Factory Girl

[Tierney]

is that the only clip from the movie? or are there any more?

 

[fairyx]

oh my god I am so mad! I just saw the movie, and it´s just so wrong!
in the beginning I thought "oh maybe it is good after all", but then everything is in the wrong order, and when they´re shooting beauty #2... why?? Chuck didn´t say those things, Gino didn´t do that to her?
didn´t they see the movie before they wrote the script?

stupid stupid movie!

though, I agree with you all, Sienna is the only good thing in this movie!

and who are those dudes who shoot her up with heroin and rob her in the end, are they supposed to be John Palmer & David Weisman, or what? I mean since they´re filming her...

and didn´t she get that f*cked up when she lived in California? not in New York?

I hope this movie never goes up on the screen in Sweden, cause if it does... I´m gonna do something drastic...

 

[babydoll1125]

^I don't get why they changed so many things that are well documented. Like the movies Edie was in, if they saw Beauty #2 they know what happens in it, why would they change it, what's the point? And when they are filming Vinyl they make Gerard say he doesn't want Edie in it. That never happened! They make Gerard seem mean when he was sweet and good friends with Edie.

 

[IcePrincess]

oh my god I am so mad! I just saw the movie, and it´s just so wrong!
in the beginning I thought "oh maybe it is good after all", but then everything is in the wrong order, and when they´re shooting beauty #2... why?? Chuck didn´t say those things, Gino didn´t do that to her?
didn´t they see the movie before they wrote the script?

stupid stupid movie!

though, I agree with you all, Sienna is the only good thing in this movie!

and who are those dudes who shoot her up with heroin and rob her in the end, are they supposed to be John Palmer & David Weisman, or what? I mean since they´re filming her...

and didn´t she get that f*cked up when she lived in California? not in New York?

I hope this movie never goes up on the screen in Sweden, cause if it does... I´m gonna do something drastic...

I didn't see those parts, but the way you describe it I don't want too

 

[XxpinktinksxX]

Wow i was expecting factory girl to be a big hit .

 

[outdoorminer]

What really get my eyes rolling is how they take actual Edie photographs and make them into scenes - same pose, etc., then they start talking or something. Really stupid.

 

[ediewarhol]

I personally thought Factory Girl was amazing in all respects. Sure it lacked, but as a character study of Edie Sedgwick I think it really triumphed.

 

[sisi01]

i heard the sex scene was really raw, does anyone know what it was like?? if its too much than pm me I just want to know before I see it

 

[babydoll1125]

It's just so cheesy! And Sienna's acting is not that great eaither. I just don't get how they can have all this information about Edie , all these people who knew her to talk to and still make a movie this bad and inacurate. If they really cared about Edie they wouldn't have a made a movie like this.

 

[Liberty Bell]

Two of my cousins went to see the film in LA and they left after about 45 minutes, in floods of tears. Now I know why no one warned us, because this is a cruel fabrication of a film, nothing more. How could anyone possibly think it would not HURT US to have this dreadful film happen? And from what I read and hear, it isn't even good, nor does it have any message or redeeming quality.

When the Girl on Fire documentary comes out this year, so will the truth, Edie's truth, and the living, breathing impressions of those who knew her well FROM THEIR OWN MOUTHS! And it will be absolutely incredible, extraordinary... I have no doubt.

 

[ShoeGal4Eva]

^from the picture that some1 previously posted,it looks like she's riding sme guy completely wasted nd another one of her breasts hangin out.
i dont know.i really have to see th film to judge if it worked or not.
i think her nude scene in alfie was working very good for the movie.
it only comes out here in february,just cant wait 2 see it!

 

[haute femme]

Wow i was expecting factory girl to be a big hit .

Has anyone found any professional reviews? Let's not go by a few people on tFS' opinions of it just yet

 

[Jeta]

i heard the sex scene was really raw, does anyone know what it was like?? if its too much than pm me I just want to know before I see it

The scene can be seen on www.egotastic.com

While it's definitely graphic, I think it's still tastefully done.

 

[LeonieAlexandria]

^ I also adore Edie... But your post sounds a bit obsessive. sorry.

 

[fairyx]

^ I also adore Edie... But your post sounds a bit obsessive. sorry.

Did you mean Libert Bell´s post? it´s a movie about a relative of hers, ofcourse she and her family are upset!

 

[mellowdrama]

^I did seem to pick up that Liberty Bell was a family member of Edie's, too--and with that I'd like to say, I mean no harm in saying I don't find Edie worthy of idolization--had I died at twenty-eight, my bio would have been limited by similar details (drug use, supposed mental illness), which I'm sure if I were at all film-worthy or famous would be all blown out of proportion and misunderstood. However, in the same situation, my family would just show up at the cinema, throw popcorn at the screen and laugh their heads off. Plus, they'd find some way of muscling in and making their cut of the profits--perhaps by selling bootleg T-shirts in the concession stand. Which reminds us all to trademark one's likeness and image before they drop dead--else someone goes all Hickenlooper on yer ***!

 

[Igbette]

Wow i was expecting factory girl to be a big hit .

I was expecting it to do a little bit better than it did... Am I the only one who didn't think it was that bad . I thought Sienna was fantastic, and as for the movie, it was just the same Edie candy that everything about Edie is, nothing new or insightful into her life (speaking of the sex scene was she supposedly a virgin until she met Dylan - that's what the movie made it seem like, any one know).

But it was a fun film, if you weren't going to take it seriously. I also thought it was one of the best portrayls of Andy Warhol I have ever seen.

 

[Liberty Bell]

To clarify, I do not idolize anyone. I have a passion for the accuracy of truth and I abhore the complete lack of integrity and honesty in the Factory Girl film. The representations of various members of my family are abusive and in many cases, patently untrue. Fabricating information to titillate an audience in order to enhance box office sales is so very Hollywood, and not terribly interesting. It's the old adage that sex sells, and illicit sex sells more. Passing this film off as a indie is insulting to an industry that thrives on passionate dedication to extreme filmmaking in a creative, dynamic and meaningful way.

 

[Liberty Bell]

The Sunday Times (United Kingdom) January 14, 2007

Gone in 15 minutes
A film portrait of the troubled life of Edie Sedgwick is causing as much controversy as she did. By Olivia Cole

It was one of the unlikeliest couplings of the 1960s: Bob Dylan, aged 25, already famous for Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home, and Edie Sedgwick, 23-year-old muse of Andy Warhol; the politicised poet-prophet with everything to say, and the fur-clad heiress Warhol admired because she was “a wonderful, beautiful blank, the mystique to end all mystiques”.

These three iconic figures have now been reunited in a film, Factory Girl, directed by George Hickenlooper and starring Sienna Miller as Edie, Hayden Christensen as a Dylan-lookalike folk singer and Guy Pearce as Warhol. We see Edie’s rise to superstardom, then her decline when she falls under the singer’s spell and Warhol punishes her, promoting the Velvet Underground’s Nico to the rank of chief muse. Even though Edie and the singer then split, she is frozen out at Warhol’s HQ, The Factory, and slips messily into heroin addiction.

With her cropped, peroxide-blonde hair, Sedgwick has always been suggested as the inspiration for Dylan’s 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. Her trademark look was a leopard-skin coat and hat (“He loves you for your money,” Dylan sings), and she has long been believed to be the woman whispering in his ear on the album sleeve. But while the shadowy, unsure inspirations for songs are one thing, the film’s creation of an unnamed character based indisputably on Dylan was not likely to go unremarked. And the legal fur has duly started to fly. Did the relationship never happen, as Dylan has asserted? Last month, the singer’s lawyers threatened legal action on behalf of their client, who said the film’s portrayal of a Dylan-like figure was an infringement of his “right of publicity”.

It was the coup de théâtre in the long- running and very public controversy surrounding the film. As shooting got under way early last year in Louisiana (“For aesthetic reasons and, uh, tax breaks,” glosses Hickenlooper), the internet was flooded with attacks by unidentified bloggers defending the right of David Weisman, the controversial director of Edie’s final film, Ciao! Manhattan, to make a long-planned movie about her life. Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, hit out at an early version of the script; Edie’s sisters were against the project. Reports that Katie Holmes had been cast were followed by stories that her then new boyfriend, Tom Cruise, was less than thrilled at the prospect of Holmes scantily clad and speed-fuelled as Edie.

This summer, however, Harvey Weinstein was impressed enough by rough cuts of the film (and, in particular, by Miller’s luminous, lost Edie and Pearce’s whispering, Hershey’s Kisses-nibbling Warhol) to pick up distribution rights and give the production more cash to shoot in Manhattan — a luxury they had been unable to afford. (Hickenlooper had run out of time and had stopped paying wages.) This bonus cash, for a film made for “under $10m”, was reported widely as a demand for reshoots. “Factory Girl is kind of a mess,” tapped the bloggers.

Right on cue, the announcement of an American release date for Factory Girl was followed by ominous noises from Orin Snyder, a lawyer specialising in intellectual property. Dylan, he maintained, had “deep concerns” at being shown as implicated in Edie’s “tragic decline into heroin addiction” — so deep that Snyder’s demand to see the film almost blocked its US release last month.

It has survived the legal challenges, however, and now its leads are rightly being teed up for awards. With almost Warholian insouciance, Hickenlooper claims the real people behind his film were never really that interesting to him. “The script came to me, and I knew very little about Edie and just a little about Andy. You could have taken out the two names of these people, and this was a film I still would have wanted to make.”

Hickenlooper’s interest, instead, was in what Edie represents to us now: the sad little rich girl desperate to be famous, and not just for 15 minutes. Edie moved from college in Massachusetts to Manhattan at 21, telling her older brother, Jonathan Sedgwick, to whom she was close, that she was “going to become the most famous girl in New York City”. With her spectacular looks, society name and Warhol as her best friend, she soon did. She was the perfect arm candy, and an emotional and social prop for Andrew Warhola, whose mother still lived with him (and could never accept his sexuality). “In a way, he was abandoned by his family, as Edie was by hers,” the director notes.

For Edie’s dazzling appearance was a front for a horrific childhood. By 1965, two of her brothers were dead. Minty, who was gay, had killed himself, tormented over his sexuality by their father — by whom Edie and her sisters, she alleged, had been abused. As a teenager, Edie suffered from depression and an eating disorder. Her father labelled her insane when she told her mother she had seen him in flagrante with another woman. In his icy account of their friendship (the closest, Hickenlooper says, Warhol ever came to a sexual relationship with a woman), Warhol nicknamed her “Taxi”, suggesting that, like a cab, she could be hired and directed on a whim: “She was a projection of everyone’s private fantasies.”

Hickenlooper’s scriptwriters used a long list of “friends of the project”, who offered private diaries and taped conversations with Edie, and shared their recollections. Warhol, too, was a source: “She drifted away from us after she started seeing a singer-musician who can only be described as The Definitive Pop Star — possibly of all time — who was then fast gaining recognition on both sides of the Atlantic as the thinking man’s Elvis Presley,” he wrote after her death. “I missed having her around, but I told myself it was probably a good thing he was taking care of her now, because maybe he knew how to do it better than we had.”

By the time Blonde on Blonde was released in 1966, according to Jonathan — who last week revealed that Dylan had been the first great love of his sister’s short life, and that she had fought desperately to keep a baby conceived during their relationship — the two had parted. He says she described the abortion forced on her by doctors as “the saddest moment in her life”, and that, in her conversations with him about Dylan, it was the first time she had used the word “love”. “It was like a light bulb had been switched on,” he says; and he suggests that had Edie’s drug problems not been so acute, it was a relationship “that might have lasted”.

The thinking man’s Elvis Presley has spoken publicly only once about Edie. In a 1985 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he said: “She was a great girl, very enthusiastic... I did know her, but I don’t recall any type of relationship. If I did have one, I think I’d remember.” Edie’s brother recalls being relieved when she seemed to be moving from the ferociously druggie world of The Factory to spend more time with a musician she said she had met “in the Chelsea Hotel” (where both she and Dylan were living). But though Dylan’s world might have seemed less toxic, it could hardly be described as clean-living. As the photojournalist Nat Finkelstein, a consultant on the film, admits: “There’s a problem with anyone remembering anything about this time.” For the record, he recalls that Dylan “did run around with her a bit, but I don’t think any of us ever got to see inside their hotel room”. Jonathan maintains that Dylan had nothing to do with his sister’s death, in California, six years later. “Edie had long been over the pain of losing Dylan and the child, and was happily married. To say she was a victim is wrong.”

For Hickenlooper, Edie’s desire to be famous and to be remembered was as much a kind of emotional neediness as her search for love. He was nine when his own parents divorced, and if there was a reason for directing this film, he says, it was to explore the connection between “this theme of abandonment and the quest for celebrity. We live in a time of soaring divorce rates, in which kids are obsessed with reality shows that are going to make them famous. The two things are connected”. Like one of Warhol’s prints, Edie the fashion icon is endlessly repeated. Her black tights, tiny dresses and striped tops are regularly revived. But, says Hickenlooper, people care about her without even knowing why: “She was so broken, yet she managed to make something beautiful out of her desire for beauty and love.”

At this distance, nobody can really know for sure what went on below the surface of Edie Sedgwick. Yet Factory Girl makes it seem plausible that she was as much in the haze — according to Dylan’s song — of “her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls”, one who “aches just like a woman, but breaks just like a little girl”, as she was the blank who transfixed Warhol.

Factory Girl opens on February 9

 

[fairyx]

btw I didn´t really see anything of Velvet Underground in the movie? only Nico, and some music when she´s seen on stage.