Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol is considered one the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
Paul Joseph Morrissey was an American film director, known for his early association with Andy Warhol. His most famous films include Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), Heat (1972), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), and Blood for Dracula (1974), all starring Joe Dallesandro, 1971's Women in Revolt and the 1980's New York trilogy Forty Deuce (1982), Mixed Blood (1985), and Spike of Bensonhurst (1988).
Naomi Levine was an American actress, artist and filmmaker. She was a friend of Jack Smith and pop artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol. In 1964, she directed the film titled Yes. In 1973, several of her films were screened at the Museum of Modern Art.
Warhol superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by the pop artist Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. These personalities appeared in Warhol's artworks and accompanied him in his social life. Warhol would simply film them, and declare them "superstars".
Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro III is an American actor and Warhol superstar. He was a sex symbol of gay subculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and of several American underground films before going mainstream.
Robert Olivo, better known by his stage name Ondine, was an American actor. He is best known for appearing in a series of films in the mid-1960s by Andy Warhol, whom he claimed to have met in 1961 at an orgy:
I was at an orgy, and he [Warhol] was, ah, this great presence in the back of the room. And this orgy was run by a friend of mine, and, so, I said to this person, 'Would you please mind throwing that thing [Warhol] out of here?' And that thing was thrown out of there, and when he came up to me the next time, he said to me, 'Nobody has ever thrown me out of a party.' He said, 'You know? Don't you know who I am?' And I said, 'Well, I don't give a good flying fuck who you are. You just weren't there. You weren't involved...'
A fan film is a film or video inspired by a film, television program, comic book, book, or video game created by fans rather than by the source's copyright holders or creators. Fan filmmakers have traditionally been amateurs, but some of the more notable films have actually been produced by professional filmmakers as film school class projects or as demonstration reels. Fan films vary tremendously in quality, as well as in length, from short faux-teaser trailers for non-existent motion pictures to full-length motion pictures. Fan films are also examples of fan labor and the remix culture. Closely related concepts are fandubs, fansubs and vidding which are reworks of fans on already released film material.
Jack Smith was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema. He is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American performance art, and has been critically recognized as a master photographer.
Lonesome Cowboys is a 1968 American Western drama film directed by Andy Warhol, and written and produced by Paul Morrissey. A satire of Hollywood Westerns, it was initially screened in November 1968 at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it won the Best Film Award. On May 5, 1969, it was shown for initial viewings at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre in New York City.
Blood for Dracula is a 1974 comedy horror film written and directed by Paul Morrissey, and starring Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro, Maxime McKendry, Stefania Casini, Arno Juerging and Vittorio de Sica. Upon its initial 1974 release in West Germany and the United States, Blood for Dracula was released as Andy Warhol's Dracula.
The Screen Tests are a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits by Andy Warhol, made between 1964 and 1966, generally showing their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. The Screen Tests, of which 472 survive, depict a wide range of figures, many of them part of the mid-1960s downtown New York cultural scene. Under Warhol's direction, subjects of the Screen Tests attempted to sit motionless for around three minutes while being filmed, with the resulting movies projected in slow motion. The films represent a new kind of portraiture—a slowly moving, nearly still image of a person. Warhol's Screen Tests connect on one hand with the artist's other work in film, which emphasized stillness and duration (for example, Sleep and Empire, and on the other hand with his focus after the mid-1960s on documenting his celebrity milieu in paintings and other works.
René Rivera, known professionally as Mario Montez, was one of the Warhol superstars, appearing in thirteen of Andy Warhol's underground films from 1964 to 1966. He took his name as a male homage to the actress Maria Montez, an important gay icon in the 1950s and 1960s. Before appearing in Warhol's films, he appeared in Jack Smith's underground films Flaming Creatures and Normal Love. Montez also stars in the Ron Rice film Chumlum, made in 1964. Mario Montez, was "a staple in the New York underground scene of the 1960s and '70s."
Sleep is a 1964 American underground film by Andy Warhol. Lasting five hours and 21 minutes, it consists of looped footage of John Giorno, Warhol's lover at the time, sleeping.
Jane Holzer, is an American art collector and real estate investor. She is best known as a Warhol superstar, and she also worked as a model, actress, and film producer. Nicknamed Baby Jane Holzer, she appeared on the cover of British Vogue in 1964, and she was referred to as one of the "fashion revolutionaries" by Women's Wear Daily in 1966.
Eating Too Fast is a 1966 Andy Warhol film made at The Factory. It was originally titled Blow Job #2 and features art critic and writer Gregory Battcock (1937–1980). The film is 67 minutes long and is, in effect, a black and white sound film remake of Warhol's Blow Job (1964). Battcock had previously appeared in Warhol's films Batman Dracula (1964) and Horse (1965).
American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol produced more than 600 films between 1963 and 1968, including short Screen Tests film portraits. His subsequent work with filmmaker Paul Morrissey guided the Warhol-branded films toward more mainstream success in the 1970s. Since 1984, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and worked to preserve, restore, exhibit, and distribute Warhol's underground films. In 2014, the MoMA began a project to digitize films previously unseen and to show them to the public.
Tally Brown was an American singer and actress who was part of the New York underground performance scene, particularly Andy Warhol's "Factory" and who appeared in or was the subject of films by Andy Warhol and Rosa von Praunheim. She was born and died in New York City.
Beverly Grant was an actress and filmmaker who appeared in films by Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Gregory Markopoulos, Ira Cohen, Ron Rice, and Stephen Dwoskin, on the off-off Broadway stage in works by Ronald Tavel and LeRoi Jones, as well as collaborated with her one-time husband, experimental filmmaker and musician, Tony Conrad. Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker of Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, in which Grant appeared, called her "the queen of the underground – both undergrounds."
Couch (1964) is a feature-length underground film directed by Andy Warhol, and starring Gerard Malanga, Piero Heliczer, Naomi Levine, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, John Palmer, Baby Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Amy Taubin, Ondine, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, Taylor Mead, Kate Heliczer, Rufus Collins, Joseph LeSeuer, Binghamton Birdie, Mark Lancaster, Gloria Wood, and Billy Name.
Normal Love is an experimental film project by American director Jack Smith. It shows the adventures of an ensemble of glamorously dressed monsters. Smith filmed the project in 1963 and began screening the work in pieces in 1964.
