By now a veritable Campbell Soup-can warehouseful of nonfiction features (Superstar, A Walk in the Sea, Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, Superstar in a Housedress, etc.) could be Brillo-boxed from various documentaries about Andy Warhol and his acolytes—assistants, muses, models and parasites at the artist's notorious New York City headquarters.
Filmmaker Catherine O'Sullivan Shorr originally assembled Andy Warhol's Factory People as a three-part television documentary series in 2008. Here is has been re-compiled into a compact feature, comprising an oral history of the heyday of the Warhol "Factory" (actually using its proper name, "Silver Factory," reflecting Warhol's favorite color). Do not expect a breakthrough understanding of Warhol's art and often enigmatic intentions, although some insights stand out.
Warhol was brilliant and generous in welcoming outsider/misfit types. However uncooperative, eccentric, and downright self-destructive (singer Nico was just plain destructive, declares Mary Woronov) they turned out, Andy knew art would result. Attempted collaborations that did not click: Andy with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. It seems Warhol did not really dig the hippie scene.
Besides silk screening and mechanical reproduction sculpture, Factory projects found ultimate expression in filmmaking. Warhol, despite his passive demeanor, generated a movie every two weeks during the mid-1960s, improvising and sometimes just letting the camera run and capture whatever (experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas champions Warhol's aesthete). It was virtually an accident when 1966's Chelsea Girls became a hit despite/because of its explicit sexuality (collection buyers should note scattered nudity and profanity).
When angry Silver-Factory "talent" Valerie Solinas fired a bullet into Warhol in 1968 (dramatized in the feature I Shot Andy Warhol) the violence shook the artist profoundly. This event draws a curtain to the narrative; the party was over. There are only minor contributions from director Paul Morrissey, who would take over the Warhol label with more structured and scripted pictures in the 1970s. A list of Silver Factory "superstars" who have died ever since (by their own hands or otherwise) is a melancholy one, and of course, Warhol succumbed at 58 in 1987 during what should have been minor surgery (we are told the gunshot wounds bled internally to the end).
Interviewees here include Taylor Mead—eloquent, but doing a mystifying performance art recitation thing over the closing credits—Allen Midgette, Lou Reed (in archival material), Lee Childers, Robert Heide and Factory "manager" Billy Name. Though the tone is generally nostalgic and upbeat, viewers can take this Factory tour as a cautionary one. But it is New York scenester history-cum-legend. Recommended. (Aud: C, P)