Original subtitles

(train roaring)

(upbeat music) (sirens wailing)

(upbeat music) (soft singing)

♪ He says I'm looking for the man that shot my pa ♪

(upbeat music)

♪ I don't know about all y'all ♪

♪ I'm having a ball and he's having a ball ♪

♪ And she's having a ball ♪

- [Narrator] Andy Warhol was the most glamorous figure

of 20th century American art.

He surrounded himself with the elite of New York City,

people who all give compelling yet competing commentaries

of their time with him.

Warhol was certainly an enigma.

And yet ironically,

he is one of the world's most well known artists

and a cult figure.

Popular culture inspired his art.

Warhol used instantly accessible images

to reach mass audiences.

He gave Americans what was already theirs,

both critiquing and glorifying American culture

and the American way of life.

Andy grew up in a poor neighborhood in Pittsburgh,

the son of first generation working class

European immigrants from Slovakia.

His story is about the pursuit of the American dream.

♪ I'm having a ball and he's having a ball ♪

♪ And she's having bell ♪

♪ We're having a ball ♪

(upbeat music)

♪ I'm having a ball and he's having a ball ♪

♪ And she's having bell ♪

(upbeat music)

He came to New York with one shopping bag full of clothing

and another full of art supplies.

After only two days in the big apple,

Andy scored his big break.

Commissioned as an illustrator for "Glamor" magazine,

he established himself as a commercial artist

for famous fashion titles "Harper's Bazaar,"

"Vogue," "Vanity Fair, and fashion house Christian Dior.

- Actually, I wanted really to be a tap dancer

and I should have stuck with it.

It was so great.

- [Narrator] Within the next 10 years,

Andy Warhol would become a sensation.

Not only in New York, but worldwide.

He constantly put forward alternative ways us to live,

express ourselves and think about society.

(upbeat music)

- Here comes a young lady who has created

a real sensation of the picture business,

having won all kinds of awards, Marilyn Monroe!

(upbeat music) (crowd cheering)

- [Narrator] Monroe played in 20 films

since her debut in 1950,

films that grossed 200 million dollars.

The golden girl received 5,000 fan letters a week.

- Mister president, the lady Marilyn Monroe.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator] Hollywood, synonymous with American culture

and Andy Warhol knew this.

- [Marilyn] Well I mean, it doesn't matter what the person,

what they look like or what color hair they have.

- [Narrator] Marilyn Monroe was seemingly

the embodiment of the American dream.

And in so many ways, so was Andy.

Interestingly, both of these larger than life characters

projected a version of themselves

where nobody really knew the real person behind the mask.

Andy's father, Andre Warhola,

immigrated to the United States in 1914

and found work in a coal mine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

His mother Julia joined him in 1921.

And on August 6th, 1928, Andy was born, a third son.

Andy was a very sickly child with a nervous system complaint

known as St. Vitus Dance,

who spent a great deal of time at home.

His mother's belief in Catholicism

was something Andy adopted,

but he also inherited his mother's love of art.

She was an embroider who encouraged

her son's artistic nature.

Despite being so poor,

she bought him his first camera at nine years old,

along with regular art supplies.

Sketching provided him an escape from the poverty

of his surroundings, as did his somewhat obsessive

fascination with the film stars at the time.

(train roaring)

(upbeat music)

Andy didn't bother with a suitcase

when he left Pittsburgh in 1949,

it was just two shopping bags

full of clothes and art supplies,

plus a degree in fine arts to his name

when he arrived at his apartment on Eighth Street,

St. Mark's Place, New York.

A change of place brought a new identity.

Andy decided to remove the A

from the end of his surname Warhola,

as he thought the new moniker Warhol

made a grander statement.

His advertising work through the 1950s

covered highly stylized bags, gloves, jewelry and shoes,

lots and lots of shoes.

As a commercial illustrator in the 50s,

Warhol had already started to work with repetition

in a forerunner to printing.

His blotted line technique,

which became his signature style.

He would use tracing paper to allow him

to create multiple images from the same drawing.

He would first trace his original drawing

with ink in small sections so it stayed wet,

and then blotted onto absorbent paper, making a copy.

Individual copies would be filled in by hand

using ink washes.

(upbeat music)

In the 1950s, for the first time in many years,

after the hardships of the Second World War,

people had money to spend.

Advertising had become a big money industry,

and Andy was highly successful

and art directors loved him as he was a yes man.

(upbeat music)

♪ Pretty well, said Anne Louise ♪

♪ Don't fall for the (indistinct), he's a scam ♪

In 1956, he was making a staggering $100,000 a year,

which today equates to more than one million dollars.

But although Andy was very successful,

he wasn't very happy.

Gay men and women were drawn to big cities.

Cities were places where they could be employed

and live as their true selves,

avoiding the stares and discrimination

they would often face in more rural towns

if they revealed their true identity.

Andy had learned about love through television and movies,

only to make the disappointing discovery

that onscreen romances bored no resemblance

to real life as a gay man.

(upbeat music)

In those days, you did learn something

about some kind of love from the movies,

but it was nothing you could apply

with any reasonable results.

Andy was a romantic.

Many of his close circle expressed this sentiment.

Romantic love was an imperative to him,

yet because he was a gay man who came of age

in the 1940s and 50s, when homosexuality was a crime,

it was difficult to ever find someone to love openly

and friends remember that he became a very lonely

and somewhat absent person in many respects.

- [Interviewer] Have you ever been in love?

- No, no.

- No?

Does that make you sad?

- No.

- [Narrator] Physically he might not have been strong

and emotionally he might well have been yearning for love,

but Andy was somehow able to become another person

in the public domain, embracing how different he was.

From very early on, Andy risked everything.

Flaunting his sexuality, made him a pioneer.

The David Mann Gallery gave him several shows in the 1950s.

Many explicit artworks of penises were exhibited,

an audacious act at this time in America

where homosexuality was seen

as deviant and criminal behavior.

Hoping to reinvent himself, he refocused his career

in illustration into the fine art scene,

fascinated by the newly emerging pop art movement

led by the likes of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

- I think it's really what's around us.

It's the art in the world today.

I mean, our towns and cities are the billboards.

It's what we really see that isn't ancient

and isn't European really.

It's also a ready made form in which to express something.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator] Andy realized that pop art

was something he could exploit for his own ends.

In 1962, he made two large paintings of Coca-Cola bottles,

one drippy and expressionistic, the other clean edged.

Asking his friends which painting they preferred,

the hard edge version,

which looked more like actual coke bottles, triumphed.

The instantly recognizable image,

symbolic of the postwar era of automation and abundance,

commercialism and consumerism.

What's great about this country is that America

started the tradition where the richest consumers

buy essentially the same thing as the poorest.

You can be watching TV and see a Coca-Cola

and you know that the president drinks Coke

and Liz Taylor, and just think, you can drink Coke too.

By adopting the image of a Coke bottle,

he took his knowledge in commercial art

and brought it into the fine art world.

With the silk screen print, he's highlighting to the world

an image that exists in the real world of mass production,

whilst at the same time using the self-same technique

of mechanical reproduction to make multiple images.

Warhol made the commercial world visible.

So in tune with the whole essence and nature of the new

at the beginning of the 1960s, everything Andy contributed

to the pop art movement resonated Americanness.

(upbeat music)

After his first foray into fine art,

he was seeking his next project.

Having eaten Campbell's Soup almost every day of his life,

Andy found inspiration on his dining table.

- Yeah, then somebody can, it'd be like a store

and they just come in and ask you for a can soup.

And that was just the easiest way to do something.

Because everybody paints the same picture

over and over again anyway, so.

Oh, I used to eat it every day.

I still do.

- [Narrator] The piece marked out a whole new way

of creating for the artist and represented a complete break

from the previous decade's abstract expressionism.

The likes of Jackson Pollock,

who produced spontaneous, personal and emotional work.

- [Interviewer] Andy, do you feel that the public

has insulted your art?

- [Andy] No.

- [Interviewer] Why not?

- [Andy] Well, I hadn't thought about it.

- [Interviewer] It doesn't bother you at all then?

- [Andy] No.

- [Interviewer] Well, do you think that they've shown

a lack of appreciation for what pop art means?

- [Andy] No.

- [Andy] Andy, do you think that pop art

has sort of reached the point

where it's becoming repetitious now?

- [Andy] Yes.

- [Interviewer] Do you think it should break away

from being pop art?

- [Andy] No.

- [Interviewer] Are you just going to carry on?

- [Andy] Yes.

- [Narrator] People decried his art,

asking why anyone would pay good money

to visit than art gallery to see soup can images

when they could simply peel them off a can

and put them on their wall at home themselves.

They may at first have been a flop with the critics,

but Andy went on to revolutionize the art world

with these prints.

Incredibly aware of the imagery that he chose,

the critic's initial reaction

of disdain to his soup cans was disappointed.

Perhaps for Andy, a child from a humble upbringing,

Campbell's Soup symbolize something different,

freedom from labor, not being poor,

making choices in a consumer culture.

Andy had the eye of the immigrant,

being an outsider looking in.

(upbeat music)

♪ Have you ever met Miss Lindy ♪

♪ She's the gal with the bright red hair ♪

♪ Now she stands out from all the rest ♪

♪ You'd know her anywhere ♪

♪ Well she's mine ♪

♪ Yeah she's mine ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl with the bright red hair ♪

♪ Well Miss Lindy ♪

♪ My Miss Lindy ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl with the bright red hair ♪

♪ Have you ever seen Miss Lindy ♪

♪ She likes to dance all day ♪

♪ And when she does the rock and roll ♪

♪ It takes your breath away ♪

♪ Well she's mine ♪

♪ Yeah she's mine ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl 'cos she's so fine ♪

♪ Well Miss Lindy ♪

♪ My Miss Lindy ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl with the bright red hair ♪

(upbeat music)

♪ Well Miss Lindy ♪

♪ My Miss Lindy ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl with the bright red hair ♪

♪ Have you ever seen Miss Lindy ♪

♪ She likes to dance all day ♪

♪ And when she does the rock and roll ♪

♪ It takes your breath away ♪

♪ Well she's mine ♪

♪ Yeah she's mine ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl 'cos she's so fine ♪

♪ Well Miss Lindy's hair is fiery red ♪

♪ Her eyes are water blue ♪

♪ And when Miss Lindy smiles at me ♪

♪ Oh what it makes me do ♪

♪ Well she's mine ♪

♪ Yeah she's mine ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl 'cos she's so fine ♪

♪ Well Miss Lindy's hair is fiery red ♪

♪ Her eyes are water blue ♪

♪ And when Miss Lindy smiles at me ♪

♪ Oh what it makes me do ♪

♪ Well she's mine ♪

♪ Yeah she's mine ♪

♪ Well I love that little girl with the bright red hair ♪

♪ Well Miss Lindy ♪

♪ My Miss Lindy ♪

His art examined what constituted beauty.

He too had felt an outsider.

His insecurities rooted in his sickly childhood

exacerbated by pockmarked skin, a prominent nose,

premature baldness and later gunshot wounds

from an attempt on his life, plus his homosexuality.

- [Interviewer] What do you think about sex Andy?

- I don't.

(soft music)

- Within the past week,

unmistakable evidence has established the fact

that a series of offensive missile sites

is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

- [Narrator] With tensions rising between the US

and the Soviet Union,

Andy was working on another collection

entitled "The Death and Disaster Series,"

as well as his Marilyn diptych.

This project included images taken from newspapers

and police reports depicting car accidents,

photos of electric chairs, suicides and plane crashes.

It is as if the two polarizing projects

subconsciously fed into one another

with Maryland's actual death hanging over the artwork.

On the left, her garishly made up face

a depiction of an embalmed corpse,

while the fading images of the right

seem as though she is disappearing before the viewers eyes,

potentially suggesting her death by suicide

or by more sinister means.

♪ Happy birthday to you ♪

♪ Happy birthday to you ♪

Surprisingly, Andy Warhol spent most of his life

living with his mother Julia,

a church going mother's boy did not really fit

the Studio 54 party going image he cultivated.

She moved to New York for him, cleaned his apartment,

cooked for him and prayed with him every morning

before he left the house.

Andy's religious faith instilled by his mother

from childhood is fused with his other passion,

celebrity in the Maryland diptych where the female form

takes on the status as an object of worship.

(soft music)

♪ In the midnight scene, this routine is killing me ♪

♪ So let's wake 'em up, I'll wake 'em up ♪

♪ Our sleeping dolls ♪

The Marilyn artwork explicitly references

a form of Christian painting as a diptych

was originally a small portable altarpiece

on two hinged wooden panels used to spread Christianity

to the masses who could not read.

Andy famously remarked,

"I never read, I just look at pictures."

Warhol understood visuals and applied religious symbolism

to his portrayal of his celebrity, America's newest faith.

♪ I'll wake 'em up, I'll wake 'em up, I'll wake 'em up ♪

(soft music)

- And then I said every 15 minutes,

someone will be famous or every 15 people will be famous

in every 15 minutes.

- [Interviewer] Were you sort of surprised

how that has become a part of the lexicon?

- Oh yeah, I know, I can't understand it.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator] Andy wasn't just successful as a pop artist,

but as an American brand.

In the 1960s, "The Merv Griffin Show" was huge.

Warhol knew before appearing on the show

the worst my mistake he could make

would be to talk in normal terms.

His brand needed to be accessible through the medium of TV,

and yet the mystique must be maintain

to create further interest in his work.

Edie Sedgwick, an actress, model,

and one of Andy's superstars does the talking,

informing the host that Warhol,

unused to making really public appearances,

would only whisper his answers in her ear.

- Good evening, Andy.

- Andy, oh I missed one, Andy won't say a word.

- Why?

- He's not used to making really public appearances,

so I think he'll whisper answers to me

if you ask him a question.

- Can I listen while he whispers?

- I'll whisper to you.

- Aren't you gonna say one word, Andy?

(audience laughs)

\Andy, how did you discover Edie?

Come on, you can tell me.

- [Edie] By mistake.

- [Interviewer] By mistake?

Andy's gonna tell me, aren't you?

- [Edie] No, Andy told me.

- [Narrator] He understood that keeping

a large proportion of your life a secret

would keep you in the public eye for longer.

Andy's aloof character was utterly manufactured.

It is clear that so much thought went into controlling

his fame and not letting it control him.

(gun bangs)

(sirens wailing)

- [Reporter] At 1:25, the motorcade moves

into the downtown area.

Death is six minutes away.

In a warehouse, a sniper with a rifle poised waits.

- [Reporter] Within three hours

after the tragic death of President Kennedy,

Newsday published and distributed a special eight page extra

on the assassination free as a public service

to its subscribers.

(somber music)

- In the early 1960s,

Andy was given a stack of original photographs as a gift.

Warhol's depiction of suburban car crashes,

people jumping to their deaths from skyscrapers,

the atomic bomb, race riots, and the deep south and more

revealed the underside

of his country's consumerist and capitalist culture.

With this series, Warhol began to explore

the effect of reproducing such images

repeatedly across a canvas,

testing his hypothesis that as he suggested in 1963,

when you see a gruesome picture over and over again,

it doesn't really have an effect.

(soft piano music)

An unoccupied electric chair is depicted

in an empty room in the center of the canvas,

a cable running out from underneath the seat

lies curled in front of the chair.

Behind it, the small wooden table

is shown against the back wall and a barely visible sign

that reads, "Silence" is positioned

in the top right corner of the composition.

Warhol's fascination with death indicated his interest

in its constant presence in our everyday lives,

but also our apparent distance from its impact.

The chair depicted is based on a press photograph

from January 13th, 1953 of the death chamber

at Sing Sing Prison in New York where American citizens

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed that year

for passing information about the atomic bomb to Russia

during the Second World War.

"Electric Chair" is devoid of all human presence.

As the art historian Neil Prince has observed,

""Electric Chair" is remarkable for its visual sobriety

and emotional understatement and the emptiness

and stillness of the room represents death

as absence and silence."

The series drew attention to the gratuitous repetition

of images in the media and brought viewers back into contact

with the events themselves.

Warhol was able to penetrate the shining veneer

of postwar American life and reveal the darker realities

that lay beneath.

"Electric Chair" is filled

with a chilling sense of foreboding.

The real tear is left unseen,

making it all the more horrifying.

- And so my fellow Americans,

ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country.

- [Reporter] The cheers of the crowd almost muffled

the three shots, the assassin's aim is deadly.

The area is a swarm with police,

rangers and secret servicemen.

The murderer slips the net, but a few blocks away,

a man is captured after he is reported

to have killed a policeman.

That man is a 24 year old pro Castro Texan

who once sought Soviet citizenship.

- [Narrator] The violent undercurrent

that Andy saw permeating society became all the more real

with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

(somber music)

She wasn't a movie star, but she was America's royalty.

Young, glamorous, regal, and the most popular first lady.

She was a visual metaphor for the youth

and promise of the Kennedy administration

(soft music)

Warhol set to work on a portfolio of Jackie Kennedy prints,

choosing two photographs of her wearing

her pink Chanel suit before the assassination,

two from the swearing in of Lyndon B Johnson,

and four from her husband's funeral.

He avoided the obvious choice of an image

of the president being shot and concentrated on Jackie,

using muted colors with grays and blues placed on top

of the deep black of the photocopied image

of the former first lady.

Her beautiful features and glamorous style frozen in time.

In this way, Warhol presents to the world

a portrait of grief

haunted by the specter of past happiness.

(somber music)

(radio static)

(soft music)

(upbeat music)

♪ It's okay if I do it without clothes on ♪

♪ She could be cruel or out of her mind ♪

♪ Give that girl a kiss and have a good time ♪

♪ Come here, now everything is fine ♪

(upbeat music)

He was the first person to take his own fame

out of the realm of the personal

and place it squarely in his work.

Part of this was the establishment

of his infamous studios, The Factory,

the foil covered building at 231 East 47th Street.

A coterie of his followers and friends

spent swathes of time there producing his work,

being photographed by the artist,

or simply hanging out and partying.

They became the subjects of his art,

described as an assembly line.

Andy created films, prints, sculptures, and dresses.

To belong at The Factory,

you needed to have the right clothes, attitude, look,

but also you had to take the right drugs.

Amphetamines were Andy's drug of choice.

Speed as it was often referred to

was prescribed as a dieting pill, and by 1967,

a staggering 31 million Americans relied on this drug

to combat weight gain and depression.

Although it was never empty,

The Factory often felt like a lonely place.

The people drawn to the scene were often seeking attention,

love, and a family of their own,

and drugs provided an escape.

- [Reporter] Andy Warhol not only uses film,

but also video tape.

At this party, he just lets his camera observe.

The center of attention is his superstar, Edie Sedgwick.

- [Interviewer] How does it feel to act in a Warhol movie?

- Oh, it's so true, like it's not even acting.

I mean, it's just so candid

and like the camera isn't even there.

- [Narrator] 1967 saw the release of The Velvet Underground

and Nico's first album, a group that had first performed

in Warhol's traveling multimedia show,

Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

(upbeat music)

For The Velvet Underground,

it was a no-brainer to work under his wing.

They were relative nobody's at this time

and they had nothing to lose,

but everything to gain by associating themselves

with one of the most admired artists on the planet.

He was technically their manager

and paid for their recording session,

but he didn't know anything about music,

something singer Lou Reed bemoaned in an interview

with "Rolling Stone" magazine.

He was the catalyst,

always putting jarring elements together,

which was something I wasn't always happy about.

So when he put Nico in the band, we said, "Hmm,"

because Andy said, "Oh, you've got to have a chanteuse."

Nico was undoubtedly a jarring element,

at least musically.

The German born model, actress and nightclub singer

was a typical Warhol superstar with Bohemian sensibilities

and conventional good looks.

In contrast, what Reed had already written

for The Velvet Underground was anything but typical.

Many have written love songs about a boy or a girl.

Reed wrote a love song to diacetylmorphine.

♪ Heroin, be the death of me ♪

(guitar music)

♪ Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life ♪

♪ Because a mainline to my vein ♪

♪ Leads to a center in my head ♪

♪ And then I'm better off than dead ♪

- [Narrator] But if Reed wasn't too thrilled

at having a chanteuse in the band,

he soon discovered that working with Warhol

was its own kind of thrill.

(upbeat music)

"I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory,"

Reed commented about this period.

"All I did was sit there and observe

these incredibly talented and creative people

who were continually making art,

and it was impossible not to be affected by that."

Warhol also took up production duties on the band's debut,

although technically he didn't do any actual producing

and just left the band to do their own thing.

At one point, the engineer would say

apropos of something we'd done,

"Mr. Warhol, is that okay?"

And he'd say, "Oh, that's great."

And as a consequence of that, we experienced total freedom

because no one would change anything.

After all, Andy said it was great.

As a creative, there was no place better to be

than working with Warhol.

And The Velvet Underground started gaining publicity

that was unheard of for a band of their stature.

(upbeat music)

It was getting more and more difficult

to tell the difference between the PR and the actuality

because we ended up in the middle of a storm of publicity

that we didn't know was coming.

Velvet's member John Cale told the Red Bull Music Academy,

"We got a lot of notoriety very quickly attached to Andy.

I guess Lou didn't like that.

The way Reed handled it

and the way he did it was really destructive.

I mean, he just like blew up the band

and fired Andy without telling anybody.

And it was like, what?"

(upbeat music)

When the day came that Reed told Warhol in 1967

that his service was no longer required,

it remains unknown whether this was a decision

he made on a whim or had been edging towards for a while.

(soft music)

Reed didn't consult with his band mates

before firing Warhol, but he knew he didn't want to be

another of Warhol's creations.

Commenting on that infamous day, Reed once said,

"Andy passes through things, but so do we.

He sat down and had a talk with me.

You gotta decide what you want to do.

Do you wanna just keep playing museums from now on

and the art festivals?

Or do you want to start moving into other areas?

Lou, don't you think you should think about it?"\

So I thought about it and I fired him

because I thought that was one of the things to do

if we were going to move away from that.

I'd never seen Andy angry, but I did that day.

He was really mad and called me a rat.

That was the worst thing he could think of."

At one point, in his quest for reinvention and the new,

Andy said he didn't believe in painting anymore.

So his next step of combining art with music

and films with art was a natural progression.

Most of his films were unwatchable.

They did not appeal to a broad audience,

or even those who liked his previous work.

Warhol both engaged with the experimental films

of the period and somewhat mocked them,

pushing ideas of taste to the limit.

Movies that were already long were made longer

by projecting them at a slower speed.

Drugs, sex and violence lingered just outside,

and later squarely within the frame.

"Chelsea Girls" was Warhol's first major commercial success

despite being four hours long and shot on a split screen.

(soft music)

This film is prophetic in understanding our desire

to be documented, our performative nature.

It was ahead of its time and its influence can be seen

across the landscape of the 21st century within reality TV.

There was growing conflict and rivalries at The Factory

as Andy liked to pit people against each other.

As in his desire for attention,

he wanted them to compete to be his favorite star.

And so toward the end of the 60s,

Andy's relations with his friends

and superstars of The Factory began to break down.

He thought his subjects were art supplies.

They thought they were his friends.

(soft music)

June 3rd, 1968, a defining moment in Warhol's life.

Moments after Valerie Solanas entered Andy Warhol's

sixth floor office at 33 Union Square West,

their lives would be changed for ever.

She thought he was going to steal her manuscript.

He ignored her calls.

(gun bangs)

(soft piano music)

"Self Portrait" by Andy Warhol is what he wished

he would've looked like.

It's poignant that Andy's trajectory mirrors Marilyn's.

In the end, he winningly turned himself

into a somewhat superficial figure.

(soft piano music)

The year his mother died, 1972,

he made finger painting portraits of her, yet told no one,

not even his boyfriend of the time, Jed Johnson.

Emotionally, he found it hard to express himself.

Caring was too hard for him, it hurt.

He had consciously manufactured a persona

that only existed when he was interviewed on camera,

and this had seemed was what the world wanted.

Andy Warhol, the eccentric artist, not the real person.

The most interesting thing he could do as an artist

was put himself into pop.

- Everybody had always worked these crazy people

running in and out, and everybody had said to him,

"Hey Andy, maybe we should get a lock on the door

or something, you know, or at least have somebody

look at who comes in here first,

but that was just part of it.

And he paid a terrible price for that.

- [Narrator] 1968, Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist,

writer, activist and a player in The Factory universe.

She founded an organization called

the Society for Cutting Up Men, SCUM,

of which she was the sole member.

In 1967, Solanas encountered Andy Warhol outside his studio

and asked him to produce her play.

He had accepted the script for review.

He told Solanas it was well typed and promised to read it.

According to Factory lore, Warhol,

whose films were often shut down

by the police for obscenity,

thought the script was so pornographic

that it must have been a police trap.

Solanas contacted Warhol about the script

and was told that he had lost it.

He also jokingly offered her a job

at The Factory as a typist.

Insulted, Solanas demanded money for the lost manuscript.

Instead, Warhol paid her $25

to appear in his film "I, A Man."

In the weeks leading up to the shooting,

Solanas repeatedly called Warhol's office

with threats and demands about her manuscript

until he stopped taking her calls,

and so she became paranoid that he didn't in fact

lose the play but wanted to keep it,

claim it and make it his own.

On June 3rd, 1968, Solanas showed up at Warhol's new office

at 33 Union Square West.

With a 32 Beretta, she shot Warhol and Mario Amaya,

the London art gallery owner he was meeting with,

then fled the building.

Later that day, Solanas turned herself in,

gave up her gun and confessed to the shooting.

Two bullets from Salanas' gun tore through Warhol's stomach,

liver, spleen, esophagus and both lungs.

He was briefly declared dead at one point

during the operation to remove his spleen,

but doctors were able to revive him.

He spent two months in the hospital

recuperating from various surgeries

and would be forced to wear a surgical corset

to hold his organs in place for the rest of his life.

The other victim of the shooting,

Mario Amaya, wasn't badly wounded.

Ironically, in this near death murder attempt,

he now became the subject in the same tabloid,

newspapers and magazines that he scoured for stories

to make his " Death and Disaster Series" of work.

Even before he was shot,

Andy Warhol had left behind the vibe of the 1960s.

(soft music)

He believed that culture was moving away

from what he had created.

He had done everything he could do

and the shooting incident provided him with an explanation

to the rest of America as to why he had now changed.

Curating a new inner circle of middle class kids

who went to college, his world became more like a business

and the sole goal was to make money.

His identity was all part of his work

as was his social life.

Being seen and meeting new people was an art form in itself.

Endless nights at fashion's favorite club,

Studio 54, led to encounters with designers of the day

including Giorgio Armani, Betsey Johnson,

Gianni Versace and Halston, all of whom featured heavily

in his next venture, a style magazine.

Launched in 1969, "Interview" made use

of an experimental format

to profile celebrities and cult icons.

Models such as Iman, Bianca Jagger and Jerry Hall

graced its pages alongside aristocrats

and cutting edge artists.

(upbeat music)

It had been a gigantic movie theater and exotic fashions,

loud disco music and outrageous behavior

was the order of the day.

The clientele's very decadent behavior rivaled that

of anything that had gone before.

Celebrities came from all around the world

and Andy was drawn to this honey pot to gossip,

to be seen with all the right people

and to find clients to paint.

He made a lot of money from portraiture,

portraits of anyone who would pay him enough,

which eventually dented his reputation as a trailblazer.

His book "America" published in 1985 is a melange

of text and image with photographs selected by Warhol

from years of extraordinary shots taken on his travels,

which reveal staggering contradictions

of the country itself.

It was more of a social document

of what was going on in the country.

(upbeat music)

In America, Warhol writes about the country he loves,

about how he wishes he had died when he was shot in 1968,

about commercialism, fame and beauty.

And America without Warhol is almost as inconceivable

as Warhol without America.

In his touching, witty tribute is the great artist

of the superficial that is most deeply personal.

There is a continual theme throughout

most of Warhol's work,

a sadness that isn't necessarily obvious on first viewing.

His self portraits weren't ordinary,

and they're certainly not easy pictures to look at.

Colors have a ghastly hue and he makes himself look

as though he is staring death in the face.

He was so exhausted by his work in the end

that there was almost nothing left to him at this point.

Perhaps this is what the portraits show.

Warhol was undeniably sick towards the end of his life.

He had gallbladder attacks

result of the shooting 19 years earlier

that were extremely painful,

though the condition was not however life threatening.

On a plane home from Rome in February, 1987,

Andy became sicker and sicker.

His doctors realized he was in trouble.

The gallbladder operation he had to go in for

was very complicated.

However, he woke up from the anesthetic

and was talking and walking.

On the evening of February 21st,

Andy went to sleep and never woke up.

He was only 58 years old.

(somber music)

From early on in his career,

Andy Warhol had an extraordinary ability

to find the sacred in the profane.

Like so many successful Americans,

he was a product of Eastern European immigrant experience,

who himself became an icon,

a shy, gay, working class man

who became the court painter of the 1960s and 70s.

(somber music)

He anticipated our fascination with brands,

celebrities, even selfies.

His line about everyone being famous for 15 minutes

feels even more relevant in the world

of the 21st century media outlets.

Above all, Warhol was a chronicler of modern life.

He redefined art and what art can be,

what it can mean, who has access to art,

who can make art and who's voice matters.

He democratized the very notion of art making.

(somber music)

Andy Warhol constantly put forward alternative ways

for us to live, express ourselves and think about the world.

His artwork still resonates with the public

decades after they were created.

His impact has most definitely lasted

much longer than 15 minutes.

- [Interviewer] Where do you see yourself in 20 years, Andy?

- Oh, in heaven.

(interviewer laughs)

(somber music)