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Factory Girl

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Chuck Wein

ooooh, the prospect of litigation thickens! http://www.nypost.com/seven/02022007/entertainment/movies/pal__fix_girl_flick_movies_reed_tucker.htm

PAL: FIX 'GIRL' FLICK
QUESTIONS OVER SEDGWICK STORY
By REED TUCKER

February 2, 2007 -- GUESS who'd better start punching in at the "Factory"? The lawyers.

"Factory Girl," the biopic centering on Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, has already been threatened with one lawsuit from Bob Dylan. Now another real-life figure depicted in the film is so upset that Wednesday he had his lawyer fire off a cease-and-desist letter to the film's distributor, the Weinstein Company.

Chuck Wein, a filmmaker and close associate of Sedgwick and Warhol's during the mid-1960s, calls the movie, which opens today, "vulgar and historically inaccurate in a myriad of ways."
But tell us how you really feel, Chuck?

Wein's lawyer, Chase Mellen, says "Factory Girl" is defamatory, and that changes must be made or Wein must be compensated. If no agreement can be reached, he plans to sue.

"Mr. Wein is characterized in the movie as having manipulated and had a hand in doing certain things for certain reasons that have no resemblance to the truth," Mellen says, without offering specifics.

In the film, Wein is played by Jimmy Fallon. His screen time is limited, but in one scene, Warhol seems to turn Wein against Edie. He's then shown bombarding Sedgwick with mean-spirited questions during the filming of "Beauty #2."

Aside from his own portrayal, Wein also takes issue with the way that other characters are depicted - especially Sedgwick, played by Sienna Miller.

"I'm most upset that people will see this movie and think Edie was like that. It's dishonest," says Wein, who now lives out of the public eye in California and hasn't given an interview in years. "It's really dismissive of who she was. It's more Paris Hilton than Edie Sedgwick. They make her into this simpering, sentimental girl."

The Weinstein Company had no comment.

The film also mischaracterizes the relationship between the socialite and the artist, Wein says. "From the time we did [1965's] 'Beauty #2' to the time we left [the Factory in 1966], Edie never spent any time with Andy . . . You would never see Edie and Andy talking alone or her visiting his mother's flat [as depicted in the film]. That was totally poked up," he says.

Wein says Sedgwick appeared in Warhol's films less out of respect for his artistic vision and more as a way to rebel against her stuffy New England family.

"When we met Andy, Edie had no idea who he was. She asked, 'Who's he? What's Pop Art? Pop tart?' " he says. "The last thing she was was buttering up Andy and looking for a career. That whole film makes it looks like everyone is eager to get ahead, but they were just having fun.

Edie was not looking for a career. She thought it was a joke."

As for the film's most controversial assertion - that Sedgwick had a romantic relationship with a "musician" character strongly resembling Bob Dylan - Wein says he thinks that's probably untrue.

Sedgwick did spend time with Dylan (and others) in upstate New York, but Wein says that when she returned to New York City, she denied that anything romantic went on with the singer.
 
"The last thing she was was buttering up Andy and looking for a career. That whole film makes it looks like everyone is eager to get ahead, but they were just having fun. Edie was not looking for a career. She thought it was a joke."--Wein
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I'm glad somebody who's plain-spoken and a first-hand witness of the true events confirmed this. It seems we always look at the past through the a contemporary lens. We assume because everyone's prostituting themselves for fame and fortune now that this was the primary function for Warhol, Edie, and the other Factory "superstars" of their time. That everything was looser and uncalculated and more fun is something no one wants to risk telling the Now Now Generation, because they might be bold enough to try it for themselves! And then who'll pay Paris to show up at their parties?
 
mellowdrama said:
It seems we always look at the past through the a contemporary lens.
Click to expand...

One would hope that culture and society progress over time but if this little 'biopic' is laudable, God help us all. Does the observer come away from the film with any sense of meaning, redemption, purpose, food for thought, caution to avoid heavy drug/alcohol use? Nope. Insipid dialog. Play acting. Off the rack costumes. Tabloid marketing strategy. Powerlessness (Edie - weak? vulnerable? dumb? manipulated by others??? = hardly!) It is a clear sign of the times that the 'contemporary lens' turns the sublime into the mundane!

We need a good rebellion, a revolution of objection to mediocracy - hmmm, media-cracy (punning). As someone who grew up in the 60s (I was born in '58), I am disgusted that the film does absolutely NOTHING to represent that earth shaking era properly.

Our country was up in arms, involved in a war with no meaning, breaking out in freedom of the individual daily, a ground breaking period where one person could move a generation and the art world was positively exploding with progressive thinkers! We drafted innocent men and sent them to war (sound familiar? except now the lambs go willingly). The National Guard went on campus and murdered students!

We, the people, took to the streets and demanded accountability and CHANGE! Our American house was on fire and people actually took personal responsibility for themselves and went out and DID something real, valuable, with higher purpose!

Where are we now? More importantly, where are we going, and are we moving forward in good grace with dignity and VISION for future generations????
 
TheKiwi said:
I just finished watching it. I have to say, I may be in the minority here, but I didn't think it was as bad as I thought it was going to be. I think Sienna did a wonderful job playing Edie! She was the best thing about the film. Her voice was dead-on and there were some parts where I kind of forgot I was watching Sienna and thought I was watching Edie. Her acting was just that believeable for me. I think Sienna should get some notice for her acting in this film because Edie was a hard person to play. Sienna was believeable because when I watched her, I didn't see her as "playing" Edie, but rather "being" Edie. She just had the personality and movement down so well.

But, I must say that this film was horribly inacurate, as so many others have said. But at least I can say that I am happy with at least one thing, and that is Sienna's portrayal of Edie, who I think would have been a very hard person to play.
Click to expand...
I completly agree.Sienna surprised me very much,i have never seen her act before so i was blown away.No matter what people say about her,her style and tabloid stories i think she is a good actress with promise of being great.
I just wanted more and more of her and like you mentioned;i didnt see Sienna but Edie and thats what the actor needs to make you do.Sienna is the only good thing in this movie.The clothes,the script.etc is not good.Also,imo, the movie is not that bad just not good,i have seen worse......
 
Liberty Bell said:
One would hope that culture and society progress over time but if this little 'biopic' is laudable, God help us all. Does the observer come away from the film with any sense of meaning, redemption, purpose, food for thought, caution to avoid heavy drug/alcohol use? Nope. Insipid dialog. Play acting. Off the rack costumes. Tabloid marketing strategy. Powerlessness (Edie - weak? vulnerable? dumb? manipulated by others??? = hardly!) It is a clear sign of the times that the 'contemporary lens' turns the sublime into the mundane!

We need a good rebellion, a revolution of objection to mediocracy - hmmm, media-cracy (punning). As someone who grew up in the 60s (I was born in '58), I am disgusted that the film does absolutely NOTHING to represent that earth shaking era properly.

Our country was up in arms, involved in a war with no meaning, breaking out in freedom of the individual daily, a ground breaking period where one person could move a generation and the art world was positively exploding with progressive thinkers! We drafted innocent men and sent them to war (sound familiar? except now the lambs go willingly). The National Guard went on campus and murdered students!

We, the people, took to the streets and demanded accountability and CHANGE! Our American house was on fire and people actually took personal responsibility for themselves and went out and DID something real, valuable, with higher purpose!

Where are we now? More importantly, where are we going, and are we moving forward in good grace with dignity and VISION for future generations????
Click to expand...
I don't think mass protests will happen without a draft. And that would probably mean we go to war with Iran. :yuk:
 
http://www.slate.com/id/2159245/

This is the best critique I have seen to date, and it describes only a part of why the film is trash. I have seen the BAFTA release passed around the United Kingdom, and from what I hear of the minor alterations in the US version, I feel safe in giving this the ol' heave ho! :woot:

A Very Nasty Portrait of the Artist
HOW FACTORY GIRL INSULTS ANDY WARHOL.
By Jim Lewis
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2007, at 12:56 PM ET

Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol in Factory Girl

There's a moment about midway through Factory Girl, the latest rehashing of Edie Sedgwick's life and Andy Warhol's career, when the movie suddenly goes from being merely very bad to being truly revolting. The setup is this: Sedgwick, a lovely but very unhappy girl from a wealthy but very unhappy family, comes down to New York from Boston in search of attention and the excitement of art. She finds both in Warhol's studio: Andy has started making films; Edie is both photogenic and game. He turns her into an underground star, and she, in turn, finds a place in Warhol's coterie of drag queens, drug addicts, gay men, hustlers, fashion mavens, socialites, and assorted hangers-on. So far, so good: All of this is true enough, as Hollywood movies go, anyway.

Then she meets … well, it's a little hard to say who, exactly, she meets. The character is obviously meant to be Bob Dylan, with whom Sedgwick apparently did have some kind of brief affair, but Dylan threatened to sue the filmmakers, and the character is given a ludicrous pseudonym: "the Musician."

In the movie, the Musician is everything that Warhol is not: a good, red-blooded American boy, heterosexual, motorcycle-riding, and what's more, a poet—no, a prophet—and a paragon of anti-materialism and truth-telling. In short, he's an insufferable prig, a smug and arrogant philistine, and it's no wonder Dylan disavowed him vehemently.

Edie, on the other hand, seems to fall in love with him and so, alas, do the filmmakers, who concoct a brief and improbable moment of wholesomeness for the two of them. They ride the Musician's motorcycle upstate; he ditches it in a lake to show how little he cares for the toys his wealth has brought him; they talk about her childhood; they make love, in front of a fireplace, no less; and then Edie goes horseback riding.

All of this would be silly enough; what makes it disgusting is a brief cutaway, lasting about nine seconds, showing Warhol sitting all alone in his vast, cold studio, rapturously watching a film of Sedgwick that he's projecting on the wall. The movie cuts back to Sedgwick and the Musician romping, and I realized at once that I wasn't watching a film about Andy and Edie at all; I was watching an allegory of the Evil ***, who battles with the Good Man for the soul of the Lost Girl. The Evil ***, you see, is simply a failed heterosexual, frustrated and rancorous; the Lost Girl is well-meaning but confused; and the Good Man does his best to set her straight.

In Factory Girl, it all comes to a showdown. The Musician shows up at Warhol's factory for a screen test. Warhol coos and does his best to be accommodating; the Musician says things like, "No, man, don't sweat it," and then makes fun of Warhol's work. And so on: It all goes very badly. At one point, the Musician tries to pass a joint to Warhol, who didn't do drugs and who therefore demurs. "Do you smoke, man, or do just that faggy speed sh*t?" he asks, managing in one short sentence to sum up the film's loathsome combination of sanctimoniousness, hypocrisy, and bigotry. Luckily, one of Warhol's cronies immediately replies, "Just the faggy speed sh*t"—the only line in the movie that made me smile. As Dave Hickey once said, in a not dissimilar context, I'll take the real fake over the fake real any day.

Finally, the Musician walks out, with Edie following in tears. "What the hell was that?" she asks. "He's my friend."

"Baby, your friend is a bloodsucker," the Musician answers, though I suspect "cocksucker" was the word he was looking for.

It's all downhill from there. Edie makes the mistake of going back to Andy, but soon she's been passed over for the next Factory Superstar, and then she does a lot of drugs, moves to California, gets clean, and then suddenly ODs and dies, and let that be a lesson to you: The Evil *** destroys women. The last we hear from the Musician, he's instructing his manager to help Edie out with some cash. The last thing Warhol says is "I never really knew her," and if you think that makes him sound like Judas, you're getting the idea.

Watching Factory Girl is like sitting through some risible remake of Laura, the great '40s noir that brought Clifton Webb, in the role of Waldo Lydecker, hissing and drawling opposite Gene Tierney, until she's rescued by Dana Andrews. The difference, of course, is that 1944 is not 2007; that Webb attacks his role with such energy and élan that one can't help but root for him; and that Lydecker is not, after all, a real person.

I should be pointing out that Warhol was a great artist and a great filmmaker, that he made paintings and movies the likes of which no one had ever seen before—and so he did, though you'd never know it from Factory Girl. I should be telling you that he was also, and not surprisingly, an exceedingly complicated man, that Edie, for all her winsomeness and beauty, was a suicide looking for an excuse, and that Dylan was such a minor character in that scene that it's bewildering to find him in this movie at all, and preposterous to portray him as Warhol's tormentor. I should be reminding you that the times were, by all accounts, hectic if not hysterical, and that Sedgwick was not the only one who paid the price. Warhol was shot, almost to death, by one of his more unstable hangers-on, but you wouldn't know that from watching the movie, either.

But I want to say something else, instead. The visual arts have traditionally been a refuge for marginal people: queers and misfits, fragile and disobedient people, the flamboyant and the terminally shy, some brilliant people, some shallow people, and quite a few con artists; and Warhol's Factory was open to all of them. There's a great deal more to art than that, of course; there's hard work and scholarship and as much to think about as there is in poetry or novels or philosophy. But many of us first came to the art world because decades earlier Warhol had made it seem like a wonderful place to be, and besides that, a home. So Factory Girl isn't just a bad movie, it's a 90-minute insult to the culture it pretends to be capturing, and what I really want to say—as I would almost never say of anything I see or read or listen to—is that I hated it.
 
^O, that's just gorgeous. I particularly love the last paragraph:
"The visual arts have traditionally been a refuge for marginal people: queers and misfits, fragile and disobedient people, the flamboyant and the terminally shy, some brilliant people, some shallow people, and quite a few con artists; and Warhol's Factory was open to all of them. There's a great deal more to art than that, of course; there's hard work and scholarship and as much to think about as there is in poetry or novels or philosophy. But many of us first came to the art world because decades earlier Warhol had made it seem like a wonderful place to be, and besides that, a home. So Factory Girl isn't just a bad movie, it's a 90-minute insult to the culture it pretends to be capturing"...
Click to expand...
That just nails it completely. Thanks for posting this, Liberty Bell!
 
Thanks for another great article Liberty Bell!

I really like the last paragraph, too. He seems to be right on about everything. I'm also glad he mentioned that Dylan was such minor character in Edie's life and so it's strange to have him be a main character in the movie. I feel like they wasted a lot of time in the movie this way. They emphasized minor characters and events in her life (that were more appealing i guess?) and by doing so failed to show the big picture.
 
http://ae.philly.com/entertainment/ui/philly/movie.html?id=806642&reviewId=22176

[FONT=verdana, arial]Shallow 'Factory Girl' fails Edie Sedgwick [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, arial]Carrie Rickey [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, arial]Philadelphia Inquirer [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, arial]Published: Friday, February 9, 2007 [/FONT]

[FONT=verdana, arial]
A fawn in chandelier earrings, Edie Sedgwick loped into Manhattan in 1965 and caused a youthquake.
[/FONT]
Her silver miniskirts and leopard-skin pillbox hats created fashion. Her saucy beauty and personal electricity inspired artist Andy Warhol and troubadour Bob Dylan.

The platinum prince of pop art christened Sedgwick a "superstar" and featured her in underground movies such as Beauty #2. Since 1966, there have been rumors that the balladeer alluded to her on several tracks of Blonde on Blonde, in particular the songs "Just Like a Woman," "Like a Rolling Stone" and (natch) "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat."

More meteor than star, the subject of Factory Girl streaked through the 1965 skies on a diet of amphetamines and vodka, burning out by early 1966, when her Mod Holly Golightly look was appropriated by Twiggy. Sedgwick trailed into the endless night of obscurity and eventual barbiturate overdose.

Cautionary tale? Fashion show? Love story? Excuse for groovy soundtrack? George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl is a little of each, but not enough of any to make a satisfying film story. His film is propelled less by its narrative than by the wave of current fascination with '60s fashion and music.

Sensationally riding that wave is Sienna Miller, who nails Sedgwick's stardust smile, ladder legs and tobacco-cured throatiness. Miller shines as the '60s It Girl, but the depth of feeling she brings to the part serves only to highlight how shallow and impressionistic the screenplay is.

Ever since the Sedgwick-starring underground film Ciao! Manhattan was released posthumously in 1973, Sedgwick has become an emblematic figure of the '60s, one who married high and low, glitter with gutter.

The androgynous waif was the daughter of one of America's first families, "the Plymouth Rock Princess," a free-spending and emotionally troubled heiress who made tabloid headlines as the socialite who befriended Warhol, son of Polish immigrants.

But she was also an artist in her own right, one who for reasons unexplored in the screenplay by the improbably named Captain Mauzner gravitated to the role of muse.

If you believe Factory Girl (which takes its name from Warhol's "factory," the studio and clubhouse where he made his art and his movies), Sedgwick's importance is as a plaything caught in a tug of war between the asexual Warhol (Guy Pearce) and the heterosexual Dylan (Hayden Christiansen). The musician is called The Musician here because Dylan's representatives threatened to sue the production.

Sedgwick's relationship with the real-life artist was emotional; unknown is whether she had any relationship with Dylan, though she was involved with his close friend Bobby Neuwirth.

Lost in the movie's trumped-up love triangle with Sedgwick as the hypotenuse between the supposedly superficial Warhol and the supposedly profound Dylan is a more compelling story. Why would a troubled beauty self-medicate with celebrity and amphetamines?

For Hickenlooper and Mauzner, Sedgwick is more interesting for whom she slept with than who she was. Their movie may indict Warhol for exploiting Sedgwick, but they're just as guilty.
 
babydoll1125 said:
Thanks for another great article Liberty Bell!

I really like the last paragraph, too. He seems to be right on about everything. I'm also glad he mentioned that Dylan was such minor character in Edie's life and so it's strange to have him be a main character in the movie.
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Me too... I mean, her relationship romantically (or, shall we same "romantically tense') with Warhol was a much bigger deal than her relationship with any rockstar. Guess they grossly elaborated for Hollywood's sake. :blink:
 
Liberty Bell said:
http://www.slate.com/id/2159245/

This is the best critique I have seen to date, and it describes only a part of why the film is trash. I have seen the BAFTA release passed around the United Kingdom, and from what I hear of the minor alterations in the US version, I feel safe in giving this the ol' heave ho! :woot:
Click to expand...

ah, Liberty Bell, i just came on to post this same Slate piece! :flower: i'm glad the film is recieving the kind of criticism it deserves. :innocent: :rolleyes:
 
I just saw the ad for this movie in the papers... it was titled, "Everything you've heard is true...AND THEN SOME" and in the background text vomit it says "A dazzling ROMP..." "Sienna Miller is sensationally sexy..." and it's sexy this sexy that. Real creative. How desperate, they have to create hype with immature Hollywood tabloid tactics, especially with the headline referring to all those stupid rumors. Speaks volumes about the people pushing this silly film...
 
Well,in today's "blink and you'll miss it world",it really doesn't matter if it's a small sexy hit for a week or two or not because it will be forgotten by this summer."You're the boss,Apple Sauce",-that is MASS COMERCIALISM!!!!!:lol:
 
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