This interview, originally made for the documentary Factory People, was kindly granted by Patrick Nagle

What was Andy’s factory space originally like?

When he took the lease for the loft on 47th street between 2nd and 3rd avenues and I went up to look at it and, you know doing an installation of the silver thing, it was very decrepit. The walls were concrete, the floor was concrete and the walls were crumbling. Andy had set up a painting area in the front of the loft where windows were because he could only paint in the daytime when the sunlight came in because there were no electrical outlets installed. So we somehow synchronised and said to each other, “Lets get this thing into working order!”.
He wanted to be painting and doing films, but he needed someone to have all the skills for electricity, electrical installations, and I had all that from my theatrical experience and working as a lighting designer because you work with live voltage.
The first thing I did in Andy’s new factory studio, which was just Andy’s studio at that time we call it, was to install overhead lights, spot lights. Then I installed the sound system and made special places for Andy to work, spaces for his painting, special areas where he could do the film making...

How did you become the Factory in-house photographer?

When Andy got this new space we became so involved with the creation of what became the Silver Factory, and because he had just started doing filmmaking at this time, and because he got the film camera, the 16 mm Bollex and had only been using a 35 mm still camera from Honeywell Pentax, he then gave me the still camera and said, “Billy you do the still photography. I am just going to make films now.” So that is when I became a photographer I hadn’t really been interested or thought about the field previously, and its because everything was there for me that I could just move in to it, and Andy moved into the motion pictures, and because I had established the Silver Factory as a work place for him so that it was all ready for him just to start utilizing because he didn’t have to spend 90% figuring out how to install lights and all that stuff, you know I had the skills to do that.

What was going on with movie making in the Factory?

Well what was going on was, if you put the words in quotes “going on”, it was going on, and you never knew that it was going on, but it was always going on. Andy, once he got that camera in his hands, he was just going on with it, and he would just, like later he became with the tape recorder, you know, it was incessant, and he would have to tape record everything just like he had to film everything.
In the first year of the Silver Factory, like in 1964, it was very much more open space for those who were participating like me and Ondine with Andy because we were still totally into that Avant garde underground art world thing, it wasn’t until like next year after the Brillo boxes and all that, that Andy started to become really famous, he was just known at this point so we were still underground artists. I had set up barriers when I installed all the lights so the ceiling, it was a large loft space previously a hat factory with 3 arches in the ceiling, it was like 100 feet long by, I don’t know like 30 by 100 something like that and there were 3 arches and in each arch I had set up outlets for spotlights to come straight down so there were areas where Andy could make films in and I would make sets like order from a hardware store probably 5 wood sheets and hinge two of them together and spay them silver so with a couple of them you would then have the set for Ondine and “Chelsea Girls” under the spotlight.

What were some of the technical details of filmmaking for Andy then?

The interesting thing about filmmaking at that time was that great new products were coming out for filmmakers. Kodak came out with this Tri-X film that was this high speed film which you could actually make movies with without lights. You know, in outdoor light you could make handheld movies, you did not need a studio to make them in with lights and all, so and then another thing that came out then was the halogen lights. So we had what we called sun guns.
We would set up one sun gun on the subject whether it was a screen test or Pope Ondine or Chelsea Girls, so that whole look that came from the 60’s, I can’t say that we were the originators because Avedon did it too. I think that every studio photographer did it once they had halogen lights and tri-x film. You would just need this brilliant halogen from one side and then total dark on the other side so that you had a black and white harlequin face. If you look at Chelsea Girls during the Pope Ondine segments, that is how I lit them and they were shot in Tri-X, so it’s intense black and white high contrast. In this light the bodies are floating in space because the contrast is so intense.
So we were into using new tools and materials simultaneous with having the opportunity to have these crazy, brilliant characters expose themselves in our films and again it’s just this coming together of elements of our culture which is snatched like a cyclotron into this wonderful happening thing that is spectacular like Pope Ondine and the Chelsea Girls

Who influenced Andy’s filmmaking?

Jack Smith. There was a filmmaker who was including a whole culture of these fabulous wild creatures from New York underground who didn’t really have an outlet for expression other than off Broadway theatre. All of a sudden people like Jack Smith started that, bringing all these crazy theatre people into the film making process like in his “Flaming Creatures” or “Normal Love”, but it was unscripted and it was simply nuance or presence.
Andy and I went to some sessions of Jack Smith filming “Normal Love” on Lower East Side rooftops, because I knew Jack through La Monte Young. So I brought Andy over there and I think for the first time Andy saw that he didn’t have to really pre-conceive or construct a film, you could just make it happen because Jack Smith was basically conceptual in his filmmaking. The focus of his images were his characters, the crazy flaming creatures, the title of his most famous film; and Andy saw that he didn’t have to direct people, he didn’t have to have a script or a scenario. You could just make a film of what was going on.
And when Andy first started making his films he did chose somewhat a story line in them like “Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of”, with Taylor Mead and Naomi Levine and Dennis Hopper, you know; but they were handheld camera so that they were moving and when he looked at them he said that is not my film it looks like any number of underground filmmakers, Ron Rice or Kenneth Anger; you know, all that handheld movement stuff, that amateur goofy stuff.
Andy did not find his own style or something that he thought was his own filmmaking until he said, “I am not going to do handheld filmmaking anymore, I am going to put the camera on a tripod. I am not going to move, I am just going to load the film and turn it on and off.” And that became what we called the “Kiss Series”, the Screen Test Series, the serial art films. And once Andy did that; for instance, did a “screen test” of any one of the wonderful people who came in and then we would get it back from the lab and project it. I would hang these great sheets of white photography paper in certain areas that we could use for projection screening and it was simply this still like portrait of a living person for like 3 minutes alive.
Andy realised that that the “screen test”was an Andy Warhol art work. He felt that he had reached his own stage of creation, that he recognised it as his own work. The handheld avant garde movie thing, from the nouvel vague in France to Ron Rice here, didn’t do it for him. It wasn’t what he was trying to do, but when he did the still life portraiture in a motion picture, I mean it is ironic that you’re making motion pictures and you end up doing a still life portrait.
But this is the audacity of Andy’s mind or non-mind whichever way you see Warhol because he contends to have no mind but you know something is going on in there. He can see that only he could make a still life portrait as a motion picture and he knew it was his art work so he just worked with the tripod from then on and never did handheld cameras again.

How did Andy create the Superstars?

If you know anything about Andy Warhol or read any of the books about him, you know that as a child he adored film stars. When he became a famous painter, which was his altruistic, his highest goal to become a world renowned fine arts painter, his deeper inner life came out, he wanted to be a portrayer of glamour, because for him glamour was the most powerful thing in the world because, movie stars inhibit, inhabit or inhabit the minds of people all over the world and they are icons, and whenever you go to a movie and you say, oh boy I am going to have it on with her, you know, and then you do your fantasy. It’s like a fulfilment, a sexual completion; but it is so beautiful.

What was Andy’s focus?

The whole thing with Andy as he went from minimalist filmmaking, like the screen tests, the kiss series, 13 most beautiful boys, 13 most beautiful girls, he moved into features which had a duration beyond just still life or a moving still life. In a sense the work did not have a screen play but had a situation so there was more than one person there, and there was a set, or it was in someone’s wonderful apartment, or it was in Southampton at the de Menil’s beach mansion. There had to become a focus, otherwise it just becomes pastoral filming the house, the ocean and people around. So the focus was either Ondine, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Allen Midgette, or other superstars; because within the realm of just filming the world, it’s beautiful, but it’s still like a still life… pastoral.
The only thing that brings back whatever inhabited his childhood libido is the power of glamour because everyone all over the world will go to see a movie with Marylyn Monroe in it. Why? Because she is beautiful, but also because she is vulnerable, also because she is an icon and people can place their whole faith in an icon, their whole life. So this inhabited Andy from his childhood. When he got more astute at making the films, it just came through him that he wanted to make stars. I do not know if it was because Andy grew up during the depression and his family was poor and the only thing that was beautiful and available was movies that you could go see for 5 cents, but there is something about film stars for him, for all America during the depression it was the only place they had to turn for dreams.

The movies were fun, and the paintings paid for the making of the movies. Why was not that enough for Andy? Why did he decide that he had to involve the Silver Factory in music?

Well he didn’t really involve the factory in music. What happened was we were developing this multimedia aspect. Andy was a famous fine arts painter, becoming a famous underground movie maker who never really surfaced to above ground. The whole multimedia thing started when Edie Sedgwick got mixed up with the Bob Dylan crowd. We were going to do an Edie Sedgwick festival for Jonas Mekas at his Filmmakers Cinematheque and Jonas said to Andy, “I have a time area for you in the festival, you can utilise this?”, and so Andy said we will do an Edie Sedgwick Film Festival.
So budget aside, it has to be known what Jonas Mekas did for Andy’s filmmaking is what Henry Geldzahler did for Andy’s painting. Jonas was the imprimatur who said it was art. Geldzahler said that Warhol’s paintings are art and therefore from then on they were known as such. Jonas Mekas wasn’t sure because so many of his filmmakers in the filmmakers co-op stable were of the Avant garde world were straignt, and didn’t really find an interest in Warhol’s work and didn’t think it was art. Jonas Mikas said, “I am going to have to recognize Andy, because these people, serious people are questioning this, I am to have to sit down and look at all of Warhol’s films.” So like for a whole day he viewed all of Warhol’s films and he decided it was art, and that it wasn’t frivolous, and that it wasn’t surface culture, and that it wasn’t something to be dismissed, but that it was really serious art. Just as Henry G. proclaimed that Warhol’s painting and and that of the other the pop artists was actually art. Jonas Mekas proclaimed, contrary to the avant garde dismissal of this frivolous stuff, you know, Jonas said, “I have viewed it for an entire day and I declare it as art, as serious art.”
Ok, so Jonas said “Andy, why don’t you do some kind of a Warhol exposition or something? So we decided to do an Edie Sedgwick festival. This is the point where Edie got herself involved with Bob Dylan and his manager Grossman, and actually the undercurrent was that she was having this torrid, torrid love affair with Bobby Newirth who Dylan’s best friend; and that she was getting into amphetamines also. Like she, one time at her apartment when Ondine was being her housemaid, giving her amphetamines, it was like this little French movie, where Edie was Renald and Ondine was her French maid supplying the amphetamines. She had this torrid affair with Bobby Newirth, but the story was that she was making it with Dylan and that Dylan was in love with her and wrote all this songs about her, and offered to be her manager so she left us.
She (Edie)actually walked out on us, she said, “I am tired of making these films with Andy Warhol, I don’t like the scripts, I don’t want to learn the scripts, I think he makes me look ridiculous sometimes.” You know she was really upset about how she felt she appeared in Warhol movies, even though everyone else thought she was fantastic.
So she moved over to the Dylan-Grossman arena and left us, she just stopped working with us. So what we did, we said, “well if she is going with Dylan and Grossman, we are not going to do an Edie Sedgwick Film Festival for Jonas.”.
So what we did instead was, we had started working with this music group called The Velvet Underground and we had filmed them practicing at the Silver Factory, and we had made a film called the “Velvet Underground Nico”, so that’s what we did for that Jonas Mekas series of time spaces instead of the Edie Sedgwick Centennial, not that she’s Debbie Reynolds.
So we did a multimedia show. It was called “Uptight, Andy Warhol Uptight”. We had the Velvet Underground performing on the stage live with Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov doing their whip dances. Then we projected the film of the Velvet Underground on them while they were performing live, and also projected various screen tests of all the favourite people. And we had strobe lights that we were flashing at them and at the audience, blinding people.
So this was a rich multimedia exposition that happened.