Tuesday, June 3, 2014

June 3 - I Shot Andy Warhol

Today’s movie is a biographical drama with scenes that happen on June 3. I hope you will enjoy this film and watch it tonight.

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 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
Tahnee Welch as Viva


Copyright by Ivan Walters 2014. 




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