It must be real

Edie was a filmmaker, a collaborator and artist with other underground and experimental filmmakers at a time when making a non-Hollywood film was almost a revolutionary act. Like you she was young at a time when a wave of technological advancements– new video camera, audio recorders and film cameras– were putting power in the hands of the people to tell their own stories. This is a pursuit she believed in fiercely. She said often to fellow adventurers in her filmmaking pursuits, “It must be real, if it isn’t real, there is no movie.” On the eve of the release of a HIGHLY fictionalized Hollywood account of Edie’s life, we hope you will join us in our Internet and video experiment of making real screen tests of real people. WE know you can tell the difference, as she would have wanted, between what is real and what is not.

-Melissa Painter

“I do love Alice in Wonderland though. That’s something I think I could do very well. Don’t you think we ought to do an A.W.? A.W.’s Alice in Wonderland? Andy Warhol’s Alice in Wonderland? A.W. stands for a lot of things, I understand. It, uh, it would make a fantastic film. So I wanted somebody to write the script for it, in a modern sense. Think it would be the most marvelous movie in the world. If it could be done. Don’t you think? Really I don’t think they’ve done one since they did a Walt Disney one- which isn’t really doing it. In a sense it is, but not in the way it really should be done. What’s needed right now is a real scene. I mean not just cartoon characters but the actual character of people because there’s so many fantastic people that you might as well use the people.”

– EDIE 1965

“To be an underground filmmaker… one felt that you were engaged in forbidden activity, which of course lead us to Andy and 47th St and the factory because Andy was hosting this whole feeling of rebellion in image where we could all participate in doing things that were ridiculous and absurd…and so to get a bunch of people who all feel that the sky’s the limit to start being able to do crazy ridiculous image with Andy…

[John, what did it feel like to be in a movie that Warhol directed?] Well, it felt like you were talking your pants off. It was embarrassing. You wondered what were you doing? Why are you doing this? And yet at the same time you knew… You didn’t know then, but to think about it now, I mean imagine you are there and there’s a hundred million dollars worth of art lying around on the floor, and these people fooling around with cameras. Andy, and I’m there with him doing the same thing, and there’s Edie, and we’re all there doing this. And so on the one hand there’s the rebellion, because you know you’re not supposed to, and on the other hand you know that its really really important, and yet its just going to disapear. So that was a peculiar feeling. ”

-John Palmer

xoxo,

susie