Eventually, everybody who ever spent five minutes with Andy Warhol will have a film made about them. Warhol filmmaker Paul Morrissey and scenemakers like Glenn O'Brien will show up to deliver a few choice and knowing quotes, and archival footage of the silver-haired artist himself will be rolled out in order to witness his laconic non-responses. An image will be crafted of an older, rawer New York, where self-identified freaks and outcasts gathered under the umbrella of the Warhol Factory and in the back room at Max's Kansas City; safe and feted, even if ever so briefly.
James Rasin's unfinished-feeling film on Warhol star Candy Darling falls into the category of documentaries that should have been many times more fascinating than they actually are. This is, after all, the story of a boy from a prototypically sterile Long Island suburb who grew up as James Slattery but later reinvented himself as a self-created movie star, using nothing more than a blonde wig, a high and breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, and incredible amounts of makeup. The persona created was that of the old-time film star, an aloof creature of the old studio system who just happened to be gracing the mortals with her presence for a short time before swanning off to her next shoot.
Whether or not Lou Reed actually wrote "Walk on the Wild Side" ("Candy came from out on the Island / In the back room, she was everybody's darlin' ") about Darling was beside the point; because everybody believed that he did. Tennessee Williams wrote a starring role in a play for her; to be sure, it was a late-period piece that's mostly forgotten now (1972's Small Craft Warnings), but still, Tennessee Williams. She was in one of Warhol's more scandalous films, 1968's Flesh. There's that name, too, Candy Darling, a pop art masterpiece of a moniker, tailor-made for the high-low art fusion that Warhol's Factory was constructing.
Of all the interviewees in Rasin's film, Fran Lebowitz - about the only New Yorker left who one could still believably refer to as a "raconteur" - has perhaps the smartest take on Darling's time with the Factory. She notes that that famous back room at Max's, where all the "stars" Warhol was promoting for his various films being shot in the late-1960s and early-1970s hung out being fabulous, was undeniably a fun place to be, even if it was filled with people who would have a tantrum if somebody stopped paying attention to them for five minutes.
But Lebowitz's choice of words for Darling's acceptance into that circle is telling, talking about how she "fell into the clutches" of Warhol. For all the glamorous armor, there was a fragile creature underneath, that little boy from Long Island who was "too gentle for the bullies," as one person put it. This is not somebody who could necessarily handle the sycophants and in-fighting of that circle. That so many people remember Darling thinking the intensely disinterested and fickle Warhol could be her Louie B. Mayer, employer and protector, is all the tragic foreshadowing needed.
In between recollections of Darling's briefly rocketing star by various scenesters and hangers-on, Rasin interjects footage of Darling's old friend Jeremiah Newton, who has decided to bury her ashes (entrusted years ago to his care) in upstate New York. The mixture of moods doesn't quite work, with Rasin's indifferently shot current-day narrative frequently bringing an already poorly-constructed film to a halt.
There's a great undeveloped story here about Darling's briefly glittering spot in the New York demimonde. Esther Robinson's 2006 film on Danny Williams (another Factory member who ended badly), A Walk into the Sea, was able to tell that story with artistry and aplomb. But somehow Rasin seems to miss out on what it was that made Darling something, her roles in Off-Off-Broadway plays and that general air of downtown mystique given her the aura of somebody just on the verge of being truly discovered. That it never quite happened is just one of her story's tragedies. That she entrusted her life to the likes of Warhol is another.
James Rasin's unfinished-feeling film on Warhol star Candy Darling falls into the category of documentaries that should have been many times more fascinating than they actually are. This is, after all, the story of a boy from a prototypically sterile Long Island suburb who grew up as James Slattery but later reinvented himself as a self-created movie star, using nothing more than a blonde wig, a high and breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, and incredible amounts of makeup. The persona created was that of the old-time film star, an aloof creature of the old studio system who just happened to be gracing the mortals with her presence for a short time before swanning off to her next shoot.
Whether or not Lou Reed actually wrote "Walk on the Wild Side" ("Candy came from out on the Island / In the back room, she was everybody's darlin' ") about Darling was beside the point; because everybody believed that he did. Tennessee Williams wrote a starring role in a play for her; to be sure, it was a late-period piece that's mostly forgotten now (1972's Small Craft Warnings), but still, Tennessee Williams. She was in one of Warhol's more scandalous films, 1968's Flesh. There's that name, too, Candy Darling, a pop art masterpiece of a moniker, tailor-made for the high-low art fusion that Warhol's Factory was constructing.
Of all the interviewees in Rasin's film, Fran Lebowitz - about the only New Yorker left who one could still believably refer to as a "raconteur" - has perhaps the smartest take on Darling's time with the Factory. She notes that that famous back room at Max's, where all the "stars" Warhol was promoting for his various films being shot in the late-1960s and early-1970s hung out being fabulous, was undeniably a fun place to be, even if it was filled with people who would have a tantrum if somebody stopped paying attention to them for five minutes.
But Lebowitz's choice of words for Darling's acceptance into that circle is telling, talking about how she "fell into the clutches" of Warhol. For all the glamorous armor, there was a fragile creature underneath, that little boy from Long Island who was "too gentle for the bullies," as one person put it. This is not somebody who could necessarily handle the sycophants and in-fighting of that circle. That so many people remember Darling thinking the intensely disinterested and fickle Warhol could be her Louie B. Mayer, employer and protector, is all the tragic foreshadowing needed.
In between recollections of Darling's briefly rocketing star by various scenesters and hangers-on, Rasin interjects footage of Darling's old friend Jeremiah Newton, who has decided to bury her ashes (entrusted years ago to his care) in upstate New York. The mixture of moods doesn't quite work, with Rasin's indifferently shot current-day narrative frequently bringing an already poorly-constructed film to a halt.
There's a great undeveloped story here about Darling's briefly glittering spot in the New York demimonde. Esther Robinson's 2006 film on Danny Williams (another Factory member who ended badly), A Walk into the Sea, was able to tell that story with artistry and aplomb. But somehow Rasin seems to miss out on what it was that made Darling something, her roles in Off-Off-Broadway plays and that general air of downtown mystique given her the aura of somebody just on the verge of being truly discovered. That it never quite happened is just one of her story's tragedies. That she entrusted her life to the likes of Warhol is another.
