciation of beauty, but when he looked in the mirror he didn't see what he wanted to see. Bob Colacello told me that after Andy died they found 120 different brands of beauty products in his bathroom: eye makeup, lots of skin stuff. He tried to look better, but it was impossible. I had a great deal of sympathy for him along those lines."

The emotional core of Warhol —"quite flat on the page save for monosyllabic grunting" — was harder to plumb. Harris' nonverbal abilities (something he's acquainted with from noncommunicative roles in Wayne Wang's Smoke and Blue in the Face) allowed him access to twitches, bad posture and simple answers.

"I went to the Warhol Institute in New York to find footage on how he moved or reacted. I found one unlogged tape where Warhol is sitting in a chair posing for a guy in T-shirt and jeans with a pencil and pad in hand. The guy takes off his clothes and sticks the pencil up his ass and starts to draw Warhol's portrait. Now I'm looking at Andy, thinking if he doesn't smile, he's a robot. Nothing — until the guy turned away and Andy sneaks a look at his friend and starts giggling like a kid. As soon as the guy with the pencil turned back, Andy was emotionless."

Harris is overjoyed at this, sniggering the same way Warhol must've. "It was an act. Once I knew that, it gave me license to put a mask on and take it off."

To create the master/servant scenario that made the Factory hierarchy unique, Harris and Taylor created a gully to work in that separated Andy from his minion while keeping the pumped-up spirit intact. "Lili and I sat apart from each other during lunch and other rehearsal settings. Before shooting began, we acted out a Factory situation at the actual space to get an atmosphere going. Everybody was talking sex, but it did nothing for me. I had to encourage them to get wild because Andy was a watcher, not a doer. "

"Everybody acted the exhibitionist. Ran around without clothes, spanked each other. To get Andy's attention you had to display yourself. He encouraged the outrageous: shooting up, etc. Ondine [played lispishly by Michael Imperioli] wasn't as interesting to Andy unless he was strung out on speed. It must've been an exhausting lifestyle, those long binges. But that was what inspired Warhol. The Outrage... As prince of the underground, he had to be in it as well as pinching as much as possible from them. That's what pissed Valerie off, the nicking of dialogue she spotted in his films."

Nothing seems to piss off director Mary Harron, a delicate white-wearing blonde who seems as cheerful as a New England schoolmarm.

"The whole point of this was to bring to bear a lost piece of history." When the former TV director (Fox's tabloidy Front Page, BBC2's Late Show, countless South Bank Show documentaries) says she relates to the man-hating anger at the core of Solanas' being, I'm waiting for teacher to cram an apple down my gullet.

"I don't think that you can do this kind of film unless it's connected with something very deeply emotional in yourself. Her writing touched on a lot of secret anger, a lot of confusion. Nothing I have ever read quite expressed that, and I think, too, I was probably, you know, very frustrated at the time I was working at the BBC [eight years ago at ISAW's genesis], a very chauvinist environment. I was frustrated in research, dying to direct and I just, you know, was lonely and unhappy. "

"Valerie just managed to get a few things down on paper and then she shot somebody, so she's notorious. But she seemed to evoke a lot of misfit female lives... She stands for me for all of those talented brilliant failures, all those brilliant forgotten people."

The most brilliantly sparkling of the Factory's forgotten ones is Candy Darling. Though played annoyingly here by Stephen Dorff, Harron says her/his invocation is pivotal. "Valerie is the angry bitter side of me. Candy Darling is my ultra-feminine girly side," says Harron of the drag queen who brought Solanas into the Warhol fold, starting a chain of events that ends at ISAW's first scene.

Harron understands the drag queen ideology pretty well, having shared an apartment with the notorious RuPaul for some time. "Living with Ru, I got that sense of how a drag queen has to learn; almost an intellectual study of glamorous womanhood, movie-star womanhood. When I came to direct Steven as Candy, it was very important that he not play a drag queen of the modern type because Candy is a women trapped in a man's body, not a 'hey girl' drag queen now. "

"Candy is about identity, the pain of being, you know, born in the wrong body. Valerie was in pain because she was born 20 years too early... an early feminist. So in that sense I think they were a perfect contrast: the drag queen and the girl who dresses like a boy. You have to give Candy some credit, too, because at the time it was probably still illegal to dress in drag in New York City on the street."

In the course of her life documenting Factory stuff, she's dealt with some who helped (Billy Name was visual consultant, John Cale did the score), some who stayed clear (Lou Reed), some who offered fleeting thoughts. "It was Paul Morrissey who said that Andy tolerated Valerie because he saw something of himself in her, in her awkward social disabilities."

When someone brings up the now typical lesbian-as-killer question, the demure Harron heaves a sigh and lowers her head. "Why can't women be anti-heroes or anti-heroines? In the meetings they thought she could be more sympathetic, show her troubled childhood. I'm tired of the notion that to have a female protagonist, they have to be noble. I'm interested in mixed-up, bad, complicated characters. Did these same people need Travis Bickle to be sympathetic?"

No one could be more sympathetic than Lili Taylor. With her throaty Chicago accent and her solid bone structure, she is the doyenne of independent film.

"I do stuff that's off the beaten track because that's where a director or writer has the most freedom to express themselves — wherein I can become part of that process. I'm not allergic to Hollywood for the sake of of it. That'd be futile. I mean heck, on [Ron Howard/Mel Gibson's] Ransom, they've implemented my ideas, I'm working in New York and the pay is good," she laughs.

"But you'd think after Sundance, they'd be knocking down my door. Nah. You have to reaffirm the fact that you love acting, because the independents are the same as the studios. They play the same game."

This reaffirmation is in full swing as she takes Solanas into quasi-mythical status, playing Val as a heroic, mad prophet. "I don't know collectively how ready we are to deal with some of the things she was talking about. If I had a daughter I'd tell her to read the manifesto. People misunderstood SCUM. In 1968, when someone asked her if she wanted to kill all men, she said no. She had a sense of humor, except for the shooting..."

"She's very complicated. When she was with a man, she was not venomous, but shy and flirtatious. She was a lesbian who was never in a lesbian relationship. Her ideas created a grand chasm between her person and her words. Everything started to split..."

Solanas died a homeless person's death in San Fran in 1989, and there weren't reams of info on her before, during or after the shooting. But Taylor didn't mind the lack of info.

"Facts pressure you. They're a noose that block the imagination. Jared did such a great job of letting everything go, railing against the information. You have to do what Mary kept reminding me of: 'It's our Valerie. It's our Valerie.'"

What caused Solanas to yank out a .32 automatic from a paper bag and start blasting?

"She was in awe of Andy's detachment, his control of emotions. She wanted to make an impact on him above and beyond all the others in the Factory. It drove her crazy when he didn't press charges... She was so skewed she didn't understand her actions."

"Then again, ya know, when they asked her if she had any remorse 10 years later, she said, 'I wish I'd taken target practice.'"

Sidebar: Factory Seconds

You've seen the movie, now buy the product. From the new ISAW shotgun arcade game I'm working on ("Damn, I hit Viva") to whole bunches of new Warhol-related ephemera, 1996/97 is gonna be Warholirrific. Own a piece of the pop. Your purchase would be so absolutely Andy!

I Shot Andy Warhol Soundtrack (Tag/Atlantic). Without Velvet involvement (Lou Reed's still freaked out about the shooting), you'd imagine this soundtrack, stuffed to the gills with alterna-goofs, would be yucky. Surprisingly, it makes for a pretty hearty meal. The results are mixed: REM thuds through "Love is All Around" by the Troggs with heavy boots, while Jewel and Luna wittily energize/psychedelicize Donovan's "Sunshine Superman" and "Season of the Witch" with a cool rough edge. Buy it for John Cale's "Warhol Suite" — a menacing string quartet that repetitively vibrates the post-shooting's resounding gloom.

The Last Velvet Reunion (Birdman/WB). Crazed avant-music enthusiast David Katznelson has created a label "dedicated to the spirit of all things oblique and bizarre." Along with releasing material by Velvet-inspired acts like V-3 and Japan's Boredoms, Katznelson has "a major part of rock history" with the last three tunes the Velvet Underground (sans Reed) recorded right before Sterling Morrison died. "He got really sick right after these tracks," says Katznelson from L.A. on material he says "is the closest thing to that classic Velvet sound" you'll ever find. "Real minimalistic stuff" written and sung by John Cale as well as a cover of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died.""Weirdly prophetic," says Katznelson about the tracks that should be out before summer.

Pictures and Names

The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-67, Lynne Tillman and Stephen Shore (Thunder's Mouth Press). Shore's delightful B & W photos — unlike the stagier stuff of Billy Name, etc. — capture a time when the Factory was just blossoming. Edie Sedgwick simply beams for Shore's camera as do speed freak Ondine and nihilist Nico, and even Andy goofs off — white-wigged head atop a French striped sailor shirt. Tillman allows the Factory crew to speak their own minds.

Unseen Warhol, John O'Connor and Benjamin Liu (Rizzoli). Due out in September, this coffeetable book recounts the Warhol myth from childhood to advertising, from New York to the glitz of international celebrity, with recollections from friends, the famous, Factory folk and old family members — all gathering tons of never/rarely seen Warhol-created stuff from their very own personal collections. Gotta find that napkin he drew on for me.

Mythologies of the Heart, Gerard Malanga (Black Sparrow Press). Poet/photographer Malanga's 27th book is an edgy sensual elegy to women past, present and future. Often bitingly funny, other times pointedly aware of the art and artifice around him, Malanga should be a poet well-studied someday.

Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke University). A collection of academically pointed essays that seek to find the homosexual aspects within the work of a homosexual painter and how that reflected onto a generation.

Flowers Flowers Flowers and Yum Yum Yum (Bullfinch Press). Two new entries in a series of already popular pocket-sized giftbooks that match cute Andy epigrammatic sayings like "I only stop when I'm FULL" and "I get jealousy attacks all the time" to pertinent graphic pencil and ink visuals from the archives of the AW Foundation for the Visual Arts. Note: Shoe Shoe Shoe has been postponed 'til spring '97 so you fetishists'll have to wait.

Etc.

Brigid Berlin exhibit at Stubbs Books & Prints, NYC. The gallery show of Factory's affluent dominatrix/phonamatrix Berlin (also known as Polk), whose father once ran the Hearst Corporation, is called "Tit Prints" — drawings done in toxic ink using her nipples instead of a paintbrush, done up in silver Calvin Klein frames. Also in the catalog is Berlin's "Penis Pillows" — pictures of penises Berlin cut out of magazines with manicuring scissors, xeroxed, then stuffed into clear plastic. Watch later this year for her celebrity-drawn, traced or photographed 500-page Cock Book, taken from her days at Warhol's Factory and travels to Max's Kansas City.

Another Movie?

Whether it's called Basquiat or Build a Fort, Burn it Down, fin-de-sicle painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel snags David Bowie, the first singer to dedicate a song to Drella, to play the white-wigged wonder post-Solanas shooting in a flick about kamikaze painter Jean Basquiat and their dippy palhood. With rubbery nose and imminent scowl, Bowie is said to "look a scream."