Edie by George Plimpton & Jean Stein

Author:George Plimpton & Jean Stein [George Plimpton and Jean Stein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407053295
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2010-02-23T06:00:00+00:00

Edie and Gerard Malanga in the torture sequence, Vinyl, March, 1965

I worked on getting rid of characters. Andy had said, “Get rid of plot.” Of course, Samuel Beckett had done that in the Fifties, but he had retained his characters. So I thought what I could introduce was to get rid of character. That’s why the characters’ names in Kitchen are interchangeable. Everyone has the same name, so nobody knows who anyone is.

Andy and I would sit side by side like two Hollywood directors and tell the actors what to do, and sometimes Andy’d turn to me and say—especially when Roger Trudeau would hug Edie—“It looks just like a Hollywood movie.” That would bother him. He went for that sloppy, offhand, garbagy look. Edie forgot her lines a lot. If she didn’t know a line, she was to sneeze. That was the signal, so that someone behind the refrigerator could whisper it to her. There were other techniques—pages of script hidden among the junk on the kitchen table, or in the cabinets, so if the actors forgot their lines, they could go and pretend they were looking for a cup or a glass.

NORMAN MAILER I think warhol’s films are historical documents. One hundred years from now they wI’ll look at Kitchen and see that incredibly cramped little set, which was indeed a kitchen; maybe it was eight feet wide, maybe it was six feet wide. It was photographed from a middle distance in a long, low medium shot, so it looked even narrower than that. You can see nothing but the kitchen table, the refrigerator, the stove, and the actors. The refrigerator hummed and droned on the sound track. Edie had the sniffles. She had a dreadful cold. She had one of those colds you get spending the long winter in a cold-water flat. The dialogue was dull and bounced off the enamel and plastic surfaces. It was a horror to watch. It captured the essence of every boring, dead day one’s ever had in a city, a time when everything is imbued with the odor of damp washcloths and old drains. I suspect that a hundred years from now people wI’ll look at Kitchen and say, “Yes, that is the way it was in the late Fifties, early Sixties in America. That’s why they had the war in Vietnam. That’s why the rivers were getting polluted. That’s why there was typological glut. That’s why the horror came down. That’s why the plague was on its way.” Kitchen shows that better than any other work of that time.

GEORGE PLIMPTON Any number of influences must have been involved with Andy’s filmmaking. I remember riding in a large freight elevator with Andy in the early sixties—it may have been the one that rose slowly to the Factory—and mentioning in passing that I had been reading an account in The New Yorker of an Erik Satie musical composition being played over and over for eighteen hours by relays of pianists in a recital room in Carnegie Hall.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.