I Shot Andy Warhol

Biographical feature about Valerie Solanas, who achieved her 'fifteen minutes of fame' by attempting to murder Andy Warhol in 1968. The contemporary picture of Solanas is one of a disturbed lesbian who was driven by revenge because she was denied access to Warhol's Factory. I Shot Andy Warhol provides a broad and paradoxical view of this militant feminist (played impressively by Lili Taylor). Her background is sketched in a couple of short scenes. As a child she was abused; she was a prostitute to pay for her studies in which she investigated how to procreate without a man. In 1966 she is in Manhattan, where she sells her body occasionally to make ends meet. In the meantime she works on her SCUM manifesto, a tract for her one½person organisation the 'Society For Cutting Up Men', and on her play Up Your Ass. She then decides that Andy Warhol has to produce the play. Via the budding transsexual Candy Darling she manages to get a copy through to the artist in his fortress. Playboy Maurice Girodias, a publisher of pornography and Nabokov's Lolita, offers her a contract for a book. Things go downhill however when her aggressive personality clashes with the drug-abusing weirdos around Warhol. She develops a paranoid fantasy that Warhol and Girodias are conspiring against her.