News

In the mid-1970s Andy Warhol began keeping a diary–of sorts. It started out as a dry accounting of expenses–a tube of paint here, a quart of milk there—dictated to his collaborator Pat Hackett. But over time the entries shifted from the strictly mundane to something deeper and more personal.

“I’ve got these desperate feelings,” he noted in a 1981 entry, for instance, “that nothing means anything.”

Andy Warhol’s diaries were published posthumously in 1989, Hackett having edited the raw 20,000 pages to a more manageable, if not inconsiderable, 807. But it was not until this year that The Andy Warhol Diaries were transformed into a documentary series for Netflix, and an acclaimed one at that. It has earned four Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and individual recognition for Andrew Rossi for writing and directing the series.

“The diaries when they were published were seen as...

Click here to read the full article.

In Netflix’s docuseries The Andy Warhol Diaries, writer-director Andrew Rossi peels away the layers of an artist who had an indelible influence on American culture. Turning to the writings by Warhol that were published in 1989 by his collaborator and friend Pat Hackett (to whom Warhol dictated his diaries from the mid-1970s to his death in 1987), Rossi sought to find the human being behind the public persona of pop artist, celebrity and provocateur. The series uses Warhol’s own words — and a version of his voice, with the help of AI technology and readings from actor Bill Irwin, as narration — to offer a side of Warhol little seen (or heard) outside his circle of collaborators, employees, superstars and hangers-on at the famed Factory in New York.

Rossi also turned to the scholarship of Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum...

You might have thought that you didn’t really need to consume any more content about Andy Warhol. After all, the New York artist has been ubiquitous throughout pop culture for more than half a century. In fact, he kind of invented pop culture. But viewers who devour all six episodes of Netflix’s “The Andy Warhol Diaries” will realize that Warhol’s life had a lot more dimensions than a flat silkscreen of a Campbell’s soup can.

I thought I had a passing knowledge of Warhol and his life. Like most admirers of the groundbreaking music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, I had luxuriated in Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Underground” feature documentary last year. At Moca’s massive 2002 retrospective in Los Angeles, I developed an appreciation for Warhol’s early illustrations and figurative paintings, and over the years, I watched Jared Harris being ambushed by Lili Taylor in “Who...

John Waters mixed do-it-yourself moviemaking with don’t-try-this-at-home mayhem to produce the ultimate and most fiercely independent film. Made for $12,000, Pink Flamingos premiered at the Baltimore Film Festival 50 years ago. The cult masterwork replaced Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo as the midnight movie in residence at Elgin Theater in Manhattan and set high and low standards for no-budget motion picture filmmaking.

While the extremely low-budget Plan 9 from Outer Space is renowned as the worst film ever made, Pink Flamingos has a street rep as the raunchiest. Ed Wood’s sci-fi horror mashup cost $60,000 to make, which by 1956 standards is still five times the budget Waters spent. And this from an NYU film school reject who stole textbooks and sold them back to the college bookstore, and went to sleazy exploitation movies more often than going to class.

“I went to New York University, very briefly,” Waters is quoted on Dreamlandnews.

Andrew Rossi has been fascinated by Andy Warhol since childhood, which may explain why the director (“Page One: Inside The Times” “The First Monday in May” “Ivory Tower”) spent the last decade working on “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a six-part docuseries that draws upon the artist’s posthumously published diaries of the same name. Dictated over the phone to Pat Hackett from 1976 to 1987, the diaries were published in 1989, two years after Warhol’s death. In the documentary, Rossi weaves together Warhol narration, created by artificial intelligence, with archival footage and sit-down interviews with the likes of John Water and Rob Lowe. The Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix docuseries, debuting on March 9, traces Warhol’s journey through eras as an artist, film director, publisher, TV producer, band manager, scene maker and celebrity.

Rossi spoke with Variety about the project, and his desire to puncture the myth of Warhol as “a neutered alien under a white wig.

Face value has never had a more accurate appraisal than the accumulated works of Andy Warhol. Early in The Andy Warhol Diaries, the artist at the center shows his colors. “If you didn’t have fantasies, you wouldn’t have problems,” Warhol says. The mask he wore never covered the mascara he always felt he needed. Warhol didn’t like his skin, the shape of his nose, his receding hairline, or his asexual façade. He says he’d always wanted to be a robot, unemotional, detached, and ageless. The six-part documentary gives him that, but infuses the machine with affection.

The main narrator of The Andy Warhol Diaries is Andy, but not. Along with layered readings by Bill Irwin, Andy’s words are translated by a Warhol-bot, an artificially intelligent vocal algorithm machine which inadvertently highlights how much the art celebrity would have enjoyed the current age of everyday stardom.

Executive producer Ryan Murphy takes Andy Warhol enthusiasts and neophytes alike into a melancholy immersion of the man’s life and work — using his own words and voice reconstructed with artificial intelligence — in “The Andy Warhol Diaries.” Directed by Andrew Rossi (“Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times” and “The First Monday in May”), the six-part documentary series debuts March 9. Watch the official trailer below.

While Warhol was seemingly scrupulous about keeping his private life private — often flippantly telling journalists he was “asexual” — there’s plenty beneath the surface of his groundbreaking 20th-century art to suggest otherwise. That’s one of the achievements of “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” which melds talking-head testimonies from those who knew him with impressionistic montages of his work and archival snippets from his New York scene at the Factory. There’s plenty of the salacious here, from Warhol’s brushes with drugs, his...

Obnoxious drag queens, sleepy hustlers, washed-up starlets, effeminate vampires, and sickly junkies were among the miscreants and lowlifes that inhabited a series of films made in the 60’s and 70’s under the banner of the Andy Warhol “Factory” label. Though the eccentric artist himself had virtually no creative input, Andy Warhol’S Flesh (1968), Andy Warhol’S Trash (1970), and Andy Warhol’S Heat (1972) though low-budget and mostly improvised, were milestones in underground independent cinema. The final film made under the Warhol banner was 1977’s Andy Warhol’S Bad, one of the most shocking black comedies of the 1970’s. Andy Warhol’S Bad differs from the earlier Warhol films because of its higher production values (a 1.5 million dollar budget) and studio-friendly casting, but retains its sense of underground cred thanks to a demented script by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo that breaks many taboos of the time to create a hilarious deadpan satire.