Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Nico. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum
Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Angelina “Pepper” Davis / Eric Emerson. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum
During the summer of 1966, while hanging out in the famed backroom of Max’s Kansas City, Andy Warhol took a napkin and began to draw a line down the middle. On one side, he wrote “B,” and on the other “W.” From this simple sketch, the concept of a split screen film, which would become Chelsea Girls, was born.
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“I want to make a movie that is a long movie, that is all black one side and white the other,” scriptwriter Ronald Tavel recounts Warhol explaining, in Ric Burns’ documentary film Andy Warhol.
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A true radical in the avant-garde cinema community, Warhol’s first major film was Sleep (1963): a five-hour, 20-minute silent film of John Giorno, his boyfriend at the time. It could be described as an endurance test, for nothing much happened. Warhol took this idea of the still camera and the unedited reel of film, combined it with the faux-documentary sensibility of cinéma vérité, added his Superstars into the mix, set them in a simple scenario, and let them do their thing.
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The result was Chelsea Girls was born: a split-screen film featuring 22 different 33-minute reels featuring appearances by Nico, International Velvet, Eric Emerson, Brigid Berlin, Mario Montez, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Susan Bottomly, and Ingrid Superstar that became Warhol’s first commercially successful film – due in no small part to the classic cocktail of sex, drugs, and drama.
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“Before, people fell asleep during my films. When they didn’t walk out,” Warhol observes in the new book, Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (D.A.P./The Andy Warhol Museum, May 24). “But Chelsea Girls is packing them in. Why? Because it’s dirty.”
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Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Nico / Ondine. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum
Andy Warhol, “3 Min. Mary Might”, 1966. Pictured: George Millaway, Ronnie Cutrone, Angelina “Pepper” Davis, unidentified man. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum