POPism by Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett Read Free Book Online Page A

because they said it brought out a lot of undesirable types—meaning blacks and folk singers—and so everybody had congregated down there to protest. It was one of the first “rebellions” of the sixties. De had taken me over to the Film-Makers’ Co-operative to see a screening of
Sunday
.
    The Film-Makers’ Coop was run by a young Lithuanian refugee by the name of Jonas Mekas. It was in a loft on the corner of Park Avenue South and 29th Street, across from the Belmore Cafeteria where the cabbies hung out day and night. And day and night there were screenings going on at the Coop. Jonas actually lived there, in one of the corners: he once told me he slept under the table. Although I didn’t come to know him personally until late ’63, I went to a lot of his screenings at the Coopand also down at the Charles Theater on East 12th Street, a meeting place for underground filmmakers, and then midnights at the Bleecker Street Cinema.
    One night as I was walking home from the art supply store with some brushes, past the little old German ladies in Yorkville sweeping their sidewalks, I realized I’d forgotten to get my mother her Czech newspaper. I turned back and ran into De, who said he’d just delivered fifty thousand dollars to CBS. When he’d first approached them about the documentary he wanted to do called
Point of Order
about the McCarthy hearings, they’d denied that they had any of the original footage of the hearings, but when he told them he could prove that they had all 185 hours of it stored away in their warehouse in Fort Lee, New Jersey, they admitted it, but they still refused to sell him the rights to use it in a film because why raise that old issue. Later Dick Salant from CBS called De and said they had changed their mind, that they would sell after all, for fifty thousand dollars plus fifty cents on every dollar of profit. De said okay—provided they agreed never to use more than three minutes of footage without his permission.
    I asked De where he’d gotten the fifty thousand dollars from—those were the things that really interested me—and he said from Eliot Pratt of the Standard Oil/Pratt Institute Pratts. “Eliot Pratt is a left-wing liberal who hates McCarthy,” De explained. “We had lunch and I just told him about the movie and that I didn’t know exactly how much it would end up costing, and he said, ‘I’ll write you a check for a hundred thousand. Will that be enough to start with?’ The bill for our hamburgers came to four dollars. Eliot left a ten-cent tip for the waiter. Then wewent back to his house to work out the financing.” Rich people are so strange about money.
    De had gotten interested in filmmaking initially because of a movie called
Pull My Daisy
. Robert Frank, the underground filmmaker, and Alfred Leslie, the Abstract Expressionist painter, had gotten together to do it with Jack Kerouac, who’d had the original idea, and there were always fights about whose film it was—the ads said something different every time. De told me, “Robert shot it and it’s in his style, but he didn’t know how to put a film together, so Alfred got involved in the final cutting and now they both take credit for all of it. But like most films, it’s the work of more than one person.” A stockbroker named Walter Gutman put up the twelve thousand dollars to make it. (He used to write a great Wall Street market letter as if it were a personal letter—he’d say, “Buy AT&T, and I think Rothko’s paintings are going to go up, too.”)
    Robert Frank had called De up and said, “I hate articulate people, but I happen to like you and we need help. We think we want to dub this film into French. Can you come over?” I went over there with De and they ran the film for him. David Amram the composer was in it, and Dick Bellamy the art dealer—he played a bishop preaching