Tonight in Los Angeles, Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn (who I lived down the hall from in a Hollywood apartment building for about a month in 1995 before she moved out and had an amazing yard sale) will be present for the 9pm screening of the documentary Beautiful Darling, about the life of the legendary Candy Darling, at the Downtown Independent theater.
Born James Slattery in Massapequa, Long Island, in 1944, Candy Darling transformed herself into a stunning blonde actress who in the mid-Sixties became an active player in New York’s “downtown” scene. In her passionate act of self-creation, Candy Darling mesmerized. A party fixture, she appeared in Warhol films, and Tennessee Williams cast her in a play. She was seen and written about, and then, before she turned 30, cancer claimed her life.
Using vintage footage and interviews old and new, and anchored by the presence of Candy’s very close friend, Jeremiah Newton, director James Rasin creates a critical and loving portrait of a singular and audacious life. With Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Penny Arcade, Paul Morrissey, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters. Candy’s letters and diaries read by Chloë Sevigny. 2010. USA. 86 min.
Tickets are $10, Holly Woodlawn will be doing a Q&A after the film.
The off-Broadway musical Man on the Moon was conceived by John Phillips and his third wife, the South African actress, Genevieve Waite, as a potential film or stage production originally entitled Space. John would spend more time trying to realize this project than anything else he worked on in his career; nearly five years all told, beginning in 1969 during the period he was recording his first solo album, John the Wolfking of L.A.
Space was born the day Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Like millions of other people, John watched the 1969 moon landing on TV. He was living, at the time, on the Malibu property rented by British film director Michael Sarne, who was under contract at Fox to direct the adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel, Myra Breckenridge, with Rex Harrison, Raquel Welch and Mae West. Sarne had commissioned John to write songs for the film.
The Apollo 11 moon landing became an obsession. John would watch a recording of the TV transmission made on an early video tape machine over and over. The idea of exploring this new frontier - and particularly Neil Armstrong’s scripted aside as he stepped onto the lunar surface that it was, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” - fired John’s imagination, and he began to piece together ideas for a mythical space opera set to music. “He loved myths,” says Genevieve, who was first introduced to John by Sarne that summer. “He liked Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey.”
John first began performing a small song cycle he had written about “space exploration” as early as the fall of 1970, as part of the short tour he undertook to promote Wolf King. Over the next two years, he and Genevieve formulated ideas for the story, and created a theatrical treatment (later adapted as a screenplay). Seeking a backer, they pitched it to Michael Butler, producer of the stage musical Hair. He provided seed money to realize a book and a score for Space, and brought a young director called Michael Bennett on board.
For several months, the Italianate mansion at 414 St. Pierre road in Bel Air that John and Genevieve were renting became a hive of Space-related activity. Among their collaborators was British costumier Marsia Trinder, who had designed clothes for Elvis Presley and Raquel Welch. “It was a very creative period for about two or three months,” says Trinder, who moved into another wing of the mansion with her then boyfriend to work on costumes for the production. “John was the key person organizing it all and coming up with ideas. But everybody was feeding into it. John felt that with all the secrets in the world, there wouldn’t be wars if people didn’t have secrets. And then they kind of figured out the plot.”
The initial story for Space gradually took shape: When a humanoid bomb left on the moon by the Apollo space mission threatens to blow itself up and destroy the universe, an astronaut on Earth is tasked with leading a delegation of interplanetary dignitaries to travel there and defuse it. Humanity is forced to curb its destructive impulses for the universal good.
The role of the astronaut was originally written for Elvis, whom John and Genevieve had befriended in 1971, while living in Palm Springs shortly after the birth of their son Tamerlane. “John was trying to sell him songs,” says Waite. “They would sit around and John would sing him different songs.” At one point, Ricky Nelson was also approached for the part.
Read more about the ill-fated musical (with a second exclusive video clip) after the jump…
Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey are accused of violating child pornography laws in a 1964 film directed by Morrissey called All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo. The suit was filed in 2009 against Warhol’s Estate and Morrissey by a lawyer representing the grown children of Richard Toelk. Toelk appeared in the film when he was 14, rolling and smoking what might or might not be a joint, giving himself electrical shocks and plunging a small knife into his leg. It is strong stuff, but how much of it was staged? Toelk died in 1990 so he’s not telling.
Morrissey has said that All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo was intended to send an anti-drug message and it was made a year before he met Warhol. The title of the film came from a Shirley Temple song that he would play during the silent film’s screening.
Emily Larish of The Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law doesn’t think Toelk’s children have much of a case and may actually be exploiting their father more than Warhol and Morrissey ever did:
Assuming the depiction of Toelk in All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo can be considered sexual exploitation, if the footage was filmed in 1964, then it could not have been in violation of federal child pornography laws; the first federal laws aimed at child pornography were not enacted until the late 1970s. As for the claim for negligent infliction of emotional distress for damaging the family’s image, it is hard to imagine that many people have even seen the film, certainly not in recent years. Moreover, even out of those who have seen the film, I doubt that many would be able to identify the young boy smoking pot as Richard Toelk, the father of the plaintiffs.
It seems that this family is attempting to do the very thing for which they are accusing the defendants: exploiting the images of a young Richard Toelk for financial gain.
Watch the rarely seen All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo and make up your own mind…or don’t. In my opinion the self-torture looks no more real than what you’d see in a mainstream horror movie. The film seems to want to dramatize a young man’s desperate need to feel something, anything, some kind of kick. It’s certainly not porn. And the young actor doesn’t appear to be suffering the kind of pain you’d feel after plunging an Exacto knife in your leg. It looks like theater to me.
The film was credited to ‘Anonymous’, which led some to think it was by Andy Warhol. Or perhaps Kenneth Anger. The mix of kitsch and beautiful imagery pointed to both. However, they were wrong. For years no one knew who had made Pink Narcissus. This was until the writer Bruce Benderson became obsessed with this subversively erotic film and decided to track down its director - James Bidgood.
Shot on Super-8, Pink Narcissus is a sumptuous film depicting the erotic fantasies of a gay male prostitute (Bobby Kendall), who visualizes himself in various homage to “gay whack-off fantasies”.
Bidgood arrived in New York in 1951. He worked as a female impersonator, hairdresser, set designer and then photographer. Bidgood started taking pix for Adonis and Muscleboy. At first he was disappointed with the results. He told the New York Times:
“There was no art,” Bidgood laments. “They were badly lit and uninteresting. Playboy had girls in furs, feathers and lights. They had faces like beautiful angels. I didn’t understand why boy pictures weren’t like that.”
Bidgood made his own erotic tableaux, which mixed beauty and kitsch. His first Watercolors presented a young man swimming through a fabulous, shimmering grotto—which he built and photographed in his cramped apartment. He told Butt magazine:
“Models were not that easy to find especially for the kind of work I was doing which called for more of the subject’s time than a pose or two wearing less than two square inches of jersey and some elastic and leaning against some fagelas elaborate mantelpiece. In the time I needed to do one shot they could turn ten tricks. And there weren’t all that many great beauties around willing to be photographed nude or semi nude in homoerotic situations. Remember this was before being gay and/or being a ‘male escort’ or pornography, quasi or otherwise, were as acceptable or mainstream as they are now.”
Bidgood created his own distinct style, which later inspired the careers of Pierre et Giles, and David La Chappelle.
Between 1963 and 1971, Bidgood worked on Pink Narcissus. It was shot in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Bidgood designed and made the sets, provided the make-up and costume, and used the neighborhood hustlers as his cast. It was an incredible undertaking, and one that eventually led his frustrated backers to take the film from Bidgood and finish it themselves. This was why Bidgood took his name off the finished film.
“See, why I took my name off of it was that I was protesting, which I’d heard at the time that’s what you did…. I’d take my name off and then they’d go “Mr. Bidgood took his name off because…” But it turns out they kept me in the closet, and all you had to do was ask anybody who’s been in it and they’d say, you know, “Jim did this.” It wasn’t like a big mystery, but you would have thought, and then years later I was ‘outed’.”
Ian McKellen recites a Shakespeare sonnet while The Fleshtones zone out in the background at Warhol’s Factory in 1987.
This is one of those things that language can’t encapsulate. Not so much because it’s something wondrous or epic, it’s not. But because it is just so inexplicably Zen… as most inexplicable things are.
Broadcast on MTV as part of the last episode of “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes” TV program.
John Waters and Divine appear on Andy Warhol’s cable TV show in 1981. The late Van Smith, make-up and costume designer on Waters’ films, is seen working on Ms. Divine during the interview.
The always amusing Waters talks about his early influences (Herschell Gordon Lewis), his film making style and screens some cool clips from his early movies.
John mentions his book Shock Value which was at the time about to be published. One of my favorite memories is the day that he and Divine signed my copy at a bookstore in Greenwich Village. Two of the classiest trash mavens I’d ever met.
Yesterday a new 10-foot-tall statue of Andy Warhol was unveiled by artist Rob Pruitt outside of the one-time (70s/early 80s) Union Square location of Warhol’s “Factory” studio. Jerry Saltz writes on New York’s blog:
After pulling the sheet from the monument, Pruitt told me, “I think of it as another kind of Statue of Liberty.” Overhearing this, the former Interview editor and wordsmith extraordinaire Glenn O’Brien mused that the statue’s inscription could read “Give us your rich, your glamorous, your drag queens, and drug addicts.”
The statue, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, is near others of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Gandha, isn’t supposed to be permanent (it’s just there until October) but for fuck’s sake it should be... “The Andy Warhol Monument” stands, for now, on the corner of Broadway and 17th Street.
The Driver’s Seat AKA Identikit stars Elizabeth Taylor in one of her single most berserk performances and since no one can bring the crazy like La Liz, that is really saying something. This 1974 Italian film is based on a novella by Muriel Spark about a disturbed woman in a foreign country who seeks a man who will tie her up and stab her to death. There is ridiculous (mostly shouted, even screamed) dialogue like: “I sense a lack of absence” and “I feel homesick for my own loneliness.” How about “You look like Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Do you want to eat me?” She holds up her purse in an airport security check and exclaims “This may look like a purse but it is actually a bomb!?” The best line is this, however: “When I diet, I diet and when I orgasm, I orgasm! I don’t believe in mixing the two cultures!”
The director, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, seems to have had no control over Taylor whatsoever and it appearss like she is making up her own Dada dialogue on the spot much of the time. Andy Warhol has a cameo in the film playing a British “your Lordship” who has a cryptic encounter with Liz in an airport and they meet again later in the film. His voice is overdubbed with an English voice, which is disconcerting but kind of interesting, too. Why isn’t this cuckoo-pops crazy film better known?
Here is what the AllMovie Guide has to say about The Driver’s Seat:
A beautiful but mysterious woman goes on a journey that has dangerous consequences for her and those around her in this offbeat, arty drama from Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. Lise (Elizabeth Taylor) is a woman edging into middle age who is nearing the end of her emotional rope. Needing some time away from her job and responsibilities, Lise flies to Rome, and on the flight she meets Bill (Ian Bannen), an eccentric health food enthusiast who makes it clear he wishes to seduce her, and Pierre (Maxence Mailfort), a curious man who is wary of Lise and goes out of his way to avoid her. Lise informs anyone she speaks with that she’s come to Rome to meet her boyfriend, but it soon becomes clear she has no specific plans nor anyone to see. Lise whiles away the afternoon shopping with Mrs. Fiedke (Mona Washbourne), a chatty older woman from Nova Scotia, and in time crosses paths with Bill again, but it’s not until she meets up with Pierre that her real reason for coming to Italy, as well as the depth of her madness, becomes clear. As Lise wanders through Rome, a team of police detectives is seen investigating a crime that seems to involve her. Also released as Identikit and Psychotic, The Driver’s Seat features a brief appearance from Andy Warhol as a British nobleman.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to stunned silence and it has been suggested that Liz at one point tried to buy up the rights and all prints of the movie. The filming began one day after she filed for divorce from Richard Burton and she reportedly said to director, Griffi, “It takes one day to die, another to be reborn.”
The Driver’s Seat is not out on a proper DVD release, but you can often find bootlegs at a “99 Cents Only” store. Or watch the highlights here:
Modern Masters was a 4-part BBC Arts series first shown in 2010. In each program, Daily Telegraph art critic, Alastair Sooke examined the lives and work of one of the 20th century’s most important artists, Henri Matisse; Pablo Picasso; Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.
Sooke set out to discover “why these artists are considered so great and how they still influence our lives today,” not exactly an original approach, but hey, it’s the BBC. The series kicked-off with his documentary on Andy Warhol, “the king of Pop Art”, which certainly had great access, and some very fine archive, and while I’m sure Mr. Warhol would have loved it, it is all a bit hit-and-miss and depends on how well you take to Sooke’s approach as a presenter. Andrew Billen in the London Times wrote of the program:
The Warhol era seems so distant that it was a happy surprise that in New York Sooke found so many of Warhol’s contemporaries to interview. In the Serendipity coffee shop where Warhol sold his first paintings, its owner recalled that his favourite drink was frozen ice chocolate and lemon ice box pie (I think he said it was a drink). The nice couple who employed him to design the logo for their leather business said that he always came with five new ideas for marketing campaigns and if they didn’t like them he would come back next day with another they did. Gerard Malagna, master of the Warhol silk screen, Warholed Sooke’s face into a screen print. Sooke said that he looked like a mouse with lipstick. Malagna agreed: it was just so perfect. Sooke even got an audience with a still well Dennis Hopper. Duchamp had said that the artist would end up just pointing his finger and declaring something art. Warhol pointed his finger at us, said Hopper.
Sooke’s answers to his question “What had Warhol ever done for us?” — predicted celebrity culture, found beauty in banality, toppled the idea of the artist as suffering mystic — were less interesting than his tiggerish approach and his willingness to follow Warhol into absurdity. A stylist apparently called Brix Smith-Start, herself a ringer for Warhol, dressed Sooke in an “Andy-suit” and wig. “Gee Brix! Golly!” exclaimed Sooke, pouting into a cheval. “Yes! You’ve so got it,” gasped Brix. And so he had: the whole thing.
The rest of ‘Modern Masters: Andy Warhol’, after the jump…
This is the sign that more or less got me pushed out of Wholefoods. I apparently offended a lot of people with it. One older white lady didn’t like the angry black man yelling at her. And a Vegan didn’t like that Mr. T. pitied her because she wouldn’t eat meat.
Still, it was a blessing in disguise for Paul Maybury, who has moved on to far greener pastures than an over-priced yuppie grocery chain as an award-winning artist and writer for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Heavy Metal, Ubisoft, Metro, Image, Criterion and Mirage Studios. WTF was Whole Foods thinking firing a talent like this? This guy rocks!
See more of Paul’s awesome Whole Food signs after the jump…
The very charming Cherry Vanilla discusses her new memoir, Lick Me: How I Became Cherry Vanilla, a book with far more sex, drugs and rock-n-roll per page than probably any book you will ever read! Topics include her role as “Amanda Pork” in Andy Warhol’s Pork in 1970; working for David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust/MainMan era; her punk backing band (young Sting and The Police) and, of course, being a rock super groupie.
As Marc Campbell pointed out on DM last month, when a b&w Coke bottle by Andy Warhol sold for $35, “some things are recession proof.” Now, a painting of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon has turned up after being kept in a private collection and not exhibited anywhere since 1965. This triptych goes on sale next month at Sotheby’s, in London, and according to the Daily Telegraph its $10m-$14m estimate “does not seem unreasonable.” Not unreasonable if you think of art as just a money-making exercise, like Warhol once said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”
Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud is a powerfully rendered triptych of small, 14in x 12in portraits, and is a testament to one of the most significant artistic relationships of the 20th century.
Bacon and Freud met in 1945 through the artist Graham Sutherland and became close if competitive friends, painting each other on several occasions. At one point, they met on an almost daily basis, frequently at their favourite watering hole, the Colony Room in Soho. But their friendship cooled in the late Seventies after an argument.
Only four portraits of Freud by Bacon have been at auction in the past 20 years. The last was in 2003 when a very similar small triptych sold to Pierre Chen, chairman of the Taiwanese Yageo Foundation, for $3.8 million (£2.2 million), which was record for a Bacon painting of these dimensions.
Since then, the price of Bacon has risen dramatically, climaxing in May 2008 with the $86 million (£44 million) paid by Roman Abramovich for a large-scale triptych.
However, top-drawer paintings by Bacon have been scarce at auction during the credit crunch. Since the summer of 2008, four works of varying quality have been unsold, creating a state of uncertainty in the Bacon market, and potential sellers have been waiting for someone else to make the first move to ascertain its strength. Hopefully for Sotheby’s, that deadlock was broken last November when a late painting of a cricket player belonging to Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass, sold for $14 million (£8.7 million), comfortably above its estimate.
Considering that two small-format self-portrait triptychs by Bacon made £14 million and more in 2008, the £7 million-£9 million estimate for this triptych of Freud does not seem unreasonable. The only thing against it is that it has recently been offered privately and not sold, but that was for a much higher sum.
Sotheby’s is not saying who is selling the portrait, which was bought directly from Bacon’s dealers, Marlborough Fine Art, in 1965, apart from indicating that it is part of a family inheritance. Trade sources, however, confirm that the painting belonged to the Geneva based collector, George Kostalitz, who died last year. A private man about whom little is on public record, Kostalitz is said to have had a close working relationship with Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art.
Richard Summers’ short film Warhol Multiplied is a neat Warholian conceit, in which multiple screens simultaneously run Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger. Summers is a photographer and artist who has a selection of other interesting projects on his website, including Same Spot Skies, a video diary focused on one section of the sky as shot from a window between 2006-2008.
Bonus clips of ‘Same Spot Skies’ and ‘Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger’ after the jump…
They were two men best known by their surnames, two giants of their disciplines, but when Warhol met Zappa in 1983, on the Pop Artist’s TV show, it was less a meeting of great minds than a few questions from fan Richard Berlin, who did the interviewing for Warhol. Zappa briefly talked about fans, music and fun, and, well, gee, that’s about it. I was left wanting to know what was said off camera. Answers on a postcard, please.
