"When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships"

Andy's Films

Warhol worked across a wide range of media — painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than sixty films. One of his most famous films, Sleep (1963), shows a man (John Giorno, with whom Warhol had a relationship) sleeping for six hours. The 41-minute film Blow Job (1963) is one continuous shot of the face of Tom Baker, receiving oral sex from Willard Maas. Another, Empire (1964), consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk.

Batman Dracula is a 1964 film that was produced and directed by Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics. It was screened only at his art exibits. A fan of the Batman serials, Warhol's movie was a "homage" to the series, and is considered the first appearance of a blatantly campy Batman. No prints of the film are known to exist.

Warhol's 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film Camp.

His most popular and critically successful film was Chelsea Girls (1966). The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mm films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. Then it would be the other film's turn to bask in the glory of sound. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silk-screen works of the early 1960s. The influence of the film's split-screen, multi-narrative style could be felt in such modern work as Mike Figgis' Timecode and, however indirectly, the early seasons of 24 (TV series).

Other important films include Bike Boy (1967-1968), My Hustler (1965) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), a raunchy pseudo-Western. These and other titles document gay underground and camp culture, and continue to feature prominently in scholarship about sexuality and art - see, for example, Mathew Tinkom's Working Like a Homosexual (Duke University Press, 2002) or Juan Suarez's Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana University Press, 1996). Blue Movie, a film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the film's playing-time, was Warhol's last film as director. The film was at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter. For many years Viva refused to allow it to be screened. It was publicly screened in New York in 2005 for the first time in over thirty years.

After his June 3, 1968 shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat. All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films starred Joe Dallesandro, who was more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.

In order to facilitate the success of these Warhol-branded, Morrissey-directed movies in the marketplace, all of Warhol's earlier avant-garde films were removed from distribution and exhibition by 1972.

Another film, Bad, made significant impact as a "Warhol" film yet was directed by Jed Johnson. Bad starred the infamous Carroll Baker and a young Perry King.

The first volume of a catalogue raisonné for the Factory film archive, edited by Callie Angell, was published in the spring of 2006.

">

Filmography

Blow Job (1963)
Eat (1963)
Haircut (1963)
Kiss (1963)
Naomi's Birthday Party (1963)
Sleep (1963)
13 Most Beautiful Women (1964)
Batman Dracula (1964)
Clockwork (1964)
Couch (1964)
Drunk (1964)
Empire (1964)
The End of Dawn (1964)
Lips (1964)
Mario Banana I (1964)
Mario Banana II (1964)
Messy Lives (1964)
Naomi and Rufus Kiss (1964)
Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of (1964)
The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964)
Beauty #2 (1965)
Bitch (1965)
Camp (1965)
Harlot (1965)
Horse (1965)
Kitchen (1965)
The Life of Juanita Castro (1965)
My Hustler (1965)
Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)
Restaurant (1965)
Space (1965)
Taylor Mead's Ass (1965)
Vinyl (1965)
Screen Test (1965)
Screen Test #2 (1965)
Ari and Mario (1966)
Hedy (film) (1966)
Kiss the Boot (1966)
Milk (1966)
Salvador Dalí (1966)
Shower (1966)
Sunset (1966)
Superboy (1966)
The Closet (1966)
Chelsea Girls (1966)
The Beard (film) (1966)
More Milk, Yvette (1966)
Outer and Inner Space (1966)
The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966)
The Andy Warhol Story (1967)
Tiger Morse (1967)
The Imitation of Christ (1967)
The Nude Restaurant (1967)
Bike Boy (1967)
I, a Man (1967)
San Diego Surf (1968)
The Loves of Ondine (1968)
Blue Movie (1969)
Lonesome Cowboys (1969)
L'Amour (1972)
Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)
aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (USA)
Blood for Dracula (1974)