Today’s movie is a biographical drama with scenes that happen on June 3. Watch it tonight and enjoy.
I SHOT ANDY WARHOL
On June 3, 1968 Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol [1:39 to 2:07]. While his friends hold a premature wake, the police interrogate Solanas. She has been committed to a mental institution and a nurse recounts Solana’s case history. She was born in a troubled family, including sexual abuse. At boarding school she had a lesbian encounter and considered herself one after that. Solanas got a degree in psychology and moved to New York where she wrote a misandrous and communistic manifesto. She lived with a transvestite, Candy Darling and prostitutes herself to men to earn money. Through Candy, Solanas is introduced to Andy Warhol and the group of artists around him, collectively called “The Factory”. She meets Maurice Girodias, a publisher, who gets her to sign a contract to write a pornographic novel. Much of the rest of the film concerns her efforts to get Warhol to produce a play she has written. Solanas hangs around the party scene at the Factory. One of the men she sleeps with has a gun, which she takes. Solanas goes on a TV show to promote her ideology and gets humiliated. She blames Warhol at least in part for this. Finally, on June 3, 1968, she goes to the Factory and shoots Warhol. Leaving the building she hands the gun over to a policeman. [1:28:51 to 1:33:31] Through onscreen print we learn that Solanas was committed for three years while Warhol did survive the shooting.
A very bizarre film. I think even the most ardent feminist will agree that Solanas had serious mental issues. Her passionate hatred of Warhol seemed to have no basis in actual reality.
Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009) at page 102 gives the date of the shooting
Producer - Tom Kalin and Christine Vachon
Director - Mary Harron
Screenplay - Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan
Runtime – 1 hour 43 minutes
Released – May 1, 1996
Starring –
Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas
Jared Harris as Andy Warhol
Stephen Dorff as Candy Darling
Martha Plimpton as Stevie
Lothaire Bluteau as Maurice Girodias
Anna Levine as Iris
Peter Friedman as Alan Burke
Copyright by Ivan Walters in 2015
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