Underground Sundae
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		In November of 1968, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey were in a local TV studio experimenting with making a commercial commissioned by Schrafft's, an East Coast chain of 55 family restaurants. Viva, with her underarms unshaven, and Joe, serious and shirtless, were the featured players. Viva sat lounging, Joe behind her, while producer Frank Hefferen occasionally broke in to tame the actress' wily hairdo (atop her head). All that Joe really remembers about the content of the thing is that Viva sat in front of him, he stood there with his shirt off, puffing on a cigarette between shots, and some Schrafft's ice cream went by and was supposed to explode into all sorts of psychedelic colors and warped images. "Andy was given the studio for the day with all of the television and video equipment," says Joe. "He was very interested in getting the special effects and making all the colors change. Kind of like a psychedelic electric light show, making a cup of ice cream look like it had thousands of colors. It wasn't about the fact that the actors were torso-naked, it was about us sitting there in front of these ice cream sundaes with the colors shooting out all over the place. It was Andy given a television studio to do whatever he wanted." Joe shakes his head. "The motherfucker's got absolutely no talent. No original idea in his head. So when we get there and the guy said, 'the camera can do this,' Andy said, 'Oh yeah, I like that. Do that. Do that.' Do you think he was gonna talk to the actors who were sitting in front of the camera in their bare chests getting their hair combed? No, it was like, 'yeah, okay Viva, sit in front of Joe. Okay, that's good. Let's shoot that thing with the thing.' It was the most boring piece of shit, but he was paid a lot of money to do it." The spot ended with the line: "A little change is good for everybody." I tell Joe I think it sounds funny. "Very funny," he deadpans. "Does nothing for me." The commercial aired effectively as a publicity stunt, but descriptions of it indicate that the actors were completely clipped out, leaving a snatch of psychedelia in which a red dot (the maraschino cherry) appears out of the darkness and "The Underground Sundae" is revealed warping into a technicolor light show. (The restaurant described their Underground Sundae "photographed by Andy Warhol" as: "Yummy Schrafft's vanilla ice cream in two groovy heaps, with three ounces of mind-blowing chocolate sauce undulating within a mountain of pure whipped cream topped with a pulsating maraschino cherry served in a bowl as big as a boat." All for $1.10.) Playboy wrote in a lengthy feature called "What's A Warhol" (September, 1969): "His recent widely discussed commercial for Schrafft's restaurant chain was a long, voluptuous panning shot of a chocolate sundae, with 'all of the mistakes TV can make kept in,' the artist explained. 'It's blurry, shady, out of focus.'" A rose-tinted still of Viva and Joe from the shoot made the cover of an issue of Great Britain's enticingly boy-crazy periodical Films and Filming for an article on Warhol Superstars. The commercial is rumored to have been shown at a film festival in South America a few years back, but to my knowledge, the only copy here in the States is probably the original somewhere in the Warhol video archive.
		©2005, Michael Ferguson | webmaster@joedallesandro.com