(13) : Tavel in Ladplao, Bangkok, 1998

            As far as the Ridiculous goes, those now leading the parade down the Misinformation Highway are Steven Watson, Bonnie Marranca, Victor Bockris, and David Dalton.

            Watson’s recent book, FACTORY MADE: Warhol and the Sixties, was created on the computer: first by lifting the passages he desired from numerous publications and then arranging them in roughly chronological order.  There remained the writing of fill-ins that hopefully would link them.  As the reviewers noted, they don’t.  The result is choppy and disconnected, and a subtle illogic pervades the entire book.  This is to say nothing of the many pages lifted from articles and interviews without credit, the faulty research, the innumerable factual errors and contradictions, the invasions of privacy and blatant violations of copyright.  Watson has little or no idea of what The Ridiculous is and thinks nothing of describing Warhol films he has never seen.  When approached pre-publication with suggestions to amend many of the mistakes, he ignored them.

(14) : Seated between his interpreter and the Director of the Pushkin Museum, Tavel fields questions in Moscow at the kickoff of the U.S. State Department-sponsored Andy Warhol Festival, which toured the pan-Slavic nations, spring-summer, 2001

            Some years ago, Watson sponsored a presentation of Ridiculous Theatre in the West Village in which he “mentioned Tavel’s name.”  When the enormity of this was called to his attention, he decided, pridefully, to stick to his guns and rewrite history rather than admit to outrageous error.

            Bonnie Marranca has a similar problem.  Her opportunistic book, Theater of The Ridiculous is a model of non-research and historical inaccuracy.   Her second edition of the self-published book compounds the misconceptions.  Matthias Haas and Marc Siegel organized a conference on the Theatre of the Ridiculous in Cologne in the mid-nineties.  They invited Marranca and her husband Gautam Dasgupta to participate.  The two appeared without a paper to deliver and, according to Haas and Siegel, had nothing coherent to say.  Marranca had spoken to Ronald Tavel shortly before the conference, but did not mention it.  She was also in contact with his agent at the time who handled many playwrights; and who, as a matter of course, always knew her clients’ whereabouts.  Frustrated by Marranca’s apparent ignorance and total lack of acceptable scholarship, and hoping to get a clearer picture of the movement, Matthias Haas asked Marranca where Tavel was now.  She said: “I don’t know.  Somewhere in Asia.”

            Victor Bockris wrote most of the biography, Warhol, back in the eighties.  The tome was initially published in England.  Informed that Americans lacked the patience and intelligence to read such a long book, Bockris did not hesitate to cut it by almost half for the Stateside publication, and earned the critical observation: “He can’t see the forest for the trees.”

            David Dalton’s A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol (2003) reads as if written for tabloid readers.  Dalton actually believed VINYL and KITCHEN were improvised films –

Remember the expression: “the actors make it up as they go along”?    This may be a tribute to the uncanny quality of both films; but since both were published back in the sixties, what does this say about Dalton’s research?  And keen perception?

            The art of the American sixties was indeed light-years ahead of where American art is now.  But if publishers leave it to the likes of Watson, Marranca, Bockris, and Dalton, we shall never know why.

THE INTERVIEWER INTERVIEWED
(A GENERAL DISCLAIMER)

              Inevitably, this incompetent grave excavating would take a swing at TV and film with their more mechanized methods of distortion.  The TV documentary has been formulated into sight-and-sound bytes of interrogated heads, interspersed with “atmospheric” roll shots of buildings (pertinent to the matter or not), neighborhoods, news-clips, supposed acquaintances, musing critics, sideliners, and cemeteries.  The filmmakers often start with a subject, arbitrary but for the possibility that they might be able to raise funds for an entertainment related to such a subject; and the hope that with sufficient footage of “authorities” addressing themselves to that (in this case) artist, they, the filmmakers, will come up with a theme, a theory, or an argument, which may not be relevant to that artist yet appear to summarize him – as if we could claim to know what goes on in other people’s minds.  They cut and paste phrases from the speakers’ sentences, and, radically rearranging their order, try to sustain a tenable coherence.  But, so far, pretending (or believing!) that they are introducing their audience to an unfamiliar personality, all have reduced their labors to a slipshod biopic.  The only results audiences can be assured of are that anything of depth or insight, which an observer has managed to assert, will be deleted; that the film has only an inadvertent chance of squeezing beyond the producers’, question-askers’, and editors’ understanding of the artist and his times; and that it is fortunate if their features are marginally interesting.

            Since, for better or worse, and like it or not, at the present moment Andy Warhol is history’s most famous and influential artist and not a day can pass in the States without your being able to read his name in the papers or hear it on the radio or TV, we are guaranteed a continual sprinkling, or dump, of spots and docs on him.

            I first appeared in a 1989 BBC-TV Channel 4 rundown, lensed in Gramercy Park, NYC, on a generous budget.  It’s currently accessed on the Internet or DVDs.  It is called WARHOL’S CINEMA 1963-1968: MIRROR FOR THE SIXTIES.  I was flown to New York from New Orleans, dressed in the cord-collared outfit I most commonly wore in Factory flicks, and interviewed at length both sitting (on a traveling trunk) and walking about.  And because the Warhol Foundation refused to lease one-time use of clips from the films other than VINYL and CHELSEA GIRLS in which I was involved – on the excuse that they were not yet restored (a lie) – whittled down to what is politely tagged a 3-shot “cameo.”  MIRROR’s major contribution is that it was filmed early enough for most of its participants, with the exception of Billy Linich and Taylor Mead, to more or less resemble what they looked like in their Factory days.  It would also loosely suggest the cast-list for which of the critics, biographers, and Factory survivors were to appear in future Warhol docs.  Whether this is because they are articulate, photogenic, or have few obvious axes to grind is hard to say.  Still, as directed by a pioneering Keith Griffiths, J. Hoberman, Amy Taubin, Kenneth Koch, Linich, Mead, Malanga, and etc. ill consider the oeuvre, are often erroneous, and, in retrospect, naïve.  They haven’t found their sea legs as yet.  Koch perpetuates the superficiality that the films are voyeuristic; Hoberman that they are conceptual (and so can be read about rather than seen); a deeply involved and always attractive Amy Taubin indulges in some unrelated Freudianisms; the charismatic and gray-bearded Billy (Name) Linich makes sweeping generalities and so on.  Griffiths, who hadn’t seen most of the films, doesn’t know what questions to ask.  So what the interviewees say must be taken with a carton of Morton Salt.  (Important to note is that any number of persons crucially connected to Warhol declined to go on camera then, and still won’t now.)

            The oddest entry to date in the blitz of Warhol speculations is another British strike called ANDY WARHOL: THE COMPLETE PICTURE – which, of course, it is anything but.  Chris Rodley produced the confusion, a woman who theorized that Andy was aphasic: and whose ambition it was to prove this.  As production got under way, the Andy Warhol Festival Week was announced in Moscow, and Rodley went there determined to make that excitement the background to her film, aphasia getting lost in the scuttle.  So did the Festival, perhaps because the city of Moscow asked big bucks or the sponsoring American State Department didn’t cotton to the lady’s horning in.  The artist’s family roots are traced to what is now Russian Ukraine, hence the Soviet interest in a son who made more than good in America. 

            Chris Rodley had intended to host and lens me in London, but when plans were switched to shoot in Moscow and she discovered I was slated to appear at its museums, galleries, and schools, thought to cut on production costs by nailing me gratis there – although I’d already gone to London, after appearances in Berlin and Zurich, to make my Russian visa, as prearranged.  An argument broke out in Moscow’s Film Museum re this connivance.  Rodley begrudgingly gave in and literally opened her loaded purse.  Nevertheless, although I was in a state over this scam and so in fine fettle to deliver a furious interview, she subsequently took her revenge: and, despite confessing to being dazzled by my info, (“What stories!”) and performance, bit off her own nose by trimming my tales to a few innocuous comments.  For the morbidly curious, THE COMPLETE PICTURE has a saving grace: a segue into the only clip of me from FIFTY FANTASTICKS currently available on DVD.  The contrast between what I look like in 1964, merely tense, and in a fury in 2001 is startling au moins dire.  When I was a kid, my neighbors used to moan: “Time is a terrible thing”.

            Reigning in ambition to encapsulate the Pop artist, as of 2007, is Ric Burns’ four-hour, multimillion-dollar epic, ANDY WARHOL: A FILM DOCUMENTARY.  Ed and Ric Burns are America’s foremost TV documentary makers.  Mr. Burns approached me with his angle, his belief that Andy is the representative personality of the second half of the 20th Century – that that entire period is culturally reflected in Warhol.  The movie took years to make and was 3.7 million in the red when completed.  I’d dutifully considered Burns’ stated evaluation and furnished the reasons why some have labeled Warhol the Father of Deconstruction, what deconstructionism is, why its program is desirable, and how it has altered every human discipline.  –Note that Jacques Derrida, normally identified as the Father of Deconstruction, did not announce or analyze that movement until 1967, when Warhol was nearing the end of his filmic output.

            Naturally, whatever I testified to in this area was dropped, and Burns favored us with yet another biopic: whose sustaining thrust is the beatification of Warhol.  It closely suggests that he died for our sins.  If you’re thinking along those lines, wouldn’t the opposite be more appropriate: that we died for his?

            Still, I manage to preside, especially in the last two hours.  And it is to Mr. Burns’ credit that when I specify what I feel is my key disclosure in film – in the movie HORSE – Ric Burns, having located those exact and bare few seconds, excerpts them from HORSE and reproduces them for the skeptical.

            I think my most comprehensive testimony on camera was a straight five-hour grill for TV Channel VH1, shot in November 2006, at Paramount Studios’ Headquarters on Sixth Avenue, NYC.  It is for a proposed series, LORDS OF THE REVOLUTION (episode 1) to be aired on VH1, a rock channel at the present time second in popularity only to MTV.  Of course, a thin fraction of what I said will surface in the series, but the enthusiastic young crew, shrewdly helmed by Ted Kim, my actual interviewer, assured me that the entire five hours will be preserved on Betamax, stored in Paramount’s archives, and unlocked for future researchers.  Photographer Kevin Kushel’s 350 portraits of me were made during this uninterrupted inquisition.

            The Internet has recently been bombarded with contentious propaganda, largely to the purpose of defaming performance-artist Penny Arcade and critic J. Hoberman, who rent the storage room where Jack Smith’s creations are assembled – with, evidently, the $8,000 to $13,000 per annum derived from screenings of his films.  The notices declare that both are illegally withholding his later still-photography, rightfully the property of Smith’s surviving sister, from documentary movie exploitation and the establishing of a Smith museum.  All this estate hassling for an uncertainty by Mary Jordan called JACK SMITH AND THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS (at the moment, on DVD).  Wags call it THE DESTRUCTION OF JACK SMITH because, defying Smith’s own studious pace when filming, it assaults the eye and ear with split-second images and three or four words yanked from actors’, models’, and historians’ thoughts, thus reinforcing every evil that sketcher, architect, filmmaker, and essayist Jack Smith fought against all his life; and due to which he virtually starved.  In the 60s, Smith held the reins on an empire that rivaled Andy’s Factory.  The NY Times noted that in DESTRUCTION he comes off as a “gratingly self-aggrandizing fringe-artist” (whatever that is).  We learn that he received a lifelong monthly check from his RN-mother: and so his celebrated Utopianism (“Art should be free – everything should be free!”) develops clay feet.  There is no sense of his galvanizing charisma, his psychotically painstaking attention to detail, his self-described “madness” and insulation, his intriguing manifesto that a work of art may be started but never finished.  Thousands of revealing feet of footage of his world-famous stars and coworkers – including Mario and Agosto Machado in current drag and the heartbreaking struggle to articulate (in a Parisian bar) of the late international actress Tina Aumont, the only daughter of Smith’s idol, Maria Montez – were dropped during the mindless editing and re-editing; and by the time we see a stock shot of snow-swept lower Broadway, according to first-nighter, fashion designer and magazine layout-man Silvano Nova, the groaning audience realizes this flicker is going nowhere.

            My own outtakes include more than three hours of musings shot in a Bangkok beer garden, musically scored with the cackling opinions of rare local birds during their feuding season; and two further hours in my chaotic, tellingly-wallpapered and cluttered Thai apartment.  These recollections and analyses of Smith’s life and devotion to Maria Montez, lensed on December 3, 2003, were replaced by seconds-long extraneous asides clipped from an ill lit session the following November in Jordan’s lower Manhattan loft.  In them, you see the tension trenched in my face as I slowly realize I am being fed responses to fill in the gaps in a clichéd biopic; and that my previous thoughts in an appropriately “exotic” Smith setting are about to end up, as Smith would snigger, on the cutting room floor.  It was my emptiest interview in 41 years of being interviewed.  (Incidentally, Michael Spencer, a South African news correspondent, with whom I’d spent two weeks vetting ré Smith and the transcending, quintessential Maria Montez in SIREN OF ATLANTIS, plus a conscientious cameraman and soundman, both young Americans working in the Thai film industry, are responsible for the entire, pro bono Bangkok material.  This is not to denigrate the Manhattan crew, a group of talented and committed art and movie devotees, and past experts on the complex mysteries of the computer.)  

            Sadly, the gloss’s unintended single virtue is the minute and twenty seconds of Betamax clips from WHITE SAVAGE, COBRA WOMAN, and ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES – the finest resolution available – because we learn that Universal Studios also uses the corporation-library’s Betamax print to create all its TV, DVD, and theatrical reissues.  Charging an alarming $8,000 per second, Universal limits its lease to 12 years.

            My contract for DESTRUCTION emphasized star billing but the producer, Ken Wayne Peralta, evidently suffering from temporary amnesia after viewing the final cut, cut my name from the promos.  After seeing it myself, I wondered if I weren’t fortunate.  (Peralta has since amended this.) 

            Referring to Mary Jordan, the theorist Douglas Crimp summarized the effort in five simple words: “She didn’t know her subject.”

 

IDENTITY THEFT

 

            However, no biopic needs my pointed disclaimer as much as a book of 19th Century American folk songs published by Green Integer Press, L.A., which purports to be written by me and uses a photo of its Editor-in-Chief, Douglas “The Mess” Messerli, as the author’s portrait.  Messerli received more advance orders for a proposed anthology of my screenplays than for any of the thousands of books his three non-royalty-paying and IRS-dodging companies have printed.  Lacking the competence to assemble this collection and his contract five-years expired, my relationship with him was dissolved.  Apparently frustrated by his own ineptitude, and no novice at scams, Messerli took the dangerous step of borrowing my authorship. 

            The only other Ronald Tavel in the world is in the Indiana legislative.  He is not an authority on folk songs and hardly looks like Messerli.  So am I becoming a brand name – or just on the way to my lawyer’s?

***********

            Since the above and as of this writing (mid 2008) I’ve been interviewed in Thailand and on trips to Germany and the U.S. concerning myself, persons with whom I worked, and persons I knew slightly then and barely remember now.  Incrementally, the interviewers display signs of the ineptitude I discuss (David Kaufman writing on The Ridiculous, a genre he hasn’t the wherewithal to define, is a strong case in point); thinly disguised venality; an heraldic, homophobic revisionism; and bleak, insatiable curiosity.

            A fact that needs to be stated – and restated – is that the Warhol films are amongst the most discussed of all time, and the least seen.             

> Top