Chapter 5
That Friday was the table read. Matthew walked around, greeting everyone and making introductions.
We’d already met some of them, but I didn’t know the studio’s publicist, Ellen Kim, or the script supervisor, or the studio executive, Todd Simons, who had fresh-cut hair and a perfectly tailored gray suit.
Kathryn began, “I’m so proud of the work we’ve done already and so excited for the work ahead. With this cast and crew, we have the chance to make a truly special film.”
Todd from the studio said, “Kathryn, Matthew, it’s such a gift to share this day with you. Any time we embark on a new project, I always think of the old joke by George Burns: ‘Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’ ”
We all laughed politely. “Todd and his jokes,” Ellen said. “We’ve already got MTV and Today coming to set. We’re going to have a great campaign lined up for this, mixing Matthew’s experience with the freshness of Kai and Juniper.”
I glanced over at Kai, who was seated next to me. He looked like he might throw up at any moment. I always felt that way after something was done, once you couldn’t do anything about it, but before and during a shoot, I felt secure. Someone literally told you what words to say.
I leaned over and muttered to him, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
“Is that original?” he asked.
“Kierkegaard,” I answered.
The idea of a table read is that everyone who’s key to making the movie can hear the whole thing in one go.
I looked down at the pages the whole time and tried to give a lot of myself to Carly but not everything.
For everything, I had to wait until we were actually on set, in costume, and rolling.
Kai, meanwhile, was giving everything. When he told me that he wanted me, sizzling with a confidence he’d found somewhere, I felt like he wanted me.
He flattened out a bit in the scene where he and Carly fight at a nightclub where they’ve gone to party with Andy, but otherwise, he felt so much like Jude that I could hardly keep up with him.
Matthew, meanwhile, did his Andy voice—pinched and disaffected.
He sounded almost dazed by reality, or drunk with ironic detachment.
“Young people inspire and exhaust me,” he said.
“Art is what you can get away with.” “People should fall in love with their eyes closed.” “If you look at a thing long enough it loses all its meaning.” He spoke in the parables of Warhol’s diaries and his books, and indeed in the parable of his art.
Andy was not the center of the movie, or at least not the center of my movie, but he was the beating heart of it, beating at first slowly and coldly and then with fear and fervor, and finally not at all.
When we finished, the whole room burst into applause, and I saw Ellen the Publicist wiping away an actual tear.
I watched Todd from the studio most closely, because more than anyone else, he’d decide if the movie got a big push or a small one, or if it even came out in theaters at all.
If he felt like it was small, or niche, he’d send it direct-to-streaming.
“That’s brilliant,” Todd said as the applause died down.
“Brilliant. I think we’ve got magic on our hands here. Absolute magic.”
_____________
On the Sunday before we began shooting, I visited the Andy Warhol Museum, where there was a huge collection not just of Warhol’s art but also his tchotchkes and papers.
An inveterate collector, Warhol kept everything and willed it all to the museum, from old copies of Interview magazine to underwear signed by Calvin Klein.
Our movie was about Warhol’s later work, the stuff he made at the end, like his Last Supper series.
Several of the Last Supper works were in the museum, but I was especially fascinated by his earlier film work.
I watched multiple loops of his Screen Tests, four-minute movies that just show people staring at the camera, blinking occasionally, looking bashful or confident or each in turn.
The camera is still, shooting the actors from the neck up, and it reminded me of auditioning, but without the words or actions—just your face.
I thought about how strange acting in front of a camera is, how vulnerable it is.
Warhol was the great poet of radical corporatization and the superficialization of human experience, but he also liked to capture people in their unprotected but still performed moments—Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral, for example.
I was especially taken by Edie Sedgwick’s Screen Test. Her oversized brown eyes, which reminded me of my own, seemed to hold all the terror and dread and wonder in the world.
As an actor, you want to be as transparent as possible, but that also of course means that people can see all the way inside you.
_____
I went home that evening and reread the last chapters of a Warhol biography, which, unlike Warhol’s own books, actually did explore his private life.
Andy wasn’t just an artist—he was trying to spin the many plates of Andy Warhol Enterprises: He was a TV host with his own show on MTV and a spokesperson for multiple brands.
He was running Interview magazine and also still making art.
And all this while the art world he’d known and helped develop was in total upheaval.
By 1986, many of Warhol’s friends had died of AIDS or were sick with it.
Meanwhile, contemporary art was passing him by as young artists like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger started to make emotionally intimate but still conceptually dazzling work.
Warhol feared he’d become stale. He couldn’t find a way forward, especially since his collaborations with the young Jean-Michel Basquiat had flamed out after a bad review in The New York Times.
Meanwhile, a man who’d always felt that he was ugly was ever more uncomfortable with his aging body, altered by the surgeries he’d needed after being shot in the stomach in the late sixties.
And his gallbladder was failing. Gallbladder surgery had killed Andy’s father, and now his own gallbladder needed removing.
Warhol felt certain that the procedure would kill him, too.
And although it was routine and relatively safe, when he finally went into the hospital to get the surgery, he never came out.
He died there alone, too embarrassed by his wiglessness and vulnerability to accept visits from even his closest friends.
I’m a success but I’m still alone. So what.
“Warhol presaged the degradation of meaning in an image,” the book argued.
“He showed us how we can’t trust or be moved by images in the way we once could.
With Warhol, everything is skin deep, but that’s exactly what is so deep about his work.
We live in a skin-deep era, staring at two-dimensional screens and endless images, an era funded by advertising and consumption and content creation, and Warhol was in all those businesses long before Instagram existed. ”
The book also talked a little about what Warhol might’ve made of the Internet.
He was fascinated by technology—he did an ad campaign with Apple and invented an animatronic robot.
In general, he was obsessed with screens way before it was cool, and the book argued he would’ve embraced the aspects of the early Internet that refuged weirdos and the marginalized.
The doorman called up to my apartment, interrupting my reading.
I had a package downstairs. It turned out to be some daisy earrings from Dior (retail cost $680) that they wanted me to model for Instagram.
My deal with Dior, first struck when I was eighteen, had carried me through all the low points in my career, and I was grateful for it, but I still felt my soul leaking out of my body every time I did a post for them.
I got dressed (a black jumpsuit and kitten heels), slicked my hair back, and then recruited Kai to be my photographer. He took a bunch of pictures of me wearing the earrings in front of his Warhol-drenched walls, and then I posted some to Instagram.
The comments ranged from You look so pretty to Fuck me step-sis to Sell out.
So what.