Indieopolis: Reports from the Front Part 41
by Lola Bianca
Super 8 on Ice! Is the usual fest circuit just not exotic enough for you? Do you dream of screening your films in far-off corners of the globe? Opportunity knocks. As announced in the latest Res Alert, the 10-person crew of a scientific polar yacht called the Vagabond, which has been sailing chilly waters for over a year now, is soliciting Super 8 films to screen on June 15th. They promise to project the films “on the boat, onto the sail, on icebergs or in a village,” depending on weather, as part of Faites de la Lumiere (www.faitesdelalumiere.net), an annual event where films, videos, and light installations are projected in public spaces all over the planet. So make some stir-crazy sailor-scientists happy, get those Super 8 films out of mothballs and send ASAP to: Vagabond, Eric Brossier, Port d'Armor, 22410 Saint-Quay-Portrieux, France (www.piem.org).

Morrissey Cannes Do. The official fest site describes him as “one

of the only true independ

ent filmmakers in cinema today…staying clear of Hollywood’s controlling grasp…[working] with actors that are fairly unknown…[and taking on] a film only if he has complete control over writing and directing.” Paul Morrissey is the subject of one of 5 tributes at the 55th annual Festival de Cannes, alongside Alain Resnais, Jacques Tati, Raj Kapoor, and Billy Wilder. They’ll be screening his Flesh-Heat-Trash trilogy.

Of the many films skedded for a Riviera premiere, Lola is particularly curious about Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon in the Director’s Fortnight. Will this movie, which stars Frances McDormand as a free-spirited record producer, Alessandro Nivolo as her rocker boyfriend, Christian Bale as her conservative Harvard Med School son, and Kate Beckinsale as his fiancée, do for LA’s rock-and-roll subculture what her debut feature, High Art, did for the NYC photography scene?

And speaking of NYC, the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival was a resounding success – and no wonder with the backing of Robert De Niro and producing partner Jane Rosenthal. The NYcentric festival grew out of a desire to contribute to Lower Manhattan’s economic recovery post 9/11.

Of course, the big indie news on both coasts is the demise of Good Machine, may it rest in peace, the company that produced 45 features, including The Brothers McMullen, Walking and Talking, The Myth of Fingerprints, The Tao of Steve, In the Bedroom, Storytelling, Human Nature, The Laramie Project, and all of Ang Lee’s movies through Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In the 11 years since its founding, 21 Good Machine films have gone to Sundance; four won the grand jury prize. Good Machine’s management and international sales has been acquired by Universal and will be combined with USA Films’ production, marketing and distribution divisions to create a new company, Focus International, headed by writer-producer-Good Machine founder James Schamus. David Linde, his partner of 5 years, is going to the new company as well. While Good Machine’s production team will stay with co-founder, Ted Hope, to form their own small production company, which will have a 3-year 1st-look distrib deal with Focus. Hope is still looking for a name for his new company, and it has to be really “cool.” If you’ve got suggestions, e-mail them to Lola, indieopolis@hotmail.com.

MovieReviews
Star Wars Episode II by Fred Godlash
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away…”
There are many things that redeem Star Wars Episode II (Attack of the Clones) from the last installment of the series. First of all, this film limits Jar Jar Binks to about 5 minutes of screen time, maybe George Lucas actually reads all the e-mails. Second, Mace Windu (S

amuel L Jackson) finally gets his hands dirty, and kicks some serious ass. Last but not least, Yoda takes on Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) for some of the best lightsaber action I have ever seen.

I always thought Yoda was one of those master Jedis that had to take a desk job teaching the force because he was too old and out of shape. I was dead wrong. Yoda is the baddest Jedi out there. That alone should get you in the theater. The film is technically not a film (shot on high definition video) but to be perfectly honest with you, there are so many effects shots in this movie, I don’t think it matters. Every frame has been manipulated. It looks very good. If he was doing American Graffiti on high definition, I might have a problem.

As for the story, it’s darker , setting up a young, soon to be Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), for total domination. So the big question is, can you understand this movie having never seen a Star Wars movie? Maybe. My advice is to try to look at the theme of good vs. bad and how technology never rules out the strength of human endurance. If this does not work and you are too impatient to rent the trilogy + Phantom Menace, here is my lame attempt on summing up all of those plots. The kid from Phantom Menace grows up to be very very evil. His son is Luke Skywalker (original Star Wars) who fights his father to save the universe from the dark side. O.K. I tried!! Anyway, this movie answers a lot of questions that were puzzling fans from the first film; like how does a friendly 9-year old kid ultimately end up being the guru of the dark side? The movie starts 10 years from the last installment and Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) has now trained Anakin well for battle. Although the two of them seem like Batman and Robin, Anakin begins to feel resentment toward Obi-Wan; that will eventually lead him to the dark side. The young rebellious Jedi falls in forbidden love with the former princess Padme, and finds out that his mother has been sold and may be dead; this also leads to the dark side. I told you it was a dark movie. My bottom line is, check it out! If not for Yoda alone.

Lucas started Star Wars on May 25, 1977. It grossed $100 million within three months of its release, which was faster than any other motion picture in history. The space adventure won five Academy Awards, and was nominated for five more (including Best Picture, Direction and Original Screenplay). Star Wars (a.k.a. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) and its two very successful sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) Lucas revisited Star Wars with the prequel The Phantom Menace.

Tales from the Cryptic
by Witney Seibold
Michael Apted is an underrated director. His “Up” documentaries have garnered him much attention, but his thrillers (Extreme Measures, Blink, 007’s The World is Not Enough), while effective and engaging, must not be quite good enough to raise Apted into the circle of greats. His newest film, Enigma, follows suit. It’s intelligent,

and it really swallows you in its mysteries, but eventually transforms into a typical feeling Hollywood thriller.

The story: 1943, Bletchley. A super-secret enclave where England’s most brilliant mathematicians and cryptologists work 24 hours a day to crack Nazi codes. Returning to Bletchley is Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott), recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by the fickle behavior of his enigmatic ex, Claire (played in flashbacks by Saffron Burrows). A police investigator, Wigram (a wonderfully smarmy Jeremy Northam), believes that Jericho may be leaking to the Nazis. As the typical math-phobic can imagine, life at this enclave is immensely stressful. Jericho cannot function well until he has solved the mystery of Claire. He enlists the help of Claire’s frumpy ex-roommate Hester (Kate Winslet), and the two of them begin to unlock Claire’s secrets under the noses of England’s most notorious secret-keepers.

The highlight of this film is, I feel, the actors. Dougray Scott is twitchy and obsessed without coming across as dangerous. He plays a man walking the line incredibly well. Kate Winslet, all schlump, complete with bad posture and Harry Potter spectacles, is the only actress I know that can be at once a wallflower and a sexpot. Jeremy Northam, with his arrogant smirk, plays a man who hides his secrets with frankness. The tone of the film is one rich with mystery, and, like all of Apted’s thrillers, is engaging.

The film’s missteps, however, start falling as it draws closer to its ending. We begin to see that there is a clear “villain” to the story, and it thusly begins to deteriorate into a “good guy/bad guy” thriller that moviegoers have seen a number of times. It’s disappointing to see it run out of steam, especially after such a great setup, and involving such great performances.

Celebrity Profile
Phillip Connery burst onto the screen in 1994 as Janitor #1 in Fast Getaway II with Cory Haim. In Hard Bounty, the actor’s portrayal of Long John, the drunken cowboy on top of a prostitute (Kelly LeBrock), cemented his place in Hollywood.

Though Phil hasn’t remained as close to LeBrock as he would’ve liked, he says he has fond memories of the actress and hopes she’s doing well. – TE

The Early Films of Andy Warhol
by Anna McWillie & Quentin Dunne

Andy made movies. A lot of them. While they achieved neither the iconic status of his Campbell soup can or Marilyn Monroe paintings nor the durability of Interview magazine, they comprise a vital part of his ouvre and a key to understanding his artistic legacy, and they were all Andy's brand of erotic.

Andy once stated, “I am a deeply superficial person,” and to anyone watching a static shot of the Empire State Building for 8 hours, he could agree, and that it is boring and tedious, also. On the other hand, his films contain the primitive appeal of garage band rock. Andy always wanted it easy; "You're on 'Easy Street'" he would say to his successful friends. Instant Movie! Instant Art! Instant Empowerment! The camera does jiggle a bit, night falls and flood lights beam indifferently upon the tower. Empire is film made into sculpture, something Warhol loved to do - turn one media into another: photos into paintings, recordings into books. He bought a bolex, his first films were silent, it was so easy. And his stars were were the most unlikely subjects.

In 1963, Andy possibly revisted his father's death with his first film, Sleep (remember Yoko Ono's fly-crawling-on-a-reclining-body film), starring John Giorno, 5 or so hours of collaged footage, some of it repeating, of him sleeping,twitching, breathing. (Andy's mother used to watch him sleep.) According to biogrpaher Wayne Koestenbaum, Sleep is his father's wake, but erotic anticipation makes the film's duration bearable, and we never do entirely see Giorno's penis.
Also in that year Andy went on a road trip to Los Angeles with underground filmmaker Taylor Mead, Gerard Malanga, and painter Wynn Chamberlain where he mingled with celebrities, and shot Tarzan and Jane Regained...Sort of, with Mead. In one scene, Mead, who edited the film, takes a dump, roadside, and wipes himself, and the whole film is and infantile and unfettererd peep of Mead's ass.
The next film with Mead, Taylor Mead's Ass, was a response to a filmmalker who wrote in to the Village Voice to complain about a Warhol film featuring 2 hours of Mead's ass. Noting that there was an absence of such a work, they immediately began shooting it in '64, and not only does the camera move in this film, the actor pretends to stuff a variety of objects up his ass, including a copy of Time magazine with Lady Bird Johnson's face on the cover, and starting with dollar bills as an ironic statement on Andy's cheapness.
In Andy's great trilogy Kiss, Blow Job, and Couch, sex is richly portrayed in durations of time, and as Koestenbaum points out, sex may mean reading, walking, shopping, and certainly seeing. It is amazing to think about how Andy got people to perform shamelessly in front of his camera. To Andy, sex was "abstract." Of Andy's repertoire of drugged-out, gay, straight and both beauties and Adonis's, there were Baby Jane Holzer (Soap Opera), Ultra Violet, Ondine (Couch), and Edie Sedgwick (the sadomasochistic Vinyl - based on Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange for which the rights were bought for $3,000, Poor Little Rich Girl, Inner and Outer Space, among others). The most ambitious portraiture project of Andy's was not his paintings but his series of screen tests, more than 500, where the subjects were coerced and "tortured" by Andy for the 3 minute duration.
Another of Andy's performers was Billy Name, a waiter at café hangout Serendipity in Manhattan. He was featured in the 3 Haircut movies. In these early movies, Andy always retained the leader. Its whiteness, at the end of each reel, begins to overtake the image and eventually whites it out altogether. Haircut No.1 is six 100 foot rools shot from 6 different camera
angles, are unedited and spliced together. Andy almost never appears though his voice can sometimes be faintly heard in the background, giving direction. The white stripos of leader appear suddenly, mimicking Andy's ghostly paleness, overtaking his actors' performances. Also in the Haircut movies are John Daley and Freddy Herko.
In Koestenbaum's new book about Andy, he states that watching Andy's films is a pleasure that too few people have experienced (Andy took them out of circulation in the '70s). "Jonas Mekas, Stephen Koch, and others have noted that these films question every assumption that cinematic art has accrete in its century long history." Andy pumps trauma and eroticism into his experience of time. Time can stand still or it can move, it can thrill, and it can kill. In the pre-1965 films, his films are projected at silent speed, 16 fames per second (sound speed is 24); therefore, the films take longer to show than they took to make. Within each reel, the camera does not move - his trademark being the stationary camera.
Ronald Tavel wrote "scripts" for many of Andy's best sound films, and has said that as the script starts to build toward a climax, the camera leaves and goes uo to the ceiloing and begins to examine the furniture... Because actors' movements are minor and the film plotless, the viewer registers every minor change of nuance or facial expression as cataclysmic. Biographer Koestenbaum, after watching dozens of hours of these early films in which little or nothing happens, says he couldn't take his eyes off the screen lest he miss something important...so entirely hypnotized by minute gradations of light and shadow, anger and lust. What v himself said of his early films was, "People ususally just go to the movies to see only one star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at the star for as long as you like, no matter what he does...It was also easier to make."
In 1965 Andy made The Life of Juanita Castro starring Marie Mencken, and experimental filmmaker whose protogé was Gerry-Pie, Gerard Malanga, aspiring poet from the Bronx, Andy's new silkscreen assistant and also performed in many of Andy's films (Couch and Apple), even though he was an avowed heterosexual. In More Milk Yvette (1965) Andy's fascination with glamorous criminality is revealed in the story which touches on Lana Turner's scandalous affair with mobster Johnny Stompanato, killed by her daughter, Cheryl. Andy identified with Lana, an unfeeling, fake blonde.
In June of 1966, Andy began shooting what would be the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed of his films. With his "stars", he camped out at Manhattan’s famous Chelsea Hotel and shot numerous short films. By September of that year, he would take ten improvised shorts and two with scripts by Ronnie Tavel and assemble the footage into The Chelsea Girls, a three-hour split screen film depicting humorous-aburdist goings on with the hotel. Though an underground film, Chelsea Girls had a style and an energy that turned it into a cause celeb, coming as it did in the developing mid-sixties youth culture.
Unlike Andy’s previous films, his Chelsea-fest would play at several prominent theaters, turning a profit (roughly $130,000 on a $1500-$3000 budget) for director and distributor alike. Newsweek even praised the film as the “Iliad of the underground.” Rex Reed, on the other hand, wrote at the time, "Chelsea Girls is a 3 1/2 hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the the inside of a toilet bowl."
With the success and controversy, came legal issues. A Boston theater showing the film was busted, found guilty, and fined on obscenity charges. Warhol himself was rather serene at the time, reasoning that such actions would only bring more publicity to the film.
"I'd always wanted to do a movie that was pure f***ing, nothing else, the way Eat had just been eating and Sleep had just been sleeping," Andy commented. "So in October '68 I shot a movie of Viva having sex with Louis Waldon. I called it just F***." Filmed in a Greenwich Village apartment, the movie is bathed in a blue tint. (The tint had the Warholian touch of visual pun - a literal blue movie.) When it was booked into the Andy Warhol Garrick Theater in New York it was renamed Blue Movie to avoid censor problems. According to Variety, Blue Movie recouped its production costs three-fold during its first week of release. But, as with Chelsea Girls, with financial success came legal trouble. On July 31st, New York City police confiscated the film and arrested the theater staff on the grounds of obscenity. As always, however, Andy had his own distinct take on the material: "Despite the fact that Blue Movie contains an act of intercourse... the film seems to be more a documentary about life in the '60s than a porno film; Viva and Louis tell each other stories, talk about the war in Vietnam, cook some food, and fool around in the shower."
In less than a decade, Andy made over 50 films. He once said he’d rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote. What did stop Andy from making films in the early seventies, however, was his near-fatal shooting by Valerie Solonas, founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and "scriptwriter" of Up the Ass, filmed by Andy, for which she was not given credit or payment. This shooting and the events leading up to it were portrayed in Mary Harron's 1996 film I Shot Andy Andy, featuring an excellent turn by Jared Harris as the ever-elusive Andy.
After this turning point, Andy acted as "producer" on films which his former assistant Paul Morrissey wrote and directed, such as Lonesome Cowboy, Bad, Andy Warhol's Heat, Trash (featuring Factory favorites such as Holly Woodlawn and "Baby Joe" Joe Dallesandra), Dracula, and Frankenstein. The latter Morrissey-directed films were commercial in subject and structure but bore the "Warhol" brand, as Andy was out to "Warholize" the world.

Andy Warhol’s
Paul Morrissey
byDr. Jim
Andy Warhol, l’artiste invisible extraordinaire, the Popmeister Meteor who flared blindingly between the Sexual Revolution of the ’60s and the AIDS Crackdown of the ’80s, was an artist who seemed obsessed with one of The Great 20th C. Questions, initially articulated by Walter Benjamin—just what is a “Work of Art” in an age of mechanical reproduction?
Of course, Benjamin posed his stumper about the movies. And of course Warhol made a bunch of those, most of them in his NYC loft/studio (aka the “Factory”), featuring his “super-stars,” live-in camp-followers permanently pinned to Andy’s tail, a motley crew of wannabes, runaways, hustlers, drag queens, junkies and dealers, art-pimps and art-hoes unlike anything anywhere outside of Greenwich Village is ever likely to collect.
Mostly what Warhol made (literally thousands of shorts shot between, say, about ’62 and ’66) was stuff we generally generously confine to the “experimental” bin, into which few folks who aren’t other-artists-and-the-scholars-who-love-them rarely deign to dip their wicks.
Thus to find the vast majority of Warhol’s cinematic output, you’re probably forced to wend your way to Pittsburgh, now-and-future home of the official Andy Warhol Museum; a trek for most of us not unlike that dramatized in Lord of the Rings.
By the late ’60s, Warhol’s genius for commercialization was recognizably at least as great as his genius for matters aesthetic, and, sure enough, Andy had attracted a cinematic mind capable of transforming the basic Warholian elements (unscripted, unwashed, incoherent, inarticulate and indelibly real people in a harshly lit, grainy, disturbingly sadistic and—all too frequently—unbearably, bone-achingly boring world) and developing them into episodic, rambling longer-form narratives with real commercial potential.
That mind was perched precariously in the head-bone of Paul Morrissey, who’d spent his formative years grinding out z-grade camp like Civilization and Its Discontents and Mary Martin Does It (both 1962). Come mid-’60s, Morrissey was blossoming under Warhol’s patronage, producing intriguing, even dangerous work at the Factory with films like My Hustler (1965) and Chelsea Girls (1966), the latter (favorably compared at the time to Godard) a three-hour-plus epic shot in twelve single takes and shown on two simultaneous screens in—a first for a Warhol film—a real theatre.
Morrissey went on to make several more features for Warhol and these are the most commonly known “Warhol” movies still generally available. Flesh (1968) opens with an interminably long take of hustler Joe Dallesandro sleeping (au naturale, natch), after which the film follows him through his daily routine, scouring the glittering, grungy NYC jungle for clients, meandering through a dazzling array of damaged and damaging fauna.
Trash (1970), both in cast and subject matter, might have been called Flesh: The Sequel. Joe has graduated from street hustler to smack-head, and where he used to pose and pout for cash he now stumbles and staggers for horse. Drag queen Holly Woodlawn (the inspiration for Lou Reed’s song “Walk on the Wild Side”) brings pitiless poignancy to the role of Joe’s pregnant partner, who collects trash off the street for her art, is reduced to negotiating for her shoes to get welfare, and catches Joe in bed with her sister (“F*** you and your dog!” she snarls), in a performance I didn’t even realize was trans-gender ’til I was told.
Women in Revolt (1973) features three drag performances (Holly, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling) in a satire of Second Wave feminism, with the main characters organizing themselves as Politically Involved Girls (P.I.G.s, get it?), and then scamming the world for contributions to The Cause and various ways to feather their own nests and powder their own booties. That same year Heat was released, featuring Sylvia Miles as an over-the-hill Hollywood star who descends into motel hell to find her cackling wacko/lesbian daughter and her numbed-out, former-child-star current-squeeze (Joey D, again). These films have been called demented send-ups of, respectively, Valley of the Dolls and Sunset Boulevard.
Send-ups even more demented, getting campier and campier, continued with 1974’s Andy Warhol’s Dracula (aka Blood for Dracula) and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (aka Flesh for Frankenstein). In the former, Udo Kier is the vampire, surviving on “were-gin” blood, while Dallesandro plays his arch-enemy and gardener, devoted to destroying the bloodsucker by deflowering every potential member of the blood supply who crosses his path. In the latter, Joe plays the monster and Udo Kier the good doctor, a man whose appetite for body organs leaves his wife to turn to the monster for solace. Watch for cameos from Roman Polanski and Vittorio De Sica in the Dracula, between the waves of blood.
I must confess, I see more Warhol in Andy Hardy’s Double Life (1942) than I do in Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977), in which Jed Johnson directs Carroll Baker as a Queens housewife trying to balance her home electrolysis business with her hit-girl service, which specializes in defenestrating offspring and pets. But this is probably the slickest, most “pro”-looking of all the productions associated with the great man’s name. It just feels more like a less-well-thought-out imitation of John Waters than even the “camp, kitsch and queers” (self described) of Morrissey’s work. As with all the so-called Warhol features, full frontal nudity of all genders, excruciating physical detail of substance misuse and, whenever possible, oceans of gore make this one for discriminating tastes, though “R” rated versions are available.
Mr. W's influence is immense. The pioneering improv-based work stands alongside that of John Cassavetes’; both build on the thousands of shorts Warhol shot in the years before Morrissey arrived. The in-your-face gay cinema of the early John Waters and Gus Van Sant—unapologetic, unsentimental, rapturously camp (and more than a little bit addicted to substance abuse), as well as the long probing takes of ungroomed people doing “nothing” in the early Jim Jarmusch films. Perhaps most of all, the ideals and products of the European-based Dogma 95 clique of enfants terribles (the effort to shoot life in the instant, eschewing cinematic manipulation, erasing the presence of the camera, to “force truth out of the characters and settings”) all owe much to him.
Look at two mainstream, consciously Warholish imitations. In 1969, John Schlesinger appropriated the Warhol/Morrissey settings, characters, milieu—even some of his actors, fer gawdsake—to make the only “X”-rated film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, Midnight Cowboy. Thirty years later, in 1999, James Merendino (who was only two years old in 1969) dipped into the same trough to make his independent charmer, SLC Punk!, replete with drugs, anarchy, street life, vacuous relationships, unexpected nudity and undesired sex. The lessons of Mr. Warhol continue to enrich our world.
- Dr. James C. Lundstrom is Dean of Academics at Columbia College Hollywood.

Holly Woodlawn
yes, she cannes-cannes Interview by Jamie Lauren
“Holly came from Miami, F.L.A., hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A., plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she... She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.” Holly Woodlawn was immortalized, along with other Warhol Superstars, by Lou Reed in the 1972 Velvet Underground classic “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”
“A friend calls me up and tells me, ‘Do you know that Lou Reed wrote a song about you?’” says Holly. “I had never met him but he wrote my part from interviews he’d read. When we met, I said, ‘I’m very honored, but how the hell did you know about my life?’ And he said, ‘Well, you have a big mouth.’” Holly laughs. “From then on we were the best of friends.”
They remain friends to this day and Lou is doing the soundtrack for the movie version of Holly’s autobiography, A Low Life in High Heels. Published in 1991, the book’s title has been co-opted enough (by Loni Anderson’s 1995 autobiography My Life in High Heels as well as Minnie Driver’s 1991 film High Heels and Low Life’s) that Holly’s film has been retitled A Walk on the Wild Side.
“I’m going to Cannes with my producer,” says Holly. “CAA is doing the packaging so we’re going there to work. Or, in the immortal words of Holly Woodlawn, we’re pushing our p*ssies.”
Holly is also going to Cannes for a Paul Morrissey retrospective, where her film Trash will be screening. “I have to get up and be flawless and answer questions. I’m now 56 years old and I did this film when I was 23. I’m not the same person.”
She was supposed to go to Cannes 12 years ago when she was part of a documentary on Andy Warhol called Superstar, “but the week before, they couldn’t get it together, and I was devastated,” she says. “Oh, honey! I had my furs, I had my diamonds, please! But now—hey, girl—it’s showtime!”
Holly is honored to be part of the Morrissey retrospective. “When Paul called me up and said, ‘They’re doing a retrospective of me at Cannes and I would love for you to be there,’ I said, ‘It’s about time somebody gave you the recognition you deserve.’ Andy did put me on the map but Paul made me a star. And he made a lot of people stars. He did all the work. And what’s so wonderful about Paul is that he doesn’t say a word, he lets Andy get all the credit.”
Holly’s rise to Warhol Superstardom was something she never could have anticipated. As a shy Puerto Rican boy named Harold Ajzenberg, she left Miami Beach, Florida at 15 and hitchhiked her way to New York City. “I was living in Brooklyn with this guy who wanted me to have a sex change and be his wife. I was, like, 17,” recalls Holly. “I met Candy [Darling] and Jackie [Curtis] and I thought they were very glamorous. They kept telling me about this wonderful artist who made soup cans. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, yeah? You call that art?’ To me,
Boticelli is art. But they said, ‘He makes
movies. He’ll
make us
movie stars.’
And I said, ‘Oh, sure,
sure, sure.’
“I started hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, and I saw how life was so amazing. Not only amazing, it was electric. People were being fabulous and being beautiful, and I wanted to be a part of it. When I got a call from Paul Morrissey asking me to be in a movie, I said, ‘Are you kidding?!’”
Holly began working with Paul while Andy was in the hospital, recuperating from the gunshot wound inflicted by Valerie Solanos. “Paul took care of the entire Warhol empire,” Holly says. “That was when he started making movies.”
Holly finally met Andy at a party at the Factory. “Andy said, ‘You’re so glamorous. What’s your last name?’ I was living with this guy who was Greek so I said, ‘Holly Kravatis.’ Andy said, ‘Oh, Holly, why don’t you call yourself Holly Wood...
Woodchuck... Holly Wood-this or Holly Wood-that.’ I went home that night with some friends and we were high on speed and watching I Love Lucy. Lucy was lost on the subway with this loving cup stuck on her head and behind her it said, ‘Woodlawn,’ for the Woodlawn Cemetery. So the next day I called up Andy and I said, ‘My name is Holly Woodlawn. I’m the heiress to the Woodlawn Cemetery fortune.’”

In spite of the fame and glamour, Holly and other Warhol superstars struggled to survive. While Trash made $3 million its first weekend, Holly had been paid $25 a day for five days’ work. She and Jackie Curtis shared an apartment on the seedy lower side of the city—“a dump,” Holly calls it. “It was such a dichotomy. Jackie and I would get all douched up, as we called it, then we’d go to Max’s Kansas City because there was free food, like happy hour, and hopefully someone would buy us a glass of wine. We’d eat, then we’d see Andy go into the Factory across the street and we’d go over and ask, ‘Andy, are there any parties?’ And he’d say, ‘Here are some invitations.’”
“Jackie had more nerve than I did, I was the shy one. She’d say, ‘Andy, do you have $300 so I can pay my rent?’ and he’d say, ‘Jackie, why don’t you get a smaller apartment?’ And she’d say, ‘Because I’m living with Holly—$150 and $150. That comes to $300.’ Oh, she was a ballsy girl! I loved her! So he’d sign a check for $300 and we’d go to Max’s and cash it, we’d have dinner, then we’d go out that night to some foo-foo party. Jackie would bring a big bag and shove things in the bag, and I’m going, ‘Jackie, what are you doing?’ She’d say, ‘Shut up! It’s dinner and breakfast tomorrow!’ I’d say, ‘But, Jackie, people are watching.’ She’d say, ‘Good!’”
“So we ate. We survived. And you know what? That’s what it was all about—surviving. And we had fun. The limousines would take us to these incredible gallery openings and mansions, then it would take us home to 10th Street and Avenue A,” Holly chuckles in recollection. “We laughed our brains out.”
Holly recalls Andy being as aloof and reserved as he appears. “Honey, the man only said four words: ‘You are so glamorous.’ We were the maniacs. What I’m saying is, there’s the sun and there are the planets, and the planets did all the work. We did the revolving—a lot of revolving.”
Does Holly still prefer Boticelli to Warhol? “At first I didn’t understand Andy’s art. But I was in Berlin for a festival once and there was an entire room and they loved him. And it made me appreciate his work. And I think he deserves the acclaim. He made a stamp, he made his mark.”
“What I think I got most from those years was that I grew up, I learned, I became…” Holly searches for the right words. “I am now Holly Woodlawn. I was a shy kid from Puerto Rico who went to New York and met these insane people and now I am who I am, and I’m very proud of that,” says Holly. “I thank Paul and I thank Andy and I thank everybody who made me as crazy as I am today.”
Holly’s brand of craziness has endeared her to indie producers and she recently completed Allan Mindel’s film, Milwaukee, Minnesota. “When Allan called me up and said, ‘Holly, do you think you can play a transvestite drag-queen prostitute?’ I said, ‘You know what, Allan? That’s a stretch,’” she laughs. The film stars Troy Garity, Jane Fonda's son, and has a cameo by Josh Brolin, Barbra Streisand’s stepson, who plays Holly’s boyfriend/pimp. “I got all these kids together one day, and I said, ‘I know all your parents and now I know you. And everything you heard about me is true. Now what did I do?’” Holly laughs. “We had a wonderful time.”

White Noise/Paint it Black
by Zox
After the big anarchy media splash in Seattle, KCOP-TV in LA aired a multiple-segmented exposé focused on jumping up the mayhem fear factor surrounding the demonstrations that were to accompany the 2000 Democratic Convention. Jessica Lawless includes clips of these broadcasts in her video, Paint It Black, to illustrate how mass media conflated the primarily white anarchists with “black menace” gangs and looters of the LA riots. To this end, Lawless claims, the media evoked embedded strategies of an illogical racialized Social Darwinism, which justifies those at the upper strata of society as entitled because they are the fittest to attain prosperity. Anarchists embrace these false characterizations by dressing entirely in black with stocking ski mask and hooded sweatshirt, often accessorized by a Jolly Roger. The black/black look, prime for media consumption, is the means by which the anarchists (however dubiously) renounce their whiteness and adopt lives on the fringe of society.
Mikhail Bakunin - Nihilism founder and creator of Anarchy, a protest of Monarchy and Marxism - would most likely deem the qualities of tribal-orientation, sacrifice of identity, common taste, and the stylized appearance of today’s Anarchists as a sub-genre of the mass culture. However, the bravado of the mythic American individual, and freedom of consumption that his work embodies are the precise things that animate Anarchist action. The Lawless documentary begins with spray paint and a statement on the ideology void of the Seattle Anarchists, and yet, states an affirmation of the embodied-ethos of “just being there.” Although, she presents a sympathetic view of the Anarchists, she does not shy away from illuminating the unanswerable questions that leave them without a satisfying justification for their actions.
Contrasting the disarmingly sincere Anarchists with the disingenuous KCOP (COP/CORP) news team, causes me to ask: Who is harming us more, those who break windows or those who corrupt our mass communication systems? It appears as though Lawless is not entirely sold on the Anarchist package, yet she still manages to present a fair representation of their ideas and tactics. The responsibility that accompanies freedom, and the quest for authenticity create a cultural anxiety in many Anarchists that cause them to reconfigure their confrontational stance.
In “Amidst the White Noise...,” a video short that preceded Paint It Black, (at Gallery 825 on La Cienega) Christiane Robbins creates a visual white noise assault employing clips from O.J.’s slow chase and snips of helicopters compressed into multiple snowy-static stripes. The point that 93,000,000 viewers witnessed the live-uninterrupted O.J. telecast suggests that the conflation of the horrific and banal by mass media has opiated culture consumers; or, perhaps, as Robbins stated (à la Sontag) in the après-video chat, that we - as viewers - have anaesthetized ourselves out of necessity. As strips of video sky compress into multiple dead channels, the viewer is forced into the point of view of a bar code scanner, thus becoming the actual apparatus of consumption.