australian rozie

I always want to see any doco or film relating to Andy Warhol. I know he used and dismissed his Factory Superstars quite easily, so it was great to see this doco on the famous Candy Darling.
Made very famous by Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, she starred in some of Warhol’s films in the 60s/early 70s and a play by Tennessee Williams. This doco had lots of great archival footage and recordings from her friends & associates. That is why it’s important to document everything (see Exit Through the Gift Shop review for more on this).
A short film called Last Address was shown before the doco, it recorded the facades of the last known addreses of artists who died of AIDS related diseases in New York such as Keith Haring. That was pretty deep.
I thought Candy Beautiful Darling was very well done and really interesting. I did notice that Dave nodded off a few times but that’s ok – he’s been working really hard recently.

An inspiration for artists such as Lou Reed, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tennessee Williams and Andy Warhol, Candy Darling was a glittering figure in New York’s 60s bohemia. She was born James Slattery and grew up in suburbia, just as the song says, ‘Candy came from out of the Island.’ Her fame was found in Warhol’s Factory films such as Flesh (68) and Women in Revolt (71), but she yearned for the glamour of a Hollywood career.

The star persona she created belied an impoverished, often lonely existence, as revealed in interviews with friends and colleagues (Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Penny Arcade, Paul Morrissey, Fran Lebowitz and John Waters), and intimately in her diaries and letters (read by Chloë Sevigny).

Australian Premiere

As a fan of all things Warhol, I Bought Andy Warhol by Richard Polsky was on my reading wishlist. Luckily I picked it up at Ariel for only $8 (a hard cover even). I know I said I wasn’t going to buy books anymore, only borrow them from the library (btw speaking of library books… oh that’s another story) but it was cheap and it wasn’t available at the library. The author is an art dealer (since the 80s) and his goal is to buy an Andy Warhol artwork (under $100,000). The book also covers how the world of art dealers and art auctions worked in the 80s and 90s. His style goes from condescending to self deprecating, sometimes he sounded like a ‘wannabe” and others times a big snob. I was interested in the many references to Andy Warhol of course, but also the Californian art scene (which I had just recently learned a lot about after watching The Cool School). He also referred to work by Joseph Cornell whose work I only discovered when I went to SF MOMA last year. Overall it was an interesting story, but his writing style kind of annoyed me.