Leopardskin Pillbox Movie

Not sure if this will beat the winter blahs or not, but I think I'll go to my old neighborhood tonight to see the movie Factory Girl. It's cheap night at one of the arthouse theatres, the Princess, which looks like the inside of a birthday cake and has the best popcorn ever). When I first saw the title "Factory Girl", I thought Oh lovely, the grim life and untimely death of a sweatshop seamstress (or maybe a Barbie assembler) in Bangkok.

But, no. It's the story of Edie Sedgwick! In other words, the weird life and untimely death of an anoretic dingbat. I can handle that. In fact, I've read Jean Stein's/George Plimpton's Edie: American Girl about 5 times. It's not that I'm obsessed with Warhol - I don't like him at all, actually - I just love those biographies assembled from short interviews with people who knew the subject, or had interesting encounters with them (like George Plimpton getting smacked around with a rolled-up newspaper by Norman Mailer in Peter Manso's Mailer). There's one about Capote too, and Plimpton edited another one on JFK. If anyone knows what this style of biography is called, please let me know.

Review:

This isn't the greatest film, but it strongly echoes the situations with celebrities like Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears.

Edie Sedgwick grew up rich and privileged in Santa Barbara, descended from a prominent and storied Massachusetts family that included an editor of The Atlantic. By all accounts, her father was a complete prick who fancied himself a gentleman rancher and tried to seduce anything that moved, including some of his own daughters. Most of his 8 kids ended up with problems; one, Minturn ("Minty") committed suicide after the family refused to accept his homosexuality.

Sienna Miller is a good Edie. She has the waifish gamine thing goin' on, combined with a slight manipulative streak. She looks like Edie: The big dark eyes, the dimples, the boyish-yet-feminine physique. Jude Law needs an eye exam, I think.

Guy Pearce as Warhol is less impressive. A lot of guys have played him. Crispin Glover is well-loved for his cameo in The Doors, but I have issues with Crispin Glover. My favorite Warhol was Jared Harris, in I Shot Andy Warhol, with David Bowie from Basquiat a close second. Pearce is a little too chiseled and pretty to play an albino freak.

There were a couple of decent cameos in Factory Girl: Beth Grant (Mrs. Farmer from Donnie Darko) as the oblivious Mrs. Warhola, and Ileana Douglas as Diane Vreeland.

Edie went to art school for a spell, then drifted to New York City to do... whatever. With more money than smarts, she had the run of the town and lots of "friends". She quickly captured the attention of Andy Warhol, who made her a household name and put her in some of his "films". (It makes me sad that a few of the people working for Warhol actually considered themselves actors. I mean, when an assistant director holds up a placard instructing you to "approach the horse sexually", you are not an actor.)

Warhol was enthralled not only by Edie's beauty and sparkle, but by her dark past. At her first mention (on-camera) of being committed as a teen to the same mental hospital where her adored brother Minty hung himself, he exclaimed, "Ooh, Spring Hill! Didn't a Vanderbilt go there?" Critics and art historians talk about Warhol lampooning pop culture with his soulless Brillo boxes and photo-montages. That's B.S. Warhol worshipped brand names, labels, titles and hype. That guy was about as deep as a sheet of paper. When a friend was punched by Norman Mailer, he was only upset that Mailer didn't punch him. (which would be upsetting, I guess, because Mailer apparently beat up everyone in the '60s).

She also caught the attention of Bob Dylan, and since some chicks dig mumbling jackasses from Minnesota, she fell ass-over-teakettle in love with him and thought they would live happily ever after. Til he got married behind her back. Factory Girl makes Dylan look a lot more courtly and kind than he probably was. I mean, he lambasted Edie in two songs: Famously Just Like a Woman, and less-famously Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat. He did not treat her well.

Warhol didn't either. He began to distance himself from Sedgwick as soon as her drug problem became serious, moving on to become professionally fascinated by a series of vacuous blondes. This estrangement naturally made Edie's problems worse. Her inheritance spent, her payment from Warhol continuously delayed (he never paid his actors decently or on time), she felt she was washed up. She was 28. She limped home to California, scrubbed off the eye makeup, and tried to make a fresh start in rehab, with a non-famous husband. By '71 she was dead from a drug overdose.

Asked about Edie just one day after her death, Warhol told an interviewer, "I barely knew her... that was years ago." At that moment in the film, just as with the parting shot of Willem Defoe's T.S. Eliot getting into an elevator and leaving his first wife to die in an asylum in Tom and Viv, we see the truly monstrous emerge from the bland, seemingly benign face of the artist.

Like Anna Nicole and Britney and Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlowe and all the other platinum goddesses who broke down under the strain of being things to greedy, exploitative people, Edie could have been saved. The people around her could have put an end to her spiral. Instead they watched her die. And filmed it.