Asked why he's stopped painting and is now interested in making films, Warhol responds in classic form: "It's easier to do than painting. The camera has a motor and you just turn it on and you just walk away. And it just takes all by itself."

In examining how mundane moving images could be and still have value (a variation of how and what his "pop" art revealed), Warhol loved to play with what wasn't aesthetically art, but was still irrefutably art, even aesthetically speaking.

"We're trying to make it so bad, but doing it well," explains Andy to an interviewer, "where the most important thing that's happening, you seem to miss it all the time, or show the most scratches you can on the film or all the dirt you can get on the film. Or zoom badly, where you zoom and miss the most important thing and your camera jiggles so that everybody knows you're watching a film."

Andy's brilliant deconstruction of the illusion of art is that much more compelling when you realize that by explaining it all he's purposefully mythologizing the demythology. It's the secret to the entire lure of his mythological Factory and all the people who hung out there and became Superstars there by making out-of-focus, scratchy, static "underground" flicks that nobody outside of a very narrow milieu ever saw.

In a clip from The Chelsea Girls (1966), we see a portion of the film's most riveting scene. Having reached a complete self-immersion in his role-playing as Pope, Ondine, who shortly before had shot up on camera and self-confessed his homosexuality, becomes violently enraged by co-star Rona Page’s uninspired realization of what he's putting himself through and explodes on-screen, slapping her face and smacking her head in barely-controlled anger as he continues his demonically witty improvisation.

In a TV interview with Warhol and Brigid Berlin, who nicknamed herself Brigid "Polk" because she loved to poke herself up with dope, Warhol is asked if the Factory films are "real," if what the people in them are doing is "real."

"No, they're faking it," Andy quietly answers in that marvelously affected disembodied voice of his. The interviewer finally comes to the conclusion, through his conversation with Berlin, that unlike Hollywood films in which the actor recreates a reality, in Warhol's films the actors live out their parts on film and "so the movie becomes reality."

"Ah, yes," complies Andy.

A shot of the 55th Street Playhouse marquee reveals Lonesome Cowboys and Flesh are playing inside and then we get to check out a couple of quick scenes from Cowboys, including the one where Eric Emerson is demonstrating his ballet calisthenics to Joe Dallesandro. Unfortunately, Joe's name is never mentioned in this documentary, but a second clip from Trash, hailed as the Factory's first international hit, has Joe and Holly arguing with the social worker over welfare.

Quality segments are also afforded the transvestite Superstars, including footage from Women in Revolt, and then, to borrow from Gerard Malanga, we follow the post-shooting "court painter" phase of Andy's life, when celebrity and commerce found themselves inextricably and irrevocably intertwined. There was inter/View magazine's evolution, the television commercials, the $50,000+ "Warhol" portraits that began as Polaroids Andy took and then became silk-screens entirely made by other people and simply okayed by him, the parade of party appearances, the Basquiat collaboration, and all that encapsulates a time when, as Ronnie Cutrone says, "Art became the rock and roll of the 80s."

Andy Warhol: Portrait of an Artist does an admirable job in capturing an ambiance of the eclectic and misleadingly superficial life, career, and undeath of an artist who became his own work of art. "In a thing-oriented world," De Antonio says, "Andy is a kind of God."

Mary Harron, a Warhol/Factory-life devotee, who's credited as "researcher" on this project, later directed the acclaimed 1996 independent feature I Shot Andy Warhol.

Joe Dallesandro may not figure prominently in such a broad panorama, but he's there all right, part of the Warhol mosaic; his handsome young face, with red bandanna tied around his forehead, prominently hanging in portraiture on the wall of the 33 Union Square West Factory (#2).

For several years in a row in the late 80s and early 90s, and even at last year’s show, when you tuned in to watch the Academy Awards broadcast you’d be treated to an introductory montage of bits and pieces of movie scenes throughout history patched together with eye-catching brilliance and flickered at hyperspeed. (Alas, the repetition of these images, and the tendency to feed off the same ones year after year, has made the segment a nuisance in the last couple of installments.)

It all began with a short film called Precious Images (1986) in which filmmaker Chuck Workman scoured through hundreds of films and made decisions about what images captured a "moment" in film history and what combinations of these disparate images might be seen as fraternal. Editing our cinematic heritage into a celluloid tapestry became his forté and he would repeat himself with riffs on specific themes (such as Women in Films) that would find an audience of a billion during the Oscar broadcasts and remind us all of the importance and power of the movies. His work eventually resulted in the very entertaining feature 100 Years of Cinema (1994).

Workman’s specialty was pasting together dozens of images in a given minute, so it's ironic that his first feature assignment was to assemble a documentary on a man whose own specialty was using only a few images and keeping them there for eight hours.

The result is an entertaining collage of pictures and sounds splashing out the superficial vibes of what Andy Warhol did and why other people thought it was good or wasn't very good and what it was like to work with him. What the film doesn't do, as many of its critics pointed out at the time, is give you any real sense of who Andy Warhol was beneath the surface. The film is truly about the "life and times," not about the man himself.

Dennis Hopper's voice-over reminds us that any attempt to know what or who Andy Warhol is or was is doomed from the start when he recites Andy's famous anti-autobiographical quote: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there's nothing behind it."

Not surprisingly, the surface will do.

Workman decides to probe no deeper than that and still manages to come up with an enjoyable collage. The announcement of Andy’s death is fit into a collection of sound and image bytes from other worldly events of the period. It’s a clever move, because it fulfills two purposes. First, like a time capsule, it sets up a social/political context for viewers of the film 20 years from now. And second, and more importantly, it situates Andy’s death as equally important or equally unimportant as a "news" item of the day, lending him equal weight for those captive seconds on television as those devoted to other newsworthy moments, including a testy First lady, a crying confessional by a televangelist, Bernie Goetz being recognized as a hero, or George Bush asking us to read his lips. By virtue of being on television, a life, a fame, an importance has been granted…even if it’s only for Andy’s fifteen minutes.

Workman isn’t able to completely escape the talking head syndrome of documentary filmmaking for his subject interviews, but he spices them up with just the right sense of what works and what doesn’t. From two of Andy’s adorable cousins, we not only learn that his high school yearbook was captioned with "as genuine as a fingerprint," but we also get a sample of their kooky sense of humor.

A trip to Pittsburgh might just as well be a trip to Vernon, Florida. We see Andy’s brother Paul working his farm and squawking back at the ducks. A woman who used to be neighbors to the Warholas in their slum neighborhood explains that the large clubhouse on the street is now owned by the colored folks, "so we live with that." At one point during her streetside reminiscing, a dog can be heard barking and in the distance behind her we see a man next to the noisy pup. She turns and yells to him, "I’m on television, Ray!" Which seems to calm both him and the dog.

There are lots of sampled clips from other interview programs featuring comments from Lou Reed, Tom Wolfe, Candy Darling, Edie Sedgwick, and Paul Morrissey, and plenty of archival footage of Andy and the Factory milieu. Naturally, Warhol does very little of the talking himself, leaving others to speculate what kind of man he was and what kind of private life he had.

A fellow at the Serendipity 3, a club where Andy once used to hang and once drew Bobby Short’s bare feet, tells us that Andy was so anemic looking that "I don’t think he would have the strength to have sex."

Ultra Violet, one of the Superstars whom Joe has trouble applying the term, is seen applying sliced beet to her cheeks as rouge during her interview. She says Andy was cold, "just like a dead body."

A stop at the Campbell’s Soup Company is an unexpected and fairly funny diversion and provides an ironic slice of commercial art unto itself. One of the managers is seen standing out front of the company holding a can of soup and admitting, "I think there were a lot of people in the company who were leery about having this kind of person involved with our brand image," then adding later, after a few other folks have rendered opinions on Andy’s soup can "art," "I wouldn’t say it’s great art, no, but certainly it didn’t hurt us, that’s for sure."

The section in which key players talk about the making of the movies is particularly interesting, with Gerard Malanga summing the process up nicely by saying "it all seemed so instant and easy." They made their own stuff, their names made it into the newspapers, their films showed at theatres, and not a one of them ever had to fuss with getting a career launched in Hollywood. They were their own Hollywood.

Paul Morrissey, in a clip from an archival interview, maintains that the secret to his films, as opposed to Andy's, was, "I just tried to combine the actor's personality with the story. In that sense, I'm much more conservative and traditional. The movie becomes a little different when Andy runs the camera."

In another archival interview clip, this one featuring Warhol and company on a talk show, Viva breaks up the company by condensing the entire process of filmmaking at the Factory to a single sentence: "We see how we feel when we get up that morning and we turn on the camera and do whatever we feel like doing and whoever is the most aggressive is the star."

Holly Woodlawn makes a memorable appearance seated at a make-up table and explaining that she got into the movies because, "They just wanted a sleazebag from the gutter and Morrissey for some reason thought I would be perfect for the role."

Holly shows up later in the film during a section on Andy’s legendarily frugal ways. Viva says Andy was just cheap. Holly adds "tight" with a scowl. Then back to Viva, who in dead seriousness says, "Most men are cheap." It’s easy to see why these people made great Superstars. Even at Workman’s sound byte level, they come off not only as witty, but capable of projecting a whole hell of a lot of character into whatever they say or do. It’s the reason why they are remembered and Paul America and Joe Spencer are not.

Taylor Mead demonstrates he’s also still capable of making us laugh, chiming in during his interview that his plane is coming in when we hear the sound of a jet passing overhead. It’s not the weight of the joke, it’s his timing that makes it rich, just as when he gestures extravagantly during his rooftop interview about "all the millions he (Warhol" gave me from the movies," followed by self-deprecating giggles and Mead’s simple demand for getting money without having to beg for it.

This whole sequence is then nicely counterpointed by discussions with jewelry store owners and the West Coast editor of Interview magazine about all of Andy’s shopping sprees for diamonds and gold. Particularly funny is Workman’s intercutting between a well-dressed jewelry proprietor lavishly praising Andy’s exceptional taste with shots of a street vendor telling us Andy loved skulls, big belt buckles and biker jewelry.

Whether it’s Dennis Hopper describing his appearance in Andy’s film The 13 Most Beautiful Boys (1965), during which he was asked to sit still while a camera photographed him for fifteen minutes and Hopper tells us he decided to do a Strasbergian emotional memory (which he then begins to recreate for Workman’s camera), or seeing Sylvia Miles declare "We were the beautiful people" while she’s decked out in a bright red Campbell’s Soup shirt and baseball cap, Workman has captured entertaining moments without ever having to crack the veneer of Andy’s mystique. (The closest the film comes is Fran Leibowitz’s erudite comment: "Andy made fame more famous.")

Even Andy’s diaries, the published collection of his daily calls to Pat Hackett recounting his life adventures while recording expenditures in case of an audit, come into reasonable question. This was supposed to be Andy in Andy’s own words, but Viva joins the chorus of critics who wonder if Pat Hackett didn’t make half of it up. "We’ll never know. Andy’s dead." (Joe, too, has gone on record criticizing the "truth" of those best-selling diaries.)

Holly Woodlawn is even more colorful: "Who cares? Who cares if Jane Fonda had her head in a toilet bowl? They all did."

Joe's exposure in Superstar is minimal, though we do glimpse him three times during its course. The first comes when we see his straining midsection in a clip on television covering Andy's death that features a shot from Flesh when he’s posing as the sprinter.

The second time we see him follows a clever cut from Candy Darling being interviewed at a museum--during which Warhol explains Candy's never been to a museum before and she concurs, though, she adds, she might have been to one when she was in school and she does live right across the street from this one--to a still photo of her that pans down to reveal her penis. To the blissfully unaware, this must have come as quite a surprise. The photo is from Richard Avedon's famed October 30, 1969 shoot of the Factory players. Joe was shot by Avedon as well during that session; probably most revealing when part of a 10' x 35' triptych which has him nude opposite a naked Darling, but also has his mentor Paul Morrissey, fully-clothed, standing right behind Joe, with his hand on his shoulder. We don't get to see that shot in the film, unfortunately, but we do see a clothed Joe standing next to Andy in a subsequent still from the session.

The third time we glimpse Joe, it's also amidst a clever visual gag by Workman. The sequence follows another clip from the Candy Darling interview at the museum where Warhol has just opened an exhibit. The interviewer asks Candy if she enjoys working for Andy and she says, "a lot." When asked if he's a good director, Candy admits that Andy doesn't really direct--"he wasn't even there most of the time." The response clearly delights Andy, who can be seen smiling as the camera widens the shot. From the idea that Andy Warhol doesn't even need to be around to make an Andy Warhol film, Workman moves to a keen split-screen effect as various images from various Warhol films are projected simultaneously. The idea clearly comes from Warhol's famed use of the process for Chelsea Girls, one of his earliest audience successes, and it even includes that film's gimmick of alternating the soundtrack so that you only hear the audio from one of the two images at a time and at random.

During the sequence, Joe can be glimpsed in a shot from The Loves of Ondine (1967).

Dallesandro showed up for the West Coast premiere of Superstar at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills, according to the Los Angeles papers, where afterwards, he, Holly Woodlawn, Sally Kirkland, Shelly Winters, Joan Quinn, and Workman went for a Factory party at the Asylum. Joining them there were Justine Bateman, David Keith, Dana Ashbrook, Donovan Leitch, Ione Skye, and Bud Cort, among others. The entertainment included a band covering Velvet Underground material, zombified Andy look-a-likes roaming with Polaroid cameras slung around their necks, male and female go-go dancers, and weird "re-enactments" of life at the Factory played out behind glass.

True to form, Joe denies going to the party.

© Michael Ferguson, 1998