Let me just play devil’s advocate right up front: Is the world really so captivated with Andy Warhol that it needs another documentary about his life? Will four more hours expressing his influence, genius, method, tragedy, etc. really get us any closer to reconciling the man with his magnitude? Don’t we already have Chuck Workman’s Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol, Chris Rodley’s Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture, a few revised A&E Biographies and at least one more lost TV biography from the mid-’90s that I know I have around here somewhere? Isn’t there such a thing as too much Andy?
Yes, yes, yes and, well, not really.

Andy Forever: The subject of Ric Burns’s Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, opening today at Film Forum (Photo: Gretchen Berg)
“Andy is so ubiquitously familiar, but nobody knows anything about his story,” said Ric Burns, whose epic new Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film today launches a two-week engagement at Film Forum in advance of its Sept. 20 PBS premiere. “It’s an amazing paradox. He was so successful at projecting that image–the sunglasses, the wig, the black leather jacket–and he always said there was nothing behind it. Well, damned if everybody didn’t believe him. So here’s this story, which is really one of the great artisitic biographies of the 20th century, and I think the most important one as well. And about someone who’s better know than anybody–he at least has greater name recognition–but I guarantee you if you walk out in the street and say, ‘Where’s he from? What kind of family did he come from? What drove him? What was he really after? What was he really like inside? Did people like him? Did his mom like him?’ I guarantee you you’re going to draw a blank. So once we got to that point, we realized we had a tiger by the tail, because you have a guy who has 100 percent household name recognition about whom nobody knows anything other than he painted something called Soup Cans or Marilyn.”

A complete Warhol freak and pseudo-scholar myself, it is hard for me to judge whether or not Warhol’s myth actually possesses such paradoxical anonymity that it can sustain a film of this scope (though fewer than 20 of the film’s 240 minutes address Warhol’s work of the 1970s and ’80s, implying Burns could have even kept going, but more on that later). The documentary’s first half is its most revealing by far, detailing young Andrew Warhola’s infirm, impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh, where he was born in 1928. His close relationship with his mother, virtually impossible to overstate, also features prominently in Burns’s old world/new world contrast; it is not for nothing that we are told how Andy, housebound and bedridden with illness, cherished his autographed Shirley Temple portrait as deeply as Julia Warhola worshipped religious iconogrpahy.
Warhol’s obsession with celebrity later informed his years as a shy art student and followed him to New York in 1949, where he flourished as a commerical artist while failing at every turn to establish gallery allegiance. The film’s critical impressions of Warhol’s 1950s are fascinating: his means of transcending simple shoe and fashion illustrations evolved into a style that elevated everyday objects to fine art. He may have absorbed more lines than he crossed, challenging shocked art-world observers to determine what art was as Pop dawned with the ’60s.
Burns’s film channels its currency from that debate, which continues almost 20 years after his subject’s death. “There is no artist as famous as Andy Warhol who is held in as much contempt,” Burns told The Reeler. “It’s funny. For everybody who’ll get out there and say what a great artist he is, you’ll find somebody who’s willing to literally or metaphorically spit on the ground at the name. Because he was gay, because he was associated with the ’60s, because he was procurially open, because he was a boundary breaker, because of a million idiosyncracies. And I think that there’s something so American about Andy in the way he prevailed despite those idisyncracies–because of those idisyncracies–that it’s just one of the great American stories to tell.”

Andy Warhol and Mario Montez on the set of Chelsea Girls. (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
And the early theatrical peek provides an extra-classy New York showcase for a work that, in typical Burns fashion, makes classiness look easy: lean narration by Laurie Anderson; involving commentary by a relatively small band of Warhol associates and art critics including Bob Colacello, Paul Morrissey and Dave Hickey; and Jeff Koons occasionally stepping in to provide the pensive, inquisitive voice of Warhol. Via the high-contrast crudeness of Warhol’s films–Kiss, Sleep, Chelsea Girls, his Screen Tests and dozens of other archival and feature works–Burns positions the perfect foil for his own hallmark fine-grain cinematography. Like Warhol’s most accomplished work, it manages fastidiousness and cleanliness–even austerity at times–without being antiseptic.
For better or worse, two of Burns’s other hallmarks are here as well, including the romantic mythology of New York City and a surfeit of hyperbole. While Burns and his co-writer James Sanders are responsible for narration attributing “the most astonishing creative burst of the 20th century” to Warhol and “the most radical, ambiguous and troubling work of art he ever made” to the artist’s work/play space, the Factory, I often wonder when watching Burns’s documentaries if he actively coaxes such grand statements as “Warhol was the greatest philosopher of stardom who ever lived” out of interviewees. I mean, who naturally–and as frequently portrayed in Andy Warhol–speaks in such extremes?

“I have to say, you know, maybe I’m still just as drugged by own enthusiasm, but I’m not sure,” said Burns (left). “We did the first part of our New York series eight years ago, and I still feel that way. I don’t think the claims made about the city were overstated. I don’t think it is wrong to say that Andy Warhol was a genius. I think it’s actually correct. I think the thing is that he knew himself how unlikely it was for a gay dyslexic kid from the wrong side of the tracks to be thought of as a genius, so he didn’t package himself as that. He decided to let his work on film in painting and in a number of media speak for itself, and that if he tried to stand out and promote it as works of genius, well, it wouldn’t quite work. So actaully he did a much better thing: He let the work speak for itself. and I think it does speak for itself. … It is so rare–and here’s the hyperbole–it is so rare to see that kind of coherence, that kind of depth, that kind of power in a work of art, that when you find it, you want to stand up on a soap box and beat a very loud drum.”
This is an important point. At its best, the film lets others speak with the art–the physical art of Warhol’s painting and cinema as well as the more cosmic art of his own persona. Its authority is final and enduring. At its worst (not often, mind you, but too many times to ignore over four hours), it condescends to tell you everything. “Maybe this is really bourgeois of me, but…” begins the critical narration in Episode Two. I mean, what?
Then there is the abrupt ending, barely glossing over the Warhol who emerged from his shooting in 1968 to indelibly impress his brand (and, some would argue, self-parodize and immolate his own legacy) on another generation or two of American culture. Easily explained, Burns told me. “It was partly to leave open the possiblity of doing another film on Andy Warhol in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “We wanted to see a film about Andy and the transformations he operated in the art world and in the culture. And I think it’s important to see that in some funny sense, the large transformations were achieved in the ’60s. … I knew that our story as we had told it had come to kind of a crucial turning point–another film about Andy could be made about the ’70s and 80s , but that our story had reached its culmination. Maybe it wasn’t satisfying to do it that way, but that’s the way we decided to it ”
Well, I was satisfied until you teased me with that revelation. Just don’t make us wait another six years. Please?

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