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You should probably put your chair here.

OK.

Hello out there in TV land.

You have to remember, I'm just... this is not being filmed, you have to remember.

- It's just, you know. - Why?

OK, are we ready?

- You ready? - Yeah.

OK.

This is high quality film, right?

New York in the late 1970s was economically depressed and definitely crime ridden.

Times Square was full of junkies, prostitutes, and sex shops.

Perhaps because the city has served as a backdrop for so many poignant films...

"Midnight Cowboy," "Taxi Driver"...

there existed a romantic allure of New York City back in those days.

Downtown Manhattan became a magnet for art students, runaways, and a lot of lost personalities.

The circumstances all came together in a rare mix where the creative and their inspirations could live side by side in dark, dramatic splendor.

Everybody did everything.

You had a band, you were a painter, you were an actor, you were a sculptor, a writer, you were a poet.

You just did everything.

People came here to be artists or musicians or writers or whatever.

They could afford to live in Manhattan, and you could also spend time doing what you wanted to do.

You didn't have to have a regular job to be able to be an artist.

You could just, like, say I'm a filmmaker.

And like, your first screening, we would be there.

And you'd be a filmmaker.

Everybody lived, worked in this area around the Bowery, and you just walked around there and you meet everybody.

Everyone would be there.

After a certain hour, downtown became a playground for a big pool of about 500 or 600 people.

Howie Montaug quoted the term Downtown 500...

that there were about 500 people who we all knew each other, and we all did various forms of art and fashion, and we all kind of converged.

I started to see these oblique pieces of poetry around the city.

A pin drops like a pungent odor.

Copyright SAMO.

Or make soup, build a fort, set that on fire.

You see a tag in like, the art district in Soho.

It was kind of weird, because it wasn't like a hip hop graffiti thing.

There was something else going on there.

It was obviously intended for the art world.

You know, a lot of us would talk about it.

Who was SAMO? Have you ever met SAMO?

Oh, it's an old woman.

And it turned out that it was Jean Michel.

Didn't you do that with another guy?

A guy named Al Diaz.

We started doing this, uh...

the SAMO graffiti while we were still in school.

We just wanted to do some sort of conceptual art project.

The whole objective in doing graffiti is fame.

Achieving in a certain status and a certain recognition.

Like, I'm going to take control of that space, and people are gonna know me.

Jean always wanted to be famous.

The Soho news started printing our graffiti.

What he was doing was quite different from what graffiti artists were doing.

What they were doing was writing their name, and sometimes there was a painterly aspect to it.

The SAMO tags had content.

There were like poetry.

We had a hit with it.

He had made a buzz in his own way.

He had tagged up a new area.

People were seeing it.

It is the Canal Zone, and it's happening here and now.

If you're lost, you can find yourself right here, right now, in the Canal Zone.

We decide that we're going to have a party, and it was called the Canal Zone party.

Jean had heard about this party.

One of the guys came over and said, SAMO is here.

And I was like...

I was like, really?

He's like yeah. He's here. He wants to meet you.

I was like, wow, where? And there he was.

SAMO.

A-M-O. Come on, you've seen it on the walls everywhere, especially down in the Village.

This gentleman right here is SAMO.

What did you look like then?

I shaved my head right when I left home, because I thought it would be a good disguise, you know?

Because they wouldn't be looking for somebody with a shaved head or something.

And Jean wrote, which of the following symbols are omnipresent?

A, Lee Harvey Oswald, B, Coca-Cola, et cetera.

His multi-choice graffiti SAMO pieces.

I went up to him later on.

First thing Jean said was, you want to start a band?

And I'm like, yeah, sure.

And we started what became Gray that night.

And what was special about this band was that neither Jean or I were musicians.

Michael was playing the drums like a maniac, and Jean couldn't play the clarinet.

It blew me away.

I was like, wow.

This is the best group I've seen, you know?

At the performance, and he was just playing a kind of noise machine.

Jean Michel was just sort of playing and I remember thinking, like, this is a totally cool thing.

And it also seemed like girls really liked him, something I had yet to really experience.

Jean-Michel's first public work is the band Gray.

I was a bartender in a sleazy dive bar on 2nd Avenue and 5th Street.

And he would come in and he would stand against the wall, and sometimes play the jukebox and stare at me.

And he wouldn't buy anything.

He had a big overcoat on and dreadlocks.

It was kind of frightening, actually.

This went on for weeks.

Eventually, one day, he came up to the bar and sat down and ordered a drink.

And he ordered the most expensive thing that we had, which was Remy Martin.

And I later realized that the reason he wasn't sitting at the bar was he had no money to buy a drink.

Didn't have any money, you know?

We were still sneaking on the trains to move around a lot, you know?

Crashing on people's couches from here to there.

It was crazy times.

I think that's how a lot of us were living, 18, 19 year olds who had just come to New York.

You could live here wild in the street and live hand to mouth.

I really loved the roughneck kind of style of living.

Jean was doing it in a much more intensely radical, bohemian style.

- And you were totally broke, right? - Yeah.

- I was living, you know... - From place to place.

Yeah, place to place.

So how were you, um, surviving, then?

I just was, you know?

Just...

you just end up surviving, you have to, I guess.

Is this in Brooklyn, or did you go to Manhattan?

I went to Washington Square Park.

Did you ever do, like, take a part time job, or did you...

- how did you make money? - No, I really didn't.

Just something really simple and dumb as how did you have the money that you had to live on?

I used to look for money at the Mudd Club on the floor.

Really?

Used to find it, too, most times.

I really don't know how I got through that, just walking

around for days and days without sleeping, you know?

Eating cheese doodles or whatever, just, you know?

And what were you thinking about then? I mean, what was, like, your vision of...

It's not... this is not funny.

Cheese doodles.

What was...

Because they were only $0.15, that's why.

Panhandling, drinking wine with winos.

Both Jean-Michel and I are first generation. Our parents were immigrants.

If you've decided to live a sort of counterculture subversive lifestyle, it's very difficult to go home.

I was determined not to go home again.

But did you think, I could be a bum forever?

Yeah, I sort of did, yeah.

I thought I was going to be a bum forever.

We were basically trying to make it happen, trying to not just...

and I feel awkward saying fame, because in this era now, it's like, you don't really want to...

who wants to be famous?

It's so, like, that shit is whack.

But it was really very specifically about making it happen, you know?

And like, I knew just...

he was gonna make it happen.

I heard all these stories of that you survived on the

streets from like, having all these different girlfriends.

- Is that true at all? - Yeah, that was some of it, yeah.

That they helped you out a lot.

That you... you could always stay somewhere?

At least you had places to stay doing that.

That's some of it, yeah.

I remember this one time walking by an art opening.

It was a Schnabel opening.

And Julian was a big star.

Darling of the art world.

He was lionized in the press.

He was the man at Mr. Chow's.

And Jean...

I'll never forget what Jean said. Jean said, I'm gonna box with that guy one day.

I'm gonna box him one day.

He was blessed with astonishing sophistication as a teenager.

He understood exactly where to position himself.

At age 18, he was already at the absolute epicenter

of the most advanced music, art in the world.

TV Party in the past has brought you some of the most

significant commentators on graffiti in New York.

But tonight, we're lucky enough to have with us, uh, probably the most language

orientated of all graffiti artists in New York, SAMO and his associate.

- SAMO. - SAMO. Sorry.

It's Mr. SAMO. This is my personal secretary.

Sorry, Mr. SAMO.

Do you write something different every time, or do you write the... you know.

I've written the same thing before. Just...

it all depends, you know, like, how inspired I feel.

And then he just started coming around.

He loved working the character generator in the control room.

He would sort of graffiti the screen with kind of running commentary.

Before Jean had started making the paintings, Jean began to make those postcards.

So he was just on the street selling these cards, and he still had the mohawk.

He was wearing these paint splattered smocks.

He was just like this spectacle.

He walked into this restaurant where Andy Warhol and Henry.

Geldzahler were having lunch.

Andy Warhol, he was like, just a demigod or a god or whatever.

He was our hero.

He was our everything.

He was just, like, a god, you know, who we all were in New York for.

So he went in and he presented himself and he

introduced himself and offered these postcards.

And Warhol bought two or three.

I was like, what?

I said, what happened?

He was like, yeah, I just walked up to him, man. And I was like, yeah.

Well, what did Henry Geldzahler say?

He said it was young.

I was like, really?

He saw Andy as number one, and he wanted to be number one.

So it was a natural thing for him to want to be around him.

I'm sure he would have like, hung out with Picasso, too, you know?

I went out every night, and I think he did too.

We all kind of went out together.

To Jean-Michel's credit, he wanted to be an

artist, and he wanted to be an artist of his time.

And that's how artists were sort of presenting themselves.

Big thing about Jean was, you know, we were out getting our groove on on the floor, dancing,

getting drink tickets, you know, putting that smoke in the air, you know what I'm saying?

Like, it was definitely going down in the major level.

He was a darling on the scene.

He was the prince of the scene at the time.

He had a really incredible way of dancing, because it was just drop dead cool.

The girls were gluing to him.

Glue, glue, glue, glue, glue.

He broke the heart of a lot of girls.

I met him at the Mudd Club on the dance floor.

He was kind of down and out financially, and I'd seen his.

SAMO drawings.

So when I ran into him, I said you should make art, you know?

You have to, you know? And I gave him some money.

Go get some paper and go to Canal Paint and make some things,

and I'll sell them for you, and you can make some money.

Characteristic of very good artists, it's a

mature, strong hand that can only be from them.

And he had that even when he was 18, 19 years old.

Everybody believed in him.

We all knew that he was a brilliant kid.

He was a star when he was broke.

Elio Fiorucci had this fashion store on 59th Street, and he loved the downtown scene.

And one day, he said, you know, it's so interesting what's going on here.

You kids should make a movie about it.

And so we said, that's a good idea.

It was the story of, like, a young artist who's struggling

to get by in the cool and scary world of Manhattan in '81.

We decided to let him live in our production office.

That was a way of, like, making sure that we could find him.

We bought him the first stretched canvas he ever

had for the purpose of the film, and one day,

uh, we had the big photography corner, and I said,

oh, Jean-Michel, enough of these street things.

I teared a huge piece, and I... we put it up, and he did it.

I don't know how many days it took him.

It was very intricate.

It was when I first saw him draw that I knew he was gonna be famous, you know?

He was working on "Downtown 81" at the time, and he sold his first painting.

Glenn O'Brien had introduced him to to Deborah Harry

and she bought his painting for $200.

And he was thrilled to have $200.

And he came in and asked me to go for dinner, so we went to, um, a

Chinese restaurant on 2nd Avenue, and he said, order whatever you want.

And, you know, the most expensive thing was probably $10.00, but that was a really big deal.

He moved in with me very soon after we met.

Not that I wanted him to, but it just sort of happened.

And I really wanted him to sleep in my bedroom.

He slept in the living room.

It was very, um, sort of innocent.

I wanted him to start working to pay the bills with me, because he was living with me.

So we would get in arguments about it.

And eventually, he went to work with a friend that was an electrician.

I was very proud of him that he was making this effort to work.

And he, um, came home and started to cry and said, I can't do this.

I really want to help you with the rent, but I can't be humiliated in this way.

And we went to this rich Park Avenue lady's apartment,

and she was treating me like a slave, and I can't do this.

So it was... there was something about it that was very moving to me.

And, um, so we agreed that I would work and he would paint.

The Times Square show ended up on the cover of The Village.

Voice as the first radical art show of the '80s.

Anybody literally could have walked up and just said, hey, I'm an artist. And they would let you hang work.

There was over 100 artists.

The Times Square show was the first time that Jean-Michel

participated in an organized real art exhibition.

I actually got Jean-Michel and Keith in the show.

I brought them along with me, and they made a big impact.

He painted in our little apartment.

We didn't have a lot of money, so he would bring home foam rubber, tin, windows, doors.

He would just find things on the street.

No, the first paintings I made were on windows... on windows I found on the street.

I used the window shape as a frame.

You know what I...

just put the paint... the painting on the glass part.

And on doors like I found on the street.

Went up to the apartment he shared with Suzanne.

It was one of the most arresting, stimulating artistic experiences I ever had.

He was very focused with his work.

The refrigerator door had this incredible painting on it.

And then some amazing paintings on windows, and all

these drawings strewn all over the floor on typing paper.

There would be 20 sheets of paper on the floor,

all seemingly half finished pieces of work.

And he would jump from one, walk across five,

literally walk on them, leaving sneaker prints.

We used to make the joke that you could date his work by

the different sneakers that he would wear over the years.

There's no artist who kind of abused his own work physically than Jean-Michel.

He was somebody who liked to have music on

and the television and the big stack of books.

People talk about multitasking, but that was part of the hard wiring of his brain.

Following the Times Square show, Diego wanted to do it his way.

And so he put his own show together, which was the

New York New Wave show at PS1, which was massive.

I was still going with Suzanne Mallouk at the

time, and she was about to throw me out any minute.

And then Diego came through with this show, which was just great, you know.

'81 was the PS1 show.

I was just tired of seeing white walls with white people with white wine, you know.

The opening for that show was the equivalent of like a

blockbuster exhibit at the Metropolitan or the Modern.

People were literally on lined down the block four deep to get into the show.

It was just packed.

Getting people in the art world to pay attention

to his work wasn't that hard, I'll tell you.

I mean, as soon as I started showing his work to anyone, they... they loved it.

After PS1, Jean's star was at the top of the constellation of the new emerging artists.

Annina Nosei connects with him and gives him the

basement of her gallery on Prince Street as a studio.

And it was a basement, but it was a nice basement with

a skylight and gallery assistants fawning over him.

This is a very crucial period for Jean-Michel, because this is the

transition period from working on the street to working in a real studio.

Very quickly thereafter, he got his first show at Annina Nosei.

His first real public exhibition is at Annina Nosei.

Which was a hit.

And he made $200,000, maybe more.

Everything sold in one night.

One day there was a knock at the door, and Jean-Michel is naked.

And he got up and answered the door, stark naked, and it was Rene Ricard.

And he was coming to interview him for Art Form.

My first Art Form cover story was about Julian Schnabel.

And I knew that the next person I wrote about had to be

totally unknown, had to be terribly young, very ambitious.

I wanted to latch on to a career that I could watch and

write about for a long time, like I had with Julian Schnabel.

That piece, The Radiant Child, was very involved

in helping Jean-Michel in his early career.

There was an article in Art Form.

- Rene Ricard. - Rene Ricard.

The second I saw his work, I got very excited.

He actually came up to talk about the painting that we had purchased.

He drew our attention to the snake in the corner.

It as very well done.

And he was very, very proud of it.

Do you ever comply with the requests to describe your work?

I never know how to really describe it except maybe,

I don't know. I don't know how to describe my work.

Do you feel that's important to you, though, not to be able to describe it?

It's I guess asking so how does your horn sound, you know?

I mean, you don't really...

I don't think he could really tell you, you know, why he played, you

know... why he plays this at this point in the music, or, you know, just...

you're sort of on automatic, you know, most of the time.

Has anybody ever written anything about your work that you think is on the ball?

Probably Robert Farris Thompson I thought wrote the best thing.

The guy that wrote "Flash of the Spirit," which is probably the best book I ever read on African art.

One of the best.

He had this unique ability to access almost

everything that was in his mind and memory bank,

channel it through his body, and put it right

there on that rectangle of campus or paper.

Jean...

I don't know how he got his knowledge, but he knew so much.

So what's the first artist work that you remember

seeing that left a really strong impression on you?

Probably seeing the "Guernica" was probably my favorite thing when I was a kid.

I remember my mother drawing stuff out of the Bible like

Samson breaking the temple down and stuff like this.

Was she a good artist?

Pretty good.

His father was fairly affluent, middle class.

An accountant.

He dressed in like blue blazers with brass buttons.

They lived on Pacific Street.

They owned the whole building.

So then you started doing your own little drawings?

I thought I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was younger, and

then I changed to painting when I was about, you know, 15 or so.

So you're like the black sheep of the family?

Well, I was until I started doing well.

One of the interesting things about this work is the

way it shoots references to other artists he admired.

The work is full of references to Leonardo da Vinci.

He wasn't unambitious.

Nobody could accuse Basquiat of that.

He's talking to the great history of painting that came before him, and he's very much aware of it.

And that's the context of his work.

He's talking to Twombly.

He's talking to de Kooning.

He's talking to Pollock.

I always think of him as a great artist a long time.

I put him in the highest place like Van Gogh, like Picasso.

There's also the important fact that he's not limiting himself to visual artists as mentors.

What books do you like?

Major ones that, you know, had facts in them or, I guess, Mark Twain.

I like Mark Twain books a lot.

You were reading William Burroughs when you were out here the last time.

I was gonna say Burroughs, but I thought I'd be...

I'd sound too young, because everybody reads.

Burroughs all the time.

But he's my favorite living author, definitely.

The work owes a lot to the influence of William Burroughs and John Giorno.

That school of poetry.

Jean-Michel adored William. I mean, he was a great fan.

The Burroughs cut up technique of slicing up, of collaging things

was a very important part of the structure of Jean-Michel's work.

William Burroughs he got from the surrealists.

This idea of cutting up like a page of your own text, written on a typewriter paper.

You'd cut it in four of rive places and then rearrange them.

And when you read across, and amazing images arise.

And sort of this is another concept of how you could perceive it of wisdom

arising, because a lot of it is gibberish, you know, when you're reading.

But then all of a sudden a clear line goes across, and that's profoundly profound.

So that's the essence of the cut up.

And then the influence of John Cage, vanguard jazz, Miles

Davis, Coltrane, that all of these sounds are interesting.

He's putting in Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and the whole

roster of jazz heroes who he can assimilate into his pantheon.

What music do you like?

Bebop is my favorite music, but I don't listen to it all the time.

I listen... I listen to everything, but I'd have to say bebop is my favorite.

He had a bebop aesthetic in terms of what he put visually on the page.

Bebop broke down melody and it broke down harmonies in ways that hadn't

been done before, thus creating another vocabulary for how to play jazz.

His collage technique was to take things and blow them up.

He had the expression boom for real, an explosion, and then you end up with fragments.

Rather than the cubist or post cubist way of building

sections, patching things together or quiltwork.

Jean-Michel's work was not about a quilt.

It was about a kind of galaxy of reality that's been, again, exploded.

So everything's equal.

It was a big loft, and it was pretty fancy.

I was going over there three, four nights a week, and there was a lot of other people that were always coming over.

It was really an incredible scene.

People who knew Jean-Michel saw him hanging out, socially active, late into the night.

So the question is, when did he do the work?

There is an astonishing amount of work.

He had an incredible work ethic, incredible focus.

If people were over, he didn't just sit and visit.

He was constantly painting, constantly getting inspiration from

something someone had just said or something that was on the television.

I don't know. I came the first day, and I basically never left for months.

And I would go home, and he would call up and ask me

to come back, because he wanted to get to work again.

So basically it was 24 hours.

It was paintings that he came up with his assistant Steve.

Torton, where the... the corners were sticks sticking out like some person

wrapped these things up and just make it quickly into a framed canvas or...

Basically, he showed me a pile of wood... molding

wood, like the little curly moldings, very flimsy wood.

A window chain, carpet tacks, canvas, and he

asked me if I could make a stretcher out of it.

So that is basically what gave birth to those.

Terrific set of paintings.

I mean, we bought a couple, but we should've bought every single one.

When I moved into the Crosby Street loft, for a

while, collectors would come over to look at the work.

And if he didn't like them... you know, if somebody said I want a painting

with shades of red in it to match my couch, he would become absolutely furious.

He would throw them out.

He would often pour food on their heads from outside the window

like cereal or water or milk out the window as they were leaving.

Jean-Michel was famously independent of mind.

No one ever told Jean-Michel Basquiat what to do and what not to do.

He did whatever he wanted to do.

It turned our world into a sports... like a tennis thing, where you had your ranking.

You know, boxing. All those metaphors with sports.

He had no qualms about being ambitious.

He was very anxious to be number one, and he was very concerned

that when he wasn't number one, he was on his way up the ladder.

There was a young guy who was painting, and I should see him, and he knew, you know, different people that I knew.

So I went down, and... and I liked him.

And at the same time, he was very competitive.

One day at Mr. Chow, he said something to me, because

he always talked about us having a boxing match.

I said, you know, you're gonna get the boxing match

that you've been asking for if you don't cool it.

Which is a fabulous way to start a... you know, a friendship and a business relationship.

And it was one of the... you know, as an art dealer, I gotta say it was

one of the most exciting things that have happened in my business career.

I was in the waiting area at Spago's on Sunset waiting to...

to get in at like 10:00 at night.

And Jean-Michel walked in with Rammellzee and Fab 5 Freddy, all behind Larry Gagosian.

And the restaurant came to a complete silence.

I mean, these three young black men, all more handsome than the next, and just, you know, who...

I don't know if people thought that they were in front of the newest Hollywood stars

or were about to get robbed, but at the restaurant just came to a dead silence.

It was fantastic.

First time I met Jean-Michel Basquiat is I was working in an art gallery while

I was going to film school, and he came in while we were having an opening.

And he had a cassette with him, and he asked me if I had any way to play it.

I took him to the back room, and I had a boombox back there.

And in like five minutes, he turned the back office into a

VIP dance area.

It was just a crazy opening.

Everybody came.

Like, by that time, the word had kind of spread.

This guy was making, you know, incredibly exciting, powerful work.

20 years old or whatever.

I went to the show at Gagosian.

Gallery, and it was huge.

We were utterly caught off guard by the energy and the content of the work.

He was a phenomenon.

It was extremely well received by players in LA, the Hollywood crew.

My recollection was they were all basically sold by the time of the opening.

He left Annina Nosei after just a year.

He called me up and I said, I'll introduce you to Bruno.

Bischofberger, who had shown an interest to me before.

Things started to change very quickly thereafter.

He was rapidly becoming a millionaire.

He was a guest at the time.

We would go out to dinner, we'd go back to the

studio, and he's in this expensive Armani suit.

He sees some painting, and he feels compelled to

change it, and he's painting there in his Armani suit.

He was in a loft on Crosby Street.

There would be like piles of money all over the place.

He was very young, and he had never had this much money.

And I... I think it was very awkward for him.

Do you spend it? Do you save it?

He had bought two new color televisions and a TAC

recording machine, and he didn't have a bank account.

He would often hide the money around the house, so when I would be cleaning up, I would

find thousands of dollars under the cushions of the couch or in the pages of a book.

That's the way he was living, and he was living high.

And whenever I would go over to visit, there

was always 20 people hanging around over there.

They were smoking pot.

There were tons of bottles of very expensive wine.

Gourmet, gourmet, gourmet delights in the

refrigerator all the time that just go to waste.

He was able to pay for the party for a while.

But that money will kill you if you don't know to deal with it, you know?

I was in charge of the production, making sure the right

food was served to the right people and the limo was there.

Entertaining the buyers, that was my job.

To produce his party. And that was a party.

So what was your first reaction when you

started selling work and making a little money?

I don't know.

Overconfidence, super confidence.

I was just happy that I was able to stick it out and then, you know, and then get things I wanted, you know? Like, after...

I felt like I... like I was right, you know what I mean?

The first really major press about Jean-Michel

was a story in the New York Times Magazine.

For a young African American fine artist, it was incredible.

It was literally rock star status.

There's this incredible photograph of him on the cover.

You know, that's really about Jean-Michel as a person, as a phenomenon.

And so he's propelled into the bigger world of culture.

Jean-Michel become gigantic celebrity.

Famous, wealthy, hanging out with celebrities, being praised, lavish gifts and money.

Everybody wanted a piece of him.

It seems to me of all the painters who've risen, you're

the one who gets singled out as this kind of a personality.

But at the same time, I sort of enjoy...

I enjoy the... I enjoy that they think I'm a bad boy, like a threat.

Yeah.

The whole bevy came into the picture.

And I remember saying to him, I want you to understand what

it feels like to be famous, so go and do what you have to do.

So it was very hard for me, very hard.

He used to often call me Venus in the paintings, and when he was having

an affair with Madonna, he painted a painting of me beating up Madonna.

We did get in a fight at the Roxy.

I'm embarrassed of that.

He was an intense center of a cult.

He was a cult figure of huge proportions.

Nobody knows what it's like if you're two painters in that situation.

Nobody else was in that situation with him.

They had a different kind of... you know,

whether it was Fab 5 Freddy or all different...

they had a different kind of... you know, I wasn't

his peer in that, since I was an older guy to him.

And he always wanted to know what I thought.

So the reason why I made the movie...

I wanted to tell him what I thought.

I thought I owed it to him.

$10.00 a piece. $10.00.

Oh, gee. Didn't work very much on these.

I can give you like $5.00.

Bruno, can I borrow some money?

Andy Warhol, like most people, was very seduced and enamored

by Jean-Michel, and I think probably had a crush on him.

It was such a big thing for Jean to become that close with Andy.

But he was the master of the game.

It's great to be that tight with somebody that we all looked up to in that way.

Are we rolling?

We're rolling?

Oh, and this is my best...

I mean, no, not the richest artist in the world,

Jean-Michel. Jean-Michel, what's your last name?

What's your last name, sweetheart?

Basquiat.

Jean-Michel wanted to be an artist in the great galleries.

Mary Boone, Leo Castelli.

But he was not an artist that was embraced by the art world.

You know, he was considered kind of an artist that could be on the cover of the New

York Times Magazine section, because there was a lot of underground feel to the work.

But I think there were still a lot of people in our world who didn't

put him on the same level as Schnabel and Salle and people like that.

I guess he saw Julian Schnabel, and I think they all had big

shows at the Whitney, and he didn't have that kind of recognition.

The kind of art that was esteemed in the mid-1970s...

minimalism, conceptualism...

didn't really allow for much innovation.

If you just kept pushing minimal painting and sculpture, you ended up with something academic.

The art was mostly minimal when I came up, and it... it sort of confused me a little bit.

I thought it divided people a little bit.

It alienated most... most people from art, you know?

Uh-huh.

He was really a pioneer in neo-expressionism, and so he

was breaking boundaries just by the nature of the work.

I think people really misunderstood.

At one point, he did a drawing as big as this painting

here, and he wanted it to go to a New York museum.

I said, OK, I'll donate it.

We offered it to MOMA, and the Museum of Modern Art

came back and said, well, he isn't worth the space.

And then we tried the Whitney, and they'd rejected it also.

When you first see brand new work, chances are if

it's really significant, it will be uncomfortable

to somebody like myself, because I am so immersed

in what painting up until now looked like.

And with Basquiat, many art professionals had skepticism about what he was doing

because the paintings didn't necessarily fit their idea of a museum painting.

And yet, of course, that's exactly what's

necessary in order to create the art of the future.

How do you... how do you work?

Do you just start with a blank canvas and just start painting?

I usually put a lot down on it, and then... then I take a lot away.

And then I put some more down, and I take some more away, you know?

So it's like a constant editing process, usually.

What... what do people like in your work that you are...

that you...

Got me.

There's something very direct about Jean-Michel's work that appeals to everyone.

It doesn't just appeal to the intellectual, but it does appeal to the intellectual.

He appealed to a lot of people who didn't have a great knowledge

of art history, but just looked at the work and liked it.

He wasn't schooled.

It was never something calculated.

That's not to say that he didn't look very closely at what he was

doing, but it wasn't something that he was following some pattern.

It was an instinct. He had incredible instinct.

You know, writing the word tar five times, crossing it out four times.

He was really a once in a generation talent.

And he had a way of making words pictorial and making them part of a picture.

Anybody who has eyes, they can see that he's channeling his inner child.

What's your... what's your earliest, most vivid childhood memory?

Probably getting hit by a car, I guess.

How did that happen?

I was playing in the street.

How old were you?

I was seven. Seven or eight years old.

And were you... what were you thinking when it happened?

Did you think, this is it?

It seemed very dreamlike, seeing the car.

I mean, it was just like in the movies, when they slow it down, you know?

When... when a car is coming at you, it was just like that.

And did they like, take you to the hospital and the whole thing?

Yeah, yeah. I had operations and stuff.

The whole business.

Like certain things that happen to you in psychology, you're arrested in time.

And he consciously and intentionally took that idea as a painter and ran with it.

I'm going to return to that time.

I'm gonna hold my instrument in a way that a child would.

I'm going to draw the way a child does.

He was also the most advanced contemporary mind.

He was both creatures.

So I understand now that you hobnob with the hobnobs.

And you go to this club called Area. Is that true?

Yeah, yeah.

When you get to Area, there's a lot of people outside.

It's a disco. It's a gallery.

And then there's a lot of pretty people there. It's big.

It's a big, big, big place, and it's...

it's hard to get in.

But I never had a hard time getting in.

But... but I've heard it was hard to get in.

I noticed quite a bit of a change in Jean when he really started hanging out with Andy.

Jean became a little bit out of touch with the old school fellas.

I really missed the old Jean a lot, because I didn't want to call him,

because I knew that I was going to get this indifference from him.

And then I'd go to his art openings and I'd see him

hanging out in the corner with a whole different crowd.

People that would ignore me.

Andy was kind of in love with Jean-Michel, and what's it like being a woman with

a homosexual man and a straight men and being the third wheel in a relationship?

That's what it was like.

I didn't visit him as much.

And I just really felt, well, you know, I don't really belong there.

As he became such a star in New York, I think it

became harder for him to work in New York City.

Around that time, he realized that he really did like Los Angeles,

and I think he also realized he could get a lot of work done here.

The Sollares rented a studio for him in Venice, which he had for about a year and a half.

And he made quite a lot of art in that studio.

I used to love watching him paint.

He didn't mind. I could sit there and watch him paint.

And it was just beautiful the way he painted.

I mean, it was just like, you know, fast and elegant and...

There was a whole group of people out here that he felt really comfortable with.

I started just hanging out with him and filming him painting, and I probably filmed

him over two or three years just hanging out in the studio painting with him.

What Jean would to do is he would go out at night, and then he would come home

and basically lock himself in for two, three days, just paint and paint and paint.

So do you have a specific method of working?

Do you have certain hours that you always work?

I just have to... I wish they'd find a television.

I have to have some source material around me, you know, to work off.

Like what?

I don't know. You know, magazines, textbooks.

You don't mind having a lot of people around, while you're painting, do you?

I've discovered that I think I'd rather work alone more than anything, you know?

I used to have assistants a lot around me, and then on days when

they wouldn't come, I would be a lot more productive, you know?

He was going out a lot, and he was under a lot of pressure to paint,

because he owed paintings to his art collectors and art dealers.

And each painting that he did had to be a masterpiece, because

now he was being criticized in the international art world.

I think it was getting harder and harder for him to go back and forth

from being an adventurous 20-year-old to being a serious painter.

He told me that he was starting to use heroin at that point.

He chose to use these drugs in order to concentrate, you know?

You know, I prefer a cup of coffee myself, but.

Put yourself in the position.

Here is this guy that is 20, 21, 22, you know, living on the street.

And within the course of two years, he became a really, really famous artist.

Everyone started flocking around him.

Can you imagine how that would be difficult to adapt to?

He kind of drifted to begin taking heroin, knowing that everyone who messed with it gets fucked up.

Jean did want to be this burning ember.

In modern times, there is for sure, whether you take Jackson.

Pollock, whether you take Vincent Van Gogh, a romance about the notion of the

artist as a person whose life is so intense that it's more than he can bear.

And there is always the question of is it a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

And I think in particular in Basquiat's case, he identified

very consciously with these heroes who had tragic endings.

He knew about the mystique of the drugs.

How much of that was his only relation taking to the next level.

So everything that happens to you then becomes heightened.

It's hard to go back to the real world.

There was a huge show for Jean.

It was a triumph because he was in a show with

the then, like, hottest contemporary artists.

I think like Schnabel and the Italian, you know, Francesco Clemente.

And me, Jean, we came outside and we were gonna go downtown to have dinner.

So Jean throws his hand up, you know.

He's waiting for a cab.

And one cab, two cab, three cab, four cab, five cabs like passed.

And Jean would sometimes get mad, because a cab would pass.

He'd try to run up, like, try to pull a door open, like, you fucker!

You know?

But you'd feel these moments.

Like, it was just a part of being black and living in New York City.

Like, these things happen, you know what I'm saying?

Of all the arrests this year, none have received as much

public attention as that of a young graffiti artist.

On September 15, 25 year old Michael Stewart was arrested for

scrawling on the wall of a subway station at 3:00 in the morning.

30 minutes later, Stewart lay in a deep coma at Bellevue.

Hospital's emergency room.

Michael Stewart was my friend, and very gentle,

kind of effeminate young black man with dreads.

He was going home one night on I train to Brooklyn, where he lived with

his parents, and he was beaten to death by five white police officers.

13 days after his arrest, Michael Stewart was dead.

It really affected Jean-Michel.

He thought it could have been him, and it could've been.

To go from a place where you're in a gallery, you're

at parties, you're in a place where everyone knows

who the hell you are, and is looking at you, or hoping

to do drugs with you, hoping to get laid by you.

And to go back out in the world and to be just this black guy walking around

looking kind of bum my to most people's eyes, that also was a mind fuck.

It was very different for a black artist in 1982.

Very different situation at that time.

He was something the art world had not seen before.

- And... and so... and you're... - you're seen as... as some sort

of primal expressionism?

Is that...

Like an ape?

Well, uh, let's...

A primate?

Well, I don't know.

Is that... is that...

You said it. I don't... you said it.

Well, um, you... you're...

Jean-Michel wasn't different.

He was an artist just like most of the people at those scenes.

But color makes you feel different, and you

know people are looking at you a certain way.

And all these different comments that you read about him

had all that kind of language and coded language in it.

This never would have happened to a white guy.

The art world, which is full of liberal, left wing types, was feeling

that they, you know, they needed to make a bow in that direction.

The disadvantaged minorities and so on.

His contribution to art is so minuscule as to be practically nil.

About your... your...

the story that you're always being locked in the basement in order to paint.

Oh, that...

that's just, um...

it has a nasty edge to it, you know?

I mean, I was never locked anywhere.

I mean, if I was a white dude, they'd say artist in residence, rather than say all that other stuff.

You know, it's shocking to even think that it's not that long ago.

The early '80s.

I had this a lot.

Most of my reviews have been more reviews on...

Your personality.

On my personality, yeah, more so than my work, mostly.

How so? How do you react to that sort of thing?

They're just racist, most of these people.

I know it affected him strongly.

It was very tough on him.

They have this image of me, wild man, running, you

know, wild monkey man, whatever the fuck they say.

There's this tendency to say, well, he's a primitive artist.

But he was a kid who grew up in New York City in the 1970s and '80s.

What the art world did to him reminds me of what

happens in... in various points in black history to...

to black artists.

A, you become a representation for white people of all black

people, because you're the only black person they know.

The guy obviously spent a lot of time thinking about what his place in the

world was, and what's the place of black people and black men in the world.

It's all in all his work over and over and over again.

He excavated the incredibly rich history of black people.

He's had an epic view of the history in his paintings.

He's going back to slavery. He's going back to Robert Johnson.

He's going back to Joe Lewis.

He's got a real sense of why he celebrates black kings,

is because the world doesn't celebrate black kings.

And suddenly you're a black king.

And now I'm here with the quote, unquote "elite"

of this particular world who controlled your value.

You're beholden to this world to make you what you are, but

you're always aware that how I can become cold, and what...

what am I to them? I'm just last year's thing.

And I'm just last year's interesting negro.

Something started to happen to Jean.

After a while, the party started to wear on him, too.

And he started to get a little bit more distrustful, a little bit more paranoid.

He distrusted different situations that he would be in sometimes, and

felt like he was being used, and that really fucked him... fucked him up.

You know, before, you left paintings around all the

time you leave these traces of things that you've done.

Are you more conscious of not doing that, or do you think...

Definitely.

Because they've wound up in auctions.

People... yeah.

I know people who've sold those things.

Like, everybody I know has sold those things, yeah.

He had more money than all of his friends.

And so that made him suspicious.

More people started surrounding him for exploitative reasons.

So partly there was a reason to be paranoid, and partly it was substance induced.

If you're using substances, it's very, very hard to stay grounded.

I think he wanted to have fun.

I think he was having fun.

He wanted to have fun, and he didn't want to get his feelings hurt.

And if he just could've had a little bit more support in a deep sense so he didn't

feel so damn lonely and didn't feel so taken advantage of and got so damn confused...

he just didn't have the tools to kind of navigate the sea of shit.

He went to Hana.

And he actually went there with his father.

I think he wanted to prove something to his father, or

he wanted to prove his father that he was successful.

Jean wanted his respect, and he wanted his confirmation.

So, um, of all the places that you've traveled to, which has been your favorite?

This is a boring answer, but I'm hung up on Hawaii.

- Yeah? - Yeah.

Why's that?

Because it's, um, because of the convenience of it and the wildness of it, I guess.

Because you can buy anything you can buy in America.

You can buy your favorite toothpaste.

And then you can just drive for two hours, and be, you

know, and they speak English, I guess. I don't know.

I remember Steve Torton once said something about you.

Steve said, you know, Jean-Michel is so cerebral, and he lives so much in his

brain that you can put him anywhere and it would be... it just wouldn't matter.

It's like, it's not like you're unaware of your environment, but it just

in some way doesn't matter because you're living in your brain and not...

I think it definitely makes a difference, though, from here and Hawaii and all.

I mean, I think I have to learn more and just not to work around

what's around me and just work with what I think, I guess.

I shouldn't let what's around me affect my work at all, I

think, and just... and just work on whatever I want to work on.

Do you still see yourself as naive the way you described yourself as a kid?

- Yeah. - You don't feel like...

Because I'm... I'm always embarrassed of... of the past. Always, you know?

I always feel like if I knew more, I wouldn't have done that.

I mean, naive, too, in relation to this incredibly high pressure, competitive art world that you're part of.

Do you maintain a distance from it so that you don't get cynical about it?

I don't think the art world is a thing with a set group of people.

They're all mercenaries trying to make as much money as they can as fast as they can, most of them.

I always felt that LA was like a safety valve, not that he could live his whole life here.

He was hardly gonna fit in here year in, year out.

But I thought it was a great place for him to work where he

didn't feel as much pressure, and he was more relaxed to paint.

I thought when he moved back to New York and gave

up the studio here, and I felt it was a shift there.

Crosby Street got a little out of hand, because everybody knew he was there.

People would constantly be ringing the bell, or he was

only on the second floor, so you could be like, yo, Jean.

And he kind of needed to move away from that.

And Andy came through with this place on Great Jones Street.

Andy love Jean-Michel like a son, almost.

And at various times, he was concerned about him, and I was, too.

So we sometimes talked about that.

I hung out with him and Andy several times during that period when they were very close.

Andy was really giving great advice.

Andy would be like, Jean, did you do this?

And have you spoke to your mom?

And did you blah blah blah?

He'd go through this list of things.

And Jean would be like, yeah, yeah, I did that.

So I was just like, OK, oh, wow, you know?

It was strange that if you're paranoid about people taking advantage of you,

and you think that people are exploiting you, and all these things, that

the one friend that you can call to be there on the lifeline to help you

out of this paranoia of your friends taking advantage of you is Andy Warhol.

But I think that with Jean, Andy really was there for him.

I'd never seen Andy so close with anyone, and I'd never seen Jean so close with anyone.

This was a real...

these guys really loved each other.

And Jean tried to do that collaboration show with him and thought he was gonna get

some kind of approval for doing this, and be accepted, and that it was a good thing.

Their friendship and that relationship led to not just dabbling

and trying out a few things together, but a large body of work.

Listening to what he had to say was probably the most fun.

Seeing how he dealt with things.

He's really... he's really funny.

Uh-huh.

You know, just tells a lot of funny jokes.

I was there once when they were working, and Andy would get mad at Jean-Michel for...

he would paint something, and then Jean-Michel would paint over it.

And that was funny to see.

Andy was more influenced by Jean-Michel than Jean-Michel

was influenced by Andy, because Andy had given up drawing.

And it was Jean-Michel that got him to draw again, and nobody could draw like Andy. It was amazing.

Yeah, we worked for a year.

Would he come up with the idea for one and then you'd

come up with one, or how did you do the collaboration?

He started... he would start most of the paintings.

He would put... he'd start one and put something very concrete

or recognizable on, like a newspaper headline or a product logo.

And then I would sort of deface it, and then... I would try to get him

to work some more on it, you know, and then I would work more on it.

I would try to get him to do at least two things, you know?

Uh-huh.

He likes to do just one hit, you know, and then... and then have me do all the work after that, you know?

So did you have rules like you couldn't actually paint over his stuff, or...

No, no, no. I used to paint over his shitty stuff all the time.

Yeah.

And luckily for the world, I suppose, they produced

a spectacular body of work, including a very

large painting with the Mobilgas Pegasus and a cut

of meat and a penguin that's a true masterpiece.

He felt that if he could align himself not only as a

friend of Andy Warhol's, but actually painting with Andy.

Warhol, this was going to take him to the next level... that

he would finally get the respect that he was looking for.

It was not what he expected.

Everybody attacked those paintings.

Jean-Michel embraced Andy at a period and a time when Andy was not very popular.

Andy basically couldn't sell his work very well in the '80s.

I don't know if Jean-Michel felt bad that he let Andy down or if he

believed what the press said, that Andy was taking advantage of him.

They said that he was Andy's lapdog and all these kind of things.

It really hurt him.

They said he was finished.

It was the attitude.

And it was hard for us to understand.

Andy Warhol died last week.

One week ago today, as he lay in a hospital bed following gallbladder surgery,

Andy Warhol's heart stopped beating.

His condition had been stable.

No one had expected him to die.

I was so shocked, because I always thought Andy would, like, outlive all of us.

They had a falling out, and he never had a chance to repair that.

And so I think it was extremely painful for him.

He really went downhill after that.

Jean was devastated, and he was crying like hysterically.

And some friends said, yo, man, you should go in there and talk to him, because people...

everybody that went up to him and tried to talk to

him he just like shut down like really abruptly.

They were like, mm.

And I was like, all right.

And I went in and I could just tell he was grieving. It was so bad.

Early on, he wouldn't admit that he was on drugs.

He wouldn't... he didn't want to talk about it.

I didn't know he was going that... that hard.

I was shocked to hear that.

I wasn't very involved in his life in, like, the last year and a half.

And I had heard he was doing badly with drugs.

And I went over there a few times to check on him.

I tried to address the drugs with him, but he would become

very angry and violent at that point if I talked to him about

stopping using drugs.

The pressure of that artificial world made it difficult for him to do something.

They tell me that the drugs are killing me,

and I stop, and then they say my art's dead.

I had just taken a job at Nell's.

And he came in super late, and there was a bit of a scurry.

And I didn't know who he was.

He sat at my table, and he sort of arrogantly said,

do you want to come and see some famous paintings?

I'm a really famous painter.

And I said, you know, super famous people don't have to say they're famous.

And so I went over, and his lights were off, or the electric bill wasn't paid.

I mean, there wasn't a life going on in there and we went back

to the back of the studio, and he started to pull out paintings.

Eventually, he pulled a couple canvas and said, which one do you like better?

And it was the double Elvis, which I now know was Warhol's, and I didn't then.

And I said, you should do more like that.

I really like that.

And so he just kind of chuckled and said, you don't know who I am, do you?

And I said, no.

And so, you know, as time went on, I realized, like, that's why he kept me around.

Because I hadn't the slightest clue, really, of where I was.

I was like, kind of cheerleading, because he didn't want to do the show.

He wanted to cancel the show.

I was there like saying, no, you can... you can do it.

A week or a few days and suddenly the opening.

His sort of hallmark had been this incredible detail, and that show was very stark.

But it was powerful.

Kind of more simplified.

They were more spacious and... and ironic, and they have a different

kind of head behind them, but they also kind of reduced him a little bit.

It was just typical of a late artist.

It's like he was doing late work at the age of 27.

They were very good, but they were really kind of lose and kind of scary.

One had the words, "man dies, man dies" all the way through it.

It was very scary, you know?

And he was like, looking really bad, and he had the

splotches on his face, and he did not look good.

He was a bad frame of mind, because he thought the press was going to get him.

And he was really worried about this article that Anthony was writing about him

for New York Magazine, and he was upset about his relationship with his father.

He was having a hard time with drugs.

It was all kind of hitting him at once.

At that time, there weren't that many people around.

Very, very few.

His gallery, a couple people.

I would say that I...

I think that he would... he was a bit lonely.

We were having lunch at the Odeon and Jean-Michel's dad was there with some businessmen.

So he's like, oh, that's my dad over there.

And he went up, he popped up, and he bounced over.

And he was with his friends, which was us, and his dad was with his friends.

He's like, hey, Dad, how you doing? Look, I'm...

I'm taking all my friends out to lunch. I'm successful. Blah, blah, blah.

And Jean-Michel came back with his tail between his legs.

His dad kind of iced him.

Just those moments where I saw him... it just deflated him.

I've seen this with other celebrity friends of mine.

Once they've encountered a certain amount of success, they tend

to go back to find people that they knew before they were famous.

He came to my 1st Street apartment and rang the bell.

And it was the middle of the night.

And at that point, I had a... a new boyfriend that I was living with.

And he got up, and who is it?

Jean-Michel. Can I come in?

Is Suzanne there? Is Suzanne there?

And he wasn't... Jonathan was not gonna let him in.

And I said, you have to let him in.

Maybe he's in trouble, you know?

And so I buzzed him in, but he never came up.

And that was the last encounter I had with him.

And he showed up to my apartment over on 1st Street, and he yelled out the window.

And he shows up with two paintings... with a diptych.

It said, to SAMO, from SAMO.

And like a... like a creep, I turned around and I sold those paintings.

Yeah.

When he was still alive?

He was still alive.

One of the last times I saw him was New Year's Eve.

He was sitting by himself at a bar looking very sad, but so sweet.

And he just smiled at me.

That image haunts me, because there he was New Year's Eve all by

himself at this bar, the most famous artist of his generation.

We bought the house on Maui that he'd been to before.

The intention was to just clean up.

And last minute, he decided he wanted to do that on his own, because it wasn't a pretty time.

And so he went on his own.

He came back through Los Angeles, and he was totally sober, and he wasn't doing drugs or anything.

I picked him up sitting out on a street corner.

We ended up picking up Chinese food, and then we drove up to the top

of Mulholland and then just sat there in my car and ate Chinese food.

He was not in a good place.

He felt like his career was over, and he really

knew that if he did drugs again, he would die.

But for some reason, he went back to New York.

The summer is a strange, you know...

it's a motherfucker in New York.

It's hot.

It's very lonely and empty in the summer.

I get a message on my answering machine from him saying that he was back, and that he was... he was...

he was clean.

He was feeling great.

And he wanted to see me.

It's like that... that classic thing about people who are...

are... they get caught.

They get caught at the oddest of times when they... when they

die from drug... drug... drugs, alcohol, and that kind of thing.

It was a normal day.

He and Kevin had tickets to go to Run DMC, and he was very excited about going.

He got in a limousine or something.

We were going high style to the... to the... to the concert.

Went out there and said, Kevin's on the phone.

And he was sleeping. And so this was...

this was normal.

I went up a couple times, and he was still in bed, resting or whatever.

So the last time that I went up, he wasn't on the bed.

Um, and he'd fallen on the floor.

We sprinted over to... when she said he wouldn't wake up, we ran over to his house.

And she opened the door, and we went upstairs, and he was laying there unconscious.

I was on the beach and somebody came up and told me.

Told me that he'd died.

Nothing surprises me about the success.

I mean, the only thing that surprises me is how, even though I was fan number one

or two, how I didn't even understand how extraordinary the vision was and talent.

So the...

now the future has arrived.

We're already 20 years later, and we can see better now.

Jean-Michel would be ecstatic, because the way the

game is played, Jean played it, you know, well.

This is a song for the genius child.

Sing it softly, for the song is wild.

Sing it softly, as ever you can.

Let the song get out of hand.

Nobody loves a genius child.

Can you love an eagle, tame or wild?

Wild or tame, can you love a monster of frightening name?

Nobody loves a genius child.

Free him, and let his soul run wild.