From Brillo Box (3¢ off) .
Sorry, but after David Bowie played Andy Warhol in Basquiat, does anyone else need to take a crack at Andy? Jared Leto thinks so. He’s producing and starring in a film that Terence Winter (of HBO’s Vinyl) will adapt from Victor Bockris’s 1989 book Warhol: The Biography. This is probably the most horrific news since Jason Segel announced he was playing David Foster Wallace. But whereas all it took to pull off DFW was a bandana and some mumbling about 15 minutes of fame, Andy is going to be trickier. Sure, there’ll be mumbling about fame, but as Vulture notes it’s also going to take 40 wigs and a mummified human foot. Needless to say, you’re going to want to soak in some real Warhol before Jared Leto ruins him for all of us. Luckily, you’ll soon have two golden opportunities.
Brillo Box (3¢ Off)
Oct. 3, 6:30pm, and Oct. 4, 9:15pm, at Bruno Walter Auditorium, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza (Amsterdam & W. 65th St. entrance).
Director Lisanne Skyler (Capture the Flag, Getting to Know You) is painfully close this story: in 1969, her parents spent a mere $1,000 on one of Andy Warhol’s plywood Brillo box reproductions. Instead of holding onto it, they traded it away, only to find out later that it sold at auction for a cool $3 million. Basically, this is the story your dad always told you about the Mickey Mantle baseball card that could’ve paid for your college had he not put it in his bicycle spokes. Except Skyler’s parents really should’ve known better, since they had faith in Warhol at a time that his dalliance with commercial products was widely panned. Over the years, the artist’s Brillo boxes have easily outperformed the S&P 500 and have sold for as much as $4.7 million. Skyler writes that her documentary “follows this single sculpture as it makes its way from my family’s living room to the global art market, exploring the ephemeral nature of art and value.” The film is premiering at the New York Film Festival in October and comes to HBO next year.
The Chelsea Girls: 50th Anniversary Screening
Oct. 2, 6:30pm, Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave., East Village.
Downtown legend Jonas Mekas is returning to his old stomping grounds, Anthology Film Archives, to present a 50th anniversary screening of this Warhol classic. And what better host? Mekas is the guy who originally screened The Chelsea Girls at his Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on West 41st Street. Shot inside of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966, it stars a plethora of Warhol’s superstars, including Rene Ricard (the only one who actually lived at the hotel), Nico (who was inspired by the film to release the album Chelsea Girl), Brigid Berlin, Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet and Eric Emerson. If you haven’t seen Warhol’s breakout film, you’ll want to do so on the big screen: Warhol shot over six hours of vignettes and then split-screened them by showing a dozen 16mm reels side-by-side. The result, Anthology notes, depicts the hotel, well before it controversial redevelopment, as “a teeming hive of Superstars, junkies, prostitutes, and generally out-sized personalities.” And this was before Dee Dee Ramone moved there.
Correction: The original version of this post was revised to correct the address of the Oct. 4 screening of >Brillo Box (3¢ Off).