User reviews

I Shot Andy Warhol, is based on the true life story of Valerie Solanas, who was a female radical in the 60's and was a lesbian and very against men. She wrote a play and came to New York, with a friend of hers who is a drag queen named Candy Darling to meet Andy Warhol. Valerie, gives Andy Warhol's company (called the factor) her play and soon she comes back and talks to Andy about it and Andy gets her to star in a couple of movies that he directs. Soon, Valerie gets a place and meets a publisher who inspires her to write a novel about her revolution and he plans to publish it. But soon Valerie starts to get paranoid and thinks that Andy Warhol, has to much impact on her life and thinks that he and the book publisher are setting her up so she plans to make herself famous by shooting him. Andy Warhol survived the shooting but died several years later due to complications and Valerie, was sent to a mental hospital and was homeless for quite awhile until she died of pneumonia. Her book SCUM Manifesto, is now published all over the world. Winner of the award for Best Art Direction at The Gijon International Film Festival, The Golden Space Needle Award for Best Actress (Lili Taylor, who plays Valerie Solanas) at The Seattle International Film Festival, The Best Actress Award at The Stockholm Film Festival and the special recognition for Lili Taylor at The Sundance Film Festival. I Shot Andy Warhol, has good direction, a good script, good performances from everybody involved, good original music, good cinematography and good production design. I Shot Andy Warhol, is a fascinating character study and a very interesting film. It shows the many different stages in a time of Valerie's life and it is compelling and played very well by Lili Taylor and all of the other actors. Also being a fan of Andy Warhol, I found the scenes with his factory and underground lifestyles with his films and art to be really interesting as well. This film shows a lot of different lifestyles and gives these characters interesting personalities and gives them good character development. The film is also a good looking film and looks like it probably would have back then. A very entertaining and fascinating look at an interesting person who you might not know of and of someone you do know of.

Lili Taylor plays Valerie Solanas, an educated loose cannon, guerrilla female activist and self-described 'bull dyke', who was taken into custody in June 1968 after shooting and wounding Andy Warhol at his New York City office/hangout The Factory. Good-looking movie investigates a hazy chapter in history, yet leaves some unanswered questions in its wake (I wasn't aware that apparently an assistant was also shot, though the film makes no attempt to explain what happened to him). However, this small-budgeted film captures a decadently apathetic, coolly indifferent time and place quite vividly, as good as any post-'60s movie has yet managed. Taylor is appropriately forceful and ungainly in her role, which is more complex than one might think, and yet hers is the least interesting or intriguing character on display. Stephen Dorff does a pretty terrific job as transvestite Candy Darling, Tahnee Welch is unrecognizable as Warhol's most famous starlet Viva, and Jared Harris is flawless as Warhol (he nails it). Terrific art direction and composition, but the film lags a bit in the narrative department, with Solanas meeting an anti-bourgeois activist which doesn't come to much and has a facetious, puzzling relationship with publisher Maurice Girodias which seems half-baked. **1/2 from ****

If you shoot someone whom others consider "important" I suppose some filmmaker will want to make a movie about you. I can think of no other reason why anyone would want to make a film about Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), the spunky, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, self-centered, lesbian feminist who, in the summer of 1968, shot Andy Warhol (Jared Harris). Warhol was a New York City painter/artist ... or something ... and guru of all things avant-garde, who attracted the chic and the trendy to his New York City "Factory", the center of counterculture pop art.

In the film Solanas, who harbors an enormous grudge against men, comes across initially as assertive and resourceful. She makes a living hustling the streets: "Pardon me sir, you got 15 cents? Pardon me sir ..." On the rooftop of a high-rise she types her S.C.U.M. "manifesto", outlining her complaints against the male species.

But whereas Solanas is passionate about her cause, Warhol is a study in emotional detachment and indifference. He, and those in his orbit, sees Solanas more as a hanger-on. At one point, Solanas shows Warhol her typed manifesto. Warhol flips through it and responds in a deadpan manner: "Did you type this yourself? I'm so impressed. You should come type for us." Marvelous.

The film's best element is the acting. Lili Taylor is terrific. She really gets into the Solanas persona. Jared Harris also gives a splendid performance. The film's tone teeters between seriousness and tongue-in-cheek humor. Costumes, prod design, music, and lighting are all credible.

For modern day feminists, "I Shot Andy Warhol" probably is required viewing. For others, the film offers a cinematic study into the mindset of a quirky, sincere, but ultimately self-deceptive and delusional young woman who got her fifteen minutes of fame by carrying her political cause a little too far.

Lili Taylor gives a savagely kinetic performance in this representation of a disturbed individual who may just also have been a genius despite, or because of, her treatment at the hands of various men throughout her life.

Judging biopics in terms of historical accuracy is for the most part a futile exercise. There is no 'truth', only interpretation, but if you want to get closer to the facts you really should be in the library, not the movie theatre. The story of Valerie Solanas is especially vexing in this case, because were this a work of complete fiction, the script would never have been made. The 'so what?' factor is superseded by the fact that this actually happened, and the legacy of Solanas still divides contemporary feminists.

As cinema, the film succeeds through the charisma exuded in Taylor's performance. Her descent into madness is sudden, vicious and uncompromising. The depiction of the shooting, the moment the film has been leading up to, shows a human being divorced absolutely from her conscience. The groovy scene around Warhol's the Factory is both decadent and, viewed from the 21st century, slightly twee. The pastiche of Sixties nostalgia is less foregrounded than Solanas's brutal victimhood. The film begins with a reading of her psychiatric evaluation, where a litany of unpunished crimes inflicted upon this woman by various men is laid out. The female director sets her stall out straight away - what you are hearing now leads through a direct line of cause and effect to the monstrous act you will see committed by Solanas later.

If the film has a major flaw, it is the title. Audiences could be mistaken for thinking it is about a documentarian of Warhol's life and work. Solanas and her SCUM manifesto, for better or worse, have made their mark, and perhaps 'Solanas' would have been a more fitting (if less marketable) title. Did it take the shooting for that to be the case? A polemical moment in recent history relayed straightforwardly, this is competent, entertaining, edifying cinema.

On 1968, Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor) shots Andy Warhol (Jared Harris) and turns herself in to the police. Her reason lies in her anti-male Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) manifesto. She was molested as a child. She attended University of Maryland from 1954 to 58 where she developed her theory of the superiority of women. She prostituted herself and became a lesbian. Homeless in 1966 NYC, Valerie and friend Stevie (Martha Plimpton) meet transvestite Candy (Stephen Dorff). Candy is invited to Warhol's Factory. Valerie tags along hoping to get Warhol produce her play. Valerie meets avant-garde publisher Maurice Girodias while doing her aggressive panhandling.

Lili Taylor is absolutely amazing. However Valerie's aggressively grating character makes it difficult to fully embrace this movie. There is no real tension. The ending is already shown. It's basically an one-woman show. It goes a long way but for me, it doesn't go far enough for greatness. It's one note played over and over again.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) was an interesting movie that I saw on satellite t.v. a few years ago. The movie was about the lesbian neo-feminist and founder of S.C.U.M. Valerie Solanis (Lili Taylor). She's an aspiring writer who's trying to fit in the mid sixties lifestyle of New York City. Valerie lives with her sometimes lover (Martha Plimpton) and co-worker. The two turn tricks, roll certain customers and hang out with a transvestite named Candy Darling (Stephen Dorff). One day Candy suggests to Valerie that she meet with Andy Warhol (Jared Harris). The rest is history. Michael Imperioli co-stars as a very catty Ondine, Tahnee Welch guest stars as Viva and Donovan Leitch appears as Gerald Malanga.

If you want to see how Warhol's "Factory" and it's atmosphere then this is the movie you want to see. Jared Harris was perfect as Andy Warhol and Lili Taylor made Valerie Solanis into a tragic person who's life was filled with madness and heartbreak. I was also impressed with Stephen Dorff, I never knew how great of an actor he has become. This movie is perfect and ideal for those who always wanted to know what happened to Warhol during the late sixties and how his life and attitudes were changed forever.

Highly recommended.

Although this film is overlong and often dull, it's still an intriguing look into a feminist gone way over the edge, who directs her wrath upon one of the most polarized artists of the century (you either love Warhol or you despise him, it seems). Anyone who truly detested Warhol may enjoy just seeing him get shot... I mean, if you're sadistic. People who are neutral towards his "greatness" (like me) or unfamiliar with his work may lose interest in this film; only Lili Taylor's hard-edged performance keeps the somewhat muddled story above water. And since I've never met anyone who worships the ground Warhol walked on, I can't say as to what those people might think of this film...in its favor, the script is objective towards both Valerie Solanas and Andy. At any rate, "I Shot Andy Warhol" is worth checking out if you stumble upon it on IFC one night.

Lili Taylor, as I think I've said here before, is one of my favorite actresses, but I have to admit I was hesitant about seeing this film, especially when a friend told me he found it overrated. I have a hard time with people who type people in general terms, and this movie seemed, at first, to say "All men are scum." And the opening 15-30 minutes seem to indicate this is just going to be a rant. However, you do gradually get to empathize with all the people involved, and you do get an idea of how things were at that time. Taylor and Jared Harris were fine as Valerie Solanas and Andy Warhol, respectively, but the real surprise for me was Stephen Dorff as Candy Darling. I've never thought much of Dorff, but he really shone through here, refusing to stereotype Candy or inject too much pathos.

One of the reasons it's so difficult to evaluate this movie is that it's hard to tell exactly how much of herself Lili Taylor is putting into the role of Valerie Solanas, the author of S.C.U.M. Manifesto and some kind of play called Up Your ***. I haven't seen much of Taylor's other work, only `The Haunting,' in which she was overwhelmed by banal lines and overbracketed by too much morphing Victorian woodwork and clanging iron. Here, her performance is outstanding but the part is again limited by the fact that, when you come right down to it, Valerie Solanas is not a particularly likable person, despite occasional flashes of wit, perhaps uninentional on her part, written into the script. She's self obsessed, narcissistic, really truly paranoid, all engulfing, uninterested in others except insofar as she can use them, grating in every way, and ultimately she does what so many other persons dissatisfied with what God has given them do: she shoots somebody famous. Her psychiatrist tells us that she was born in Atlantic City and was abused as a child. Well, enough is enough, when it comes to abuse. We have only the writers' word for that, by way of Valerie's psychiatrist, by way of Valerie, one presumes, without being able to know the actual source of the allegation, let alone its truth. If anyone claimed that they had had an encounter with a UFO during childhood, they'd be ridiculed. But all one has to do is make the claim that he or she was abused, and they get sympathy. Sometimes the claim, no matter how tenuous, can even help keep you from being convicted of a murder you admit you committed, as happened in the case of the Menendez brothers. Everyone seems to claim they were abused as children, from Marilyn Monroe to Roseanne Barre. Maybe the time has come to get rid of the left-over Freudianism that argues that such a tragic event has life-long consequences and helps us understand why the abusee's life now resembles a fouled anchor. Do you know what happens in Samoa when a man or an older boy molests a young girl? The girl's family come over and beat hell out of the man. Eventually the bruises heal, the incident slips insensibly into the past and is forgotten by all concerned parties, and life gets on with itself. Valerie is an abrasive person. But her grating personality serves a purpose. People notice you when you're a pain in the neck, even if you're homely, disorganized, and not especially intellectually distinguished. It can give you a nice warm glow to have people pay attention. And if your ranting demands don't succeed, you can always shoot someone well known. Then you can go immediately to the police and stake your claim before someone else jumps it. The film contributes to our understanding of how such a mind works, though the producers and writers may not have intended that, but it doesn't add an iota of sympathy to my feelings about Valerie. I worked as a research scientist around the fringes of the artistic/drug subculture of New York during the late 1960s and met a lot of people whose company I enjoyed, and whom I respected and admired, even losers. I wouldn't have wanted to be in her presence for five minutes. She did get one thing right, though. Males may not be `biological accidents,' as Valerie puts it, but at conception we all do start off as females, and we stay that way unless we get a shot of androgens during our embryonic development. Those of us who do, become males. So Genesis is wrong: ontogenetically, Eve precedes Adam. But then, so what? There are entire species of whiptails lizards in the Southwest whose populations consist entirely of parthenogenic females; now if life were only that simple for humans, but of course it's not, and Valerie got that wrong. Wrong too are the arguments that Valerie was a proto-feminist. Betty Friedan was way ahead of her, and before Betty Friedan there was the anthropologist M. F. Ashley-Montague, author of a well-regarded book entitled "The Natural Superiority of Women." Ashley-Montague's first name was Montague. As a man, of course, he doesn't get much play in Friedan, let alone The SCUM Manifesto.

This movie contained enough little things to shock the prudes in the audience. Add a couple of fine acting performances and you still end up with a disturbing piece of 'pop' culture. Lili Taylor plays Valerie Solanas, a wannabe novelist, that tries to garner fame by shooting Andy Warhol.

Taylor does a good job portraying a complicated and highly -disturbed woman. Stephen Dorff excelled as the gender bending Candy Darling. Jared Harris duplicated Warhol and his boring personage.

Also in the cast are Martha Plimpton and Donovan Leitch. I watched this because it was on the Bravo Network. I didn't gain anything except being reminded that Warhol died later due to complications recovering from Solanas' assassination attempt.

Stephen Dorff and Lili Taylor and Jared Harris are all great in this film, particularly Dorff. But the film's biggest weakness is that everyone in the movie is so weird you don't really care what happens to them. Only Dorff manages to invest his character with enough humanity and vulnerability that you are actually interested to learn of his ultimate fate. I was kind of surprised to learn that Solanis is held up as some kind of proto-feminist lesbian guru when it is obvious she's only twisted and insane.

Imagine if the situation were reversed and Solanis was a man calling for the cutting up of all women and denouncing women as an inferior race. Such a viewpoint would be considered monstrous! Solanis is a crank and a fool, so it's impossible to take her character's world view any more seriously than the guy down by the subway station who mumbles to people who aren't there.

The entire Factory scene is rightly exposed as the pretentious, ridiculous collection of sub-mediocre talent it was. So the viewer isn't surprised when Solanis shoots Warhol, as he couldn't say no to anyone around him and surrounded himself with so many weirdos it was inevitable.



Would this film have been lauded had it been a biopic of Mark David Chapman? I don't see much difference between Solanis and Chapman frankly...both complete, colossal failures in life who managed to gain notierity through murder or attempted murder.

In summary, this was a well-executed take on a rather idiotic topic. I'd rather see the director use her talents to make a movie about people who deserve the effort. Not worthless no-talents like Warhol and Solanis.

While Lili Taylor's performance is delightfully deranged and the depiction of the time is flawless, this film lacks any profound philosophical or visual punch. Twenty years from now, this film will be largely forgotten, except by the hardcore Taylor fans. It's her legacy, which should be great, which will give long-term life to this film. The film itself, while a fine effort, says little to give it long term legs.

However much of Andy Warhol was style and how much was substance, there is no doubt that his Manhattan studio ('The Factory') was a little capsule of creativity that could refresh your view of the world - even if you were someone as uncreative as Valerie Solanas, who was trying to sell Andy on her unwanted pornographic play 'Up Your A**". Andy could recognise garbage at a glance, and jokingly pretended to admire the typing, before agreeing to read it later. Then he managed to lose it. In doing so, he had signed his death warrant.

Who was this Valerie Solanas, who seemed to have such a problem with rejection? According to her own account, she was a badly-scarred victim of childhood rape, who wanted to exterminate the male sex, and published a manifesto called SCUM - supposedly an acronym for 'Society for Cutting Up Men'. Soon she would try cutting-up Warhol and two other men with a Biretta stolen from a drugged-up revolutionary. (Ironically, Warhol used to get his kicks by cutting-up porn mags in the bathroom!) It took him a few years to die, but the cause of death was unequivocal.

Solanas is played by Lili Taylor, made-up to look every bit as ugly as the original, as she replicates the depressing and degrading life of a psychology graduate turned lesbian hooker living on the street. It's clear that she not only hates the world, but apparently wants to be hated too - in which she is entirely successful in my case.

Taylor does not really have to do much acting. The star of the show seems to be her ever-present cigarette, presumably a symbol of in-your-face bad girl. Andy is played realistically by Jared Harris, and I like him asking Stephen Dorff (in drag) "How often do you get your period?"

When a copy of "Up Your A**" finally surfaced fifty years later, it was (unsurprisingly) dismissed as infantile nonsense. Yet the end-frame tells us that the SCUM Manifesto continues to sell all over the world as a feminist classic. But only because its author had become the new Lee Harvey Oswald.

Based on the true story of Valerie Solanas who was a 60s radical preaching hatred toward men in her "Scum" manifesto. She wrote a screenplay for a film that she wanted Andy Warhol to produce, but he continued to ignore her. So she shot him. This is Valerie's story.

Dr. Dana Heller, professor of English at the Old Dominion University, argues that the film stages the conflict between Solanas and Warhol as less the result of gender politics – particularly because Solanas intended no connection between her writing and the shooting – than of the decline of print culture as represented by Solanas and the rise of new non-writing media as embodied by Warhol and the Pop art movement. In the screenplay, Harron and Minahan describe Solanas as "banging at an ancient typewriter" and the film frequently shows her typing, for which she is mocked by Warhol and other Factory regulars. Solanas' writing is set against the new technologies of reproduction championed by Warhol.

The Andy Warhol in this film is nothing compared to the one played by David Bowie in "Basquiat". The voice and mannerisms are good, but Bowie just nails it. The film in general is excellent, though, and Lili Taylor was the perfect person for the role. What is she up to these days? It seems like she had a good run in the 1990s, playing off of John Cusack, and then disappeared.

If Peeping Tom was directed by a woman, then it would probably resemble Mary Harron's wonderful I Shot Andy Warhol. Like Peeping Tom, I Shot Andy Warhol is about how misunderstandings between the sexes can lead to violence. What was so great about I Shot Andy Warhol is how it takes a woman who most people would consider a psychopath and it humanizes her. We see what drives Valerie Solanas to commit her "insane" act of shooting Andy Warhol, and we come to understand why she did what she ended up doing. In other words, I Shot Andy Warhol successfully gets into the head of "insanity." After watching this film, I thought of a poem from Emily Dickinson: "Much madness is divinest sense. . . to a discerning eye. Much sense, the starkest madness. Ascent, and you are sane. Demure, you're straightaway dangerous, and put into chains." Now, let's see what Mary Harron does with another story about a "psychopath," American Psycho. . .

A movie that takes on topics as prone to controversy as the art of Andy Warhol and radical feminism is almost sure to garner itself with with passionate fans and spiteful critics alike. Because it portrays its subject matter with such skill, one's opinion on the film likely says something about one's ideas on those matters, and setting aside these opinions will probably yield a much more moderate take on the film. At least it does for me.

Now: as a presentation of the events that led to Warhol's shooting, this film was brilliant. Its portrayal of Solanas's and Warhol's motivations and ideas is done with compassion and clarity; I particularly enjoyed its characterization of Warhol, which, in my opinion, was quite complimentary, contrary to some other opinions expressed on this board. He approaches things with an endearingly childlike innocence, a willingness to accept anything as beautiful... Well, some people might not find that complimentary... Nonetheless, it is his hangers on who come across as cruel and unpleasant. And of course, Lili Taylor plays the idiosyncratic Solanas marvelously.

Unfortunately, the focus on the context of the events causes the film to suffer as a narrative. Many of the mood generating scenes, while providing considerable insight into the characters, seem directionless and unsure. This would not be a problem had they been more visually or emotionally compelling, but as it is, they are only occasionally composed as anything other than simple, plot-furthering shots. The result is that the film seems digressive and unfocused, and this digression mars what could have been a fascinating film.

In the end, though, this is certainly a film worth watching, if you're willing to pay attention, especially when one of its more striking images comes to the surface.

I must admit to start that I admired Lili Taylor's performance of Valerie Solanas. She has an energy that would be a plus in any film and shows in this one how good an actress she is. But this film is peopled with characters I wouldn't care to know, much less care about. And the direction by Mary Harron suffers badly from the camera too often slowly rotating about a room showing meaningless scenes of too many people who weren't introduced; I had a hard time sorting out who was who. I must confess that I didn't pay too much attention to the counter-culture of the 60's, as I was too busy raising a normal family and earning a normal living, and I also never liked Andy Warhol's art or his films. (I'd rather watch an Andy Hardy movie.) So perhaps I am slightly biased square. The film somewhat works just to see the mechanism of delusion that overtakes anyone who attempts to kill a famous personality, but most of this comes in the last half hour of this film, and it wasn't worth the wait.

The worst movie I have ever seen. Ever. If I were forced to watch this movie again(it would take an eye device ala Alex in A Clockwork Orange) I would probably induce vomiting and pray for death. I don't even know what the worst part of the movie was. Acting? Screenplay? Cinematography? Eh, it all pretty much stunk!