Famous visitors and “beautiful people” with “star potential” who flocked to Andy Warhol’s Factory studio in the 1960s were often shot for one of his notorious “screen tests”.
These quirky audition tapes, usually for nothing at all, were silent “parodies” of the Hollywood studio system. No one was really auditioning for anything; it was just an excuse to run a single reel of 16mm film through his Bolex camera and engage someone in a staring contest with it, one they normally lost.
Some of the more notable subjects included Italian model Benedetta Barzini, model/actrress Marisa Berenson, poet Ted Berrigan, manic artist Salvador Dalí, folk gobshite Donovan, toilet man Marcel Duchamp, Mama Cass, Allen Ginsberg, Beck’s mother, Bibbe Hansen, Baby Jane Holzer, Dennis Hopper, actress Sally Kirkland, Nico, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, photographer Francesco Scavullo, Edie Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, Paul Thek, Viva and Mary Woronov.
That’s quite a list, and it isn’t even complete. So, it is suffice to say that Warhol was rather fond of these little experimental films. They formed the perfect confluence of everything he loved: fame, experimentalism, simplicity, and how stars can be made and unmade in a few minutes flat.
(Credits: Dangerous Minds / Nat Finkelstein)
When Dylan stopped by the tin-foil-covered Factory, he is alleged to have taken an immediate dislike to Warhol and the “phonies” of his entourage. It has long been suspected that the spitting lyrics of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, in part, describe Dylan’s feelings about Warhol. Was Warhol “the diplomat on the chrome horse” at the centre of his tirade against tired posers?
Beyond being wary that Warhol’s ‘causes’ might be paper-thin, Dylan was also enraged about the artist’s perceived exploitation of Edie Sedgwick. The seething ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ singer was at one point romantically involved with Sedgwick. She was even his muse for some of Blonde on Blonde.
All the same, Dylan trudged along for a screen test and a chat. After the sequence was shot, Dylan grabbed a large silkscreen (as “payment”) that Warhol was going to give him anyway and headed for the door before allegedly strapping the canvas to the roof of a station wagon. Such was his dislike of the artist that he later traded the piece to his manager, Albert Grossman, for a couch.
That silkscreen, ‘Double Elvis’ – and artwork that loomed over Dylan’s surreal Factory meeting – is now part of the permanent collection at MOMA. It is said to be worth many times more than a crooked second-hand couch.
Beyond the inherent value behind Warhol rustling up an Elvis print, it is now also imbued with a mad cultural moment. It is a moment that Factory photographer Nat Finkelstein remembered very clearly. “Andy gave Bobby a great double image of Elvis. Bobby gave Andy short shrift. Shooting and plundering finished, the Dylan gang headed for the door, me and my Nikon on their heels,” he wrote back in 1965 in his diary.
“They left as they had entered… ‘Bobby the Waif’ emerging as ‘Robert the Triumphant’. They departed having tied the Elvis image to the top of their station wagon,” he comically recalled, “Like a deer poached out of season.”
In truth, maybe that analogy is pretty apt. If Warhol had stationed the looming Elvis purposefully, then perhaps Dylan proverbially shot it down like prey and claimed his mantle as the new type of icon who stood outside the clique of fame Warhol was clearly so keen on. As Dylan would soon sing in a line loaded with meaning in light of this anecdote, “He really wasn’t where it’s at”.
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