Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing

I think she's been interviewed on NPR, but I can't find the transcript. Maybe it was another woman in the Warhol Factory crowd.

I found this, an interview about the movie about her:

quote:Morning Edition (NPR 6:00 am ET)

April 5, 1996

Transcript # 1840-13

TYPE: Package

SECTION: News; Domestic

LENGTH: 1227 words

HEADLINE: 'I Shot Andy Warhol' Examines Life of Valerie Solanas

GUESTS: MARY HARRON, Writer, Director, "I Shot Andy Warhol"; LILY TAYLOR, Actress; CHRISTINE VASHON, Producer, "I Shot Andy Warhol"

BYLINE: DAVID D'ARCY

HIGHLIGHT:
A new film examines the life of Valerie Solanas, who tried to kill Andy Warhol in 1968. "I Shot Andy Warhol" was written and directed by Mary Harron, who says Solanas was out of sync with her time.

BODY:
BOB EDWARDS, Host: In 1968, Andy Warhol almost died of a gunshot wound. His attacker was writer and actress Valerie Solanas, who turned herself in to police hours later. Solanas said she shot Warhol because he had too much control over her life. Solanas is the subject of the new movie I Shot Andy Warhol. It closes the New Directors, New Film series tomorrow in New York. David D'Arcy reports.

DAVID D'ARCY, Reporter: Andy Warhol is famous for several things - soup cans, society portraits, and the saying that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

MARY HARRON, Writer, Director, 'I Shot Andy Warhol': Valerie Solanas' fame is for one thing - for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968.

DAVID D'ARCY: Mary Harron [sp] wrote and directed the new film I Shot Andy Warhol.

MARY HARRON: She wounded him so grievously that he actually never recovered. She did mean to kill him, and at the time, the press portrayed her as this actress in his films who was a kind of mad woman. And that- there's some truth in her madness. She's also famous because she had an organization called SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men. And she wrote a document in the late '60s, the mid-60s, called 'The SCUM Manifesto,' which I found in a bookstore in London in the late '80s, which affected me so powerfully and which I thought was so brilliant and so funny that it inspired me to make this film.

DAVID D'ARCY: In 'The SCUM Manifesto,' Harron says, Solanas, a self-styled revolutionary lesbian, prescribes a radical solution to the battle of the sexes.

MARY HARRON: The manifesto ends with the proposal that the only way to save society and make a groovy, swinging world,' as she says, is to kill all men, except for a few who'll be allowed to live in a pasture and will be really very lucky, the few remaining men who are allowed to live. As a treat, they'll be allowed to hang out with women just to kind of like observe their superior lifestyle.

[excerpt of 'I Shot Andy Warhol']

VALERIE SOLANAS, Portrayed by Lily Taylor: The male is a biological accident. The Y, the male gene, is an incomplete X or female gene. It has an incomplete set of chromosomes. It's now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males, and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.

DAVID D'ARCY: Actress Lily Taylor [sp] plays Valerie Solanas.

LILY TAYLOR, Actress: The whole thing with Valerie is there are some massive contradictions. Massive. I mean, lesbian - never was in a lesbian relationship. Prostitute - you know, complete feminist. So on and so forth. Hater of man, crush on Warhol. And if I could somehow- the challenge was holding all those at once.

DAVID D'ARCY: Solanas sold her body to make money and sold mimeographed copies of 'The SCUM Manifesto' for a dollar. The film I Shot Andy Warhol examines Solanas' life on the streets and in cheap hotels set against the glamour of Warhol's studio, The Factory.

Solanas tried in vain to have Warhol produce her plays and she did get a tiny part in Warhol's film, I, A Man. Mary Harron says that until Solanas shot Warhol she was viewed as just another marginal character obsessed with the artist.

MARY HARRON: There's hardly any footage of Valerie, and in terms of interviewing, I started to ring round the main Factory personnel, the other Warhol- the Warhol superstars, and no one really remembered anything about her. 'Oh, she was this girl. She was kind of quiet. She was in a corner. I never much noticed her.' I realized of course if they'd noticed her, why would she have had to shoot him. You know, that's why she shot him, because no one noticed her.

DAVID D'ARCY: Harron did manage to find a handful of people who knew Solanas at that time. And their recollections revealed another side to the story.

MARY HARRON: She was a rejected child, a lonely, abused person, longing for attention, longing for affection, longing for someplace to be. Be very careful about giving attention to the very needy and, you know, and damaged. Because, you know, when you take it away, you unleash something.

DAVID D'ARCY: I Shot Andy Warhol got its initial funding as a documentary. But producer Christine Vashon [sp] talked Mary Harron into turning it into a dramatic feature. Still, Vashon says, Harron struggled to reconcile the factual record with the drama of Solanas' story.

CHRISTINE VASHON, Producer, 'I Shot Andy Warhol': And I thought that some of the issues facing Mary, particularly that roadblock of, like - yeah, I know it makes more- it would be better dramatically if it happened like this, except it didn't. And I know it didn't. Because I have all these records that tell you exactly how it did happen. So even though it would make a better scene, she- you know, how do I get around the fact that it's not true?

DAVID D'ARCY: Yet some scenes from the film sound as if they come right out of the Warhol archives.

[excerpt of 'I Shot Andy Warhol']

WOMAN: Do you think painting is dead?

MAN: No.

WOMAN: Well, do you think that the cinema has more relevance?

MAN: No.

WOMAN: Do you think that pop art has become repetitive?

MAN: Yes.

WOMAN: And which of the modern painters do you find most significant?

MAN: Oh, I like all of them.

DAVID D'ARCY: Both the actors in, and the target audience for I Shot Andy Warhol were born after Valerie Solanas shot the artist. But director Mary Harron says she's counting on the film's portraits of Bohemia and gender ambiguity to reach young people today.

MARY HARRON: It's hard for kids now to relate to Woodstock because it's so optimistic, it's so Utopian. Whereas The Factory was distopian, you know. It- It- It was based in a certain pessimism, a certain acceptance of things as they are, a certain, like, you know, 'We accept grunge. We accept decadence.' And I think kids now can, like, say 'Yeah. That's how we see the world. We can relate to that- to that kind of Bohemia.'

DAVID D'ARCY: Harron says Valerie Solanas was out of sync with her time and that's just what could draw audiences to her today.

MARY HARRON: She's very very popular now, her manifesto, with young women, you know? Because she's like a riot girl, like a prototype riot girl. And she was completely out of her time. So you have a group of people who are absolutely in that moment of the late '60s and someone who's, like, wandering around, who, if she was born 15 years later, you know, it could have been Camille [unintelligible], but instead she's this, you know, isolated person. So it's also something about history, you know, in the end. And then she gets written out of history because history is written by the successful.

DAVID D'ARCY: Valerie Solanas died homeless of pneumonia in San Francisco in 1988. The film I Shot Andy Warhol opens in theaters next month. For National Public Radio, I'm David D'Arcy in New York.

BOB EDWARDS: This is NPR's Morning Edition.

grant

14:57 / 02.08.01

Here's something about her play:

quote:The New York Times
March 1, 2001, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
HEADLINE: THEATER REVIEW;
A Writer One Day, a Would-Be Killer the Next: Reliving the Warhol Shooting

BYLINE: By NEIL GENZLINGER

Valerie is back, and she's extremely angry. Still.

Thirty-three years ago this June, Valerie Solanas, radical feminist, would-be writer and irksome hanger-on, shot Andy Warhol at his famous Factory on East 47th Street, almost killing him.

This winter, for reasons known only to the way-Off Broadway gods, she has been the focus of not one but two plays on the East Side, one by her, the other about her.

The play Solanas wrote, a series of often crass comic skits from 1965 whose title is unprintable, was given a brash, all-female production by the George Coates Performance Works company of San Francisco at Performance Space 122, closing last weekend. Today the play's value is largely as a historical curiosity: this was the script that Solanas gave to Warhol in the hope that he would film it; instead he apparently lost it, fueling the anger and mental breakdown that led to the shooting. Someone eventually found it in a trunk.

More useful is "Valerie Shoots Andy" by Carson Kreitzer, which runs through Sunday at the Present Company Theatorium. In it, Ms. Kreitzer offers an assessment of how Solanas's play and a diatribe she wrote shortly before the shooting called the SCUM manifesto evolved into gunshots. It is a bleak but fascinating piece that plays with Warhol's notions of repetition, returning to the shooting and its immediate aftermath again and again as it fleshes out the portrait of Solanas, who died in 1988.

Solanas had what you might call a problem with men: she wanted them all dead. She said so in the SCUM manifesto (SCUM standing for Society for Cutting Up Men).

"I don't know if you know about an anger that eats away at your soul," the Solanas character says early in Ms. Kreitzer's play. Before long you do, thanks to large dollops of the manifesto, read by a young Solanas (Heather Grayson) while a post-shooting Solanas (Lynne McCollough) tries to clarify the often ugly words. A sample of manifesto wisdom: "The male is by his very nature a leech, an emotional parasite, and therefore not ethically entitled to live." Was it a joke? Ask Andy.

Ms. Kreitzer, who wrote her play before "I Shot Andy Warhol," Mary Harron's 1996 film, covered the same territory, does more than just focus on Solanas. She gives us a sampling of the Warhol Factory cast of characters: Nico, Viva, Warhol himself.

They come off as vacuous, drugged-out drones, and by the end of the evening the questions have piled up: Who anointed these people as significant? Were we really so desperate for entertainment in 1968 that these were our trendsetters? Are we any smarter today? Are the screenplay rights to the Puffy-Jennifer nightclub shooting story still available?

VALERIE SHOOTS ANDY

By Carson Kreitzer; directed by Randy White

and the Village Voice review of the same two plays:

quote:The Village Voice

February 27, 2001, Tuesday

SECTION: Theater; Pg. 64

LENGTH: 887 words

HEADLINE: WHOSE SOIREE NOW?

BYLINE: alisa solomon

Up Your Ass

By Valerie Solanas

P.S.122

150 First Avenue 212-477-5288

Valerie Shoots Andy

By Carson Kreitzer

Present Company Theatorium

196--198 Stanton Street 212-206-1515

Even though it cost him a bullet through the kishkas, it may be just as well Andy Warhol never produced Valerie Solanas's bitterly hilarious, anti-hetero sex romp Up Your Ass. Now that the script Warhol lost more than 30 years ago has been recovered and staged in all its guttural, glittery glory, it's easy to see that Warhol wouldn't have had a clue about how to present it. Sure, he may have dismissed the play as so dirty it made him suspect Solanas was an undercover cop (and no doubt his flip assertion that he'd misplaced the manuscript fueled Solanas's paranoia). But a more likely scenario suggests itself in the face of the actual text: Warhol must have flung it aside in uncomprehending horror. How could the cool, asexual, pallid pop artist, enthralled by consumer culture, find his way into this overheated, sex-drenched, knee-slapping diatribe that calls for doing away with men and money? Could there be two more contrary sensibilities?

Up Your Ass, though light-sketchy in structure, seethes with emotion and politics while splashing playfully in a swamp of bodily functions. Written in 1965--and hinting at The SCUM Manifesto that Solanas would pen and peddle on the streets a few years later--the play centers on a wisecracking, trick-turning, thoroughly misanthropic dyke called Bongi (played with scowling charm by Sara Moore). Bongi banters with drag queens (one yearns to be a lesbian: ''Then I could be the cake and eat it too''). She entreats--and ill treats--clientele (letting a john buy her dinner, she tells him, ''I'm gonna help you fulfill yourself as a man''). And she wrangles with professional and married women who kowtow to men and complain about how tricky it is to combine marriage and career (''Trickier to combine no marriage and no career,'' Bongi boasts).

The cynical quips and Barbie-bashing barbs show off Solanas's gifts as a clever, quirky wordsmith, but what astonishes more is the ahead-of-its-time critique of gender roles and sexual mores embedded in the jollity. Queer theory has nothing on the boundary-smashing glee of Solanas's dystopia, where the two-sex system is packed off to the junkyard. Think early Charles Ludlam infused with feminism, glitter drag mixed into the Five Lesbian Brothers.

Director George Coates extends the fun and the bite by casting women in all the roles. Thus drag queen characters sport froufrou wigs and furry sideburns. Hetero male characters swagger into an ironic space that cuts out pathos by showing masculinity to be just as artificial as femininity. Still, females are hardly off Solanas's hook: A shrewish mother strangles her whining child; a dolled-up socialite gobbles a turd because ''everyone knows that men have much more respect for women who are good at lapping up shit.'' The casting works, too, because every one of the actors is first-rate. Leanne Borghesi is a hoot as the turd-tasting Ginger, twittering and barking her way through inane conversation and wobbling in her red pumps during her ''dance of the seven towels.'' As her guy Russell, Mantra Plonsey deadpans self-serious worldliness with husky harumphs and well-placed hitchings of the trousers. After he's sodomized by Bongi and screwed by Ginger, he slinks off with one of the funniest exit lines in all of Western drama: ''I have to go soak my squid.''

Coates's other innovation, though he has made no cuts in the text, is to set much of it to pop tunes, karaoke-style--''Me and Bobby McGee,'' ''Pretty Woman,'' ''White Rabbit.'' The cast sings well and the music pumps even more energy and layers of artifice into the brew. In any case, just when Giuliani is threatening to establish a decency commission, there's nothing more salutary than a line of actors gyrating and crooning away about ''mighty fine ass'' or demanding harmoniously, ''Why should I dress to give a man a hard-on? Let him get his own hard-on.''

Presaging The SCUM Manifesto, Bongi predicts a day when the phrase ''female of the species will be a redundancy.'' What happened instead, of course, is that the phrase so often used to describe Solanas after she shot Warhol--''deranged feminist''--became the redundancy.

aa At least that's the conclusion one has to draw from Carson Kreitzer's superficial bio-play Valerie Shoots Andy, which bounces between the Warhol Factory and scenes with Solanas before and after she shot Warhol, using a voice-over interviewer-narrator in lieu of a dramatic structure. The play quotes liberally from The SCUM Manifesto, but rather than being interested in what's expressed through its rhetorical excess, Kreitzer uses it merely as an explanation for Solanas's violent crime. Lines from that text bring abundant guffaws. So do the ditzy depictions of the drugged-out models who hung onto Warhol. But do we really need a 90-minute play to reveal the vacuity of that world? Worse, the play repeats certain scenes over and over, trying to make a dramatic equivalent of Pop Art in the most shallow of ways. Several times the Warhol figure--or his double--explains that he likes boredom. Memo to playwright: That doesn't mean audiences do.

The S.C.U.M. Manifesto