A Walk Into The Sea - Esther Robinson Interview, Pt. 2

E. Steven Fried

ESF: So, how did the doors start opening for you to interview people like Brigid and Paul?

ER: Well, Brigid and Paul were my two most difficult interviews to get. I mean the way it happened was, I was really lucky in that a lot of the scholars were really generous with helping me locate people. If they found somebody, they would give me their phone number, or usually their address, and I would write a letter. So most interviews would start with a letter and people would maybe ignore that letter and I’d write another letter and then sometimes they would call back and I’d be able to talk to them on the phone, but most people took between three or four years to get them to actually agree.

ESF: So, it was just sort of a continual process, you would have to approach them multiple times until they were willing to do it?

ER: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Again, going back to the idea that here are people who are, not only constantly being contacted because someone wants to talk to them about Andy Warhol, but are also used to having things they say misquoted, taken out of context or used for someone else’s arguments they don’t agree with. They’re used to a certain level of abuse and I think the resistance was fair, although I ran up against it the entire time. It was very painful for me and very difficult but I understand, looking back, why they would be reluctant. I think what was always hard for me was, I wasn’t calling to ask about Andy Warhol, I was calling to ask about Danny Williams and, in a weird way, that was almost worse, because people were conflicted about Danny and they were saddened by what happened and then there was guilt and nothing makes people more reluctant to talk than guilt.

ESF: Were some of the interviews more difficult than others in terms of the rapport you had with the subject?

ER: I felt I had a good rapport with almost everybody, but the interviews were hard because of the way people remember. The clearest memories we keep are the ones we re-tell, so the hardest challenge with the interviews was keeping it on Danny and off of Warhol and what happens is when they tell a story, you can see them switch into a groove and it wasn’t that I didn’t want them to talk about Warhol, because I think Warhol’s an incredibly important part of this process, but I didn’t want them to tell the well-worn story, because it showed on their face and we were really close and so what would happen was, people would fall into a story that they would always tell and their eyes would deaden and it wouldn’t be urgent, we wouldn’t feel that kind of … you know the way the movie is cut is not linear, the movie is actually really oddly constructed and has to do with somebody saying something you want to understand and then handing you to someone else that says something you want to understand, so the biggest challenge was really keeping the interview off the worn-out memories and onto the ones that feel vital, that give you insight into something and also aren’t a regurgitation of things you already know. I wanted to get past the known story of what happened at the Factory and get into the nuance and the complexity of what happened, because I feel like that story is often told as ‘Warhol is bad’ or ‘Warhol is a genius,’ like he’s an evil, manipulative guy that got everyone on drugs or he’s the greatest living artist ever to kiss the earth. So those two narratives are told and retold and I wanted to paint a more complex picture. And people misremember, with all the best intentions as well. It’s not necessarily nefarious that someone misremembers. The thing is that everybody was on drugs and not just any drugs; they’re on amphetamines and amphetamines are a very singular experience. Like you really remember how you feel on amphetamines and your empathy is not peak. You know, like, you’re taking acid and you’re feeling your neighbors, you’re taking speed, you’re not feeling your neighbors, so there’s a whole side to why this history is so singularized, because you take speed, you’re doing your thing, you’re working your ass off, you remember working really, really hard and you don’t remember what anyone else is doing.

ESF: [laughs].

ER: And that’s true. It’s not the whole truth, but it’s your truth.

ESF: Aside from your grandmother, did you find any similar dynamic with your family, in terms of conflicting memories or trying to get past the well-worn story?

ER: It’s hard to exempt my grandmother from this, I mean, with my mom it was easy, because my mom is really honest and she is reaching for the truth and so she’s always very present in her interviews, because she’s trying to understand what happened, actively trying. My grandmother was very complicated, because my grandmother’s got old-school training, so there’s the story that you tell to make it okay, then there’s what you know and she was tough and would stick to her story and it was, like, how to trap her, maybe trap is not the right word… my grandmother was a woman with a lot of chutzpah. She moved to NY in the middle of the Depression to become a reporter, that’s the kind of girl she was, and so she actually loved adventure and she loved adventure more than propriety, although propriety was a good second, so what I would always have to do would be to overwhelm her propriety with a sense of adventure, which would be to ask her a kind of irresistible question and her first response would be to answer it and then her second response would be to cover it and so we did a lot of that.

ESF: And how about your uncle?

ER: That was a little bit more difficult. David has a more troubled history with the family in general, but again he was really game. I mean, I think that David and my mom were relieved to talk about it. Remember, they weren’t allowed to talk about it for thirty years. They were relieved and, in a way, they wanted to talk about it, it was helpful for them. My grandmother would rather not, but then she kind of liked the idea that we were making this movie, it was kind of fun, so again with her sense of adventure, she would just jump in and do it every time and then sort of backpedal, but again, as hard as my grandmother was, in a lot of ways, her instinct was to be truthful and her heart was good, but sometimes you can’t buck your training. You know, it was nearly impossible to be a woman in that era and resist convention. You buck convention as a woman in 1965 and you could lose everything, you could lose your husband, there’s no way for you to have a job, so it's important for people to remember that the reason she’s grabbing onto all these things is that’s survival, that’s what you learn and it’s hard to imagine the confines an era can place on somebody when you’re looking backwards, but my grandmother tried and was a remarkable person, but it was important to see the failings, in order to understand what happened to Danny, you did have to see where her love of him met the resistance of her fear.

ESF: Which was a very touching part of the film. You know, when she’s looking at the photographs of him and she doesn’t like the one photograph, because she feels he looks too soft. So, definitely, her feelings of who he was or who he should have been are complex.

ER: Exactly. And I think that that’s the way we all are.

ESF: One thing I found interesting is that Danny went to Harvard and there seemed to be a whole clique of people at the Factory who were either from Harvard or Boston. There was this Cambridge kind of clique.

ER: Yes.

ESF: And I always thought it was interesting that you had Danny and Chuck and Edie and…

ER: Danny Fields.

ESF: Yes.

ER: Henry Geldzahler was also with them.

ESF: I know some of them knew each other at Harvard, but did they all know each other?

ER: Yes. They all went down to NY. I mean Cambridge and NY had incredible ties. Cambridge had this incredibly robust gay scene. In fact, if I were able, I would love to do a movie about this scene. It’s insane. The Casablanca Bar. I mean Danny Fields, in one of his interviews, was saying the thing that nobody understood about the Harvard dorms was that everyone was fucking! Like, hearing that, totally changes your perception of what Harvard was then.

ESF: That plus the folk scene. Baez was there as well as Rick Von Schmidt. Dylan, to a great extent, furthered his career there.

ER: And because Danny was a photographer during that time I have photographs he shot of Joan Baez in coffee shops in Harvard Square. Again, all of this stuff, these are small towns with young kids and everyone is trying to get laid, they’re all running around, it gets porous, it’s delightful and so… Henry went down before everybody, but I don’t actually know Henry’s story very well, because I didn’t have to interview him [laughs].

ESF: Henry was a bit older, wasn’t he?

ER: I don’t know, because I have these pictures of him at Harvard with Danny and Chuck, but he may have already have left Harvard and just had been hanging out in the Casablanca scene, I don’t know.

ESF: I think Andy knew Henry as early as 1960. I think Henry was actually more established in the art scene than Andy at that time, because Henry was one of Andy’s entrée’s into the art world.

ER: They all graduated in ’61, so they didn’t leave Harvard and go to the Factory immediately. They all went and did other things and ended up at the Factory.

ESF: But Geldzahler must have been quite an operator, because he became an influential person in the art scene rather quickly.

ER: Oh yeah, I think that’s a good characterization. He was quite the operator. And also, if you look at Danny’s Factory film, again the Factory film is insanely prescient. It starts with the delightful, fun, easy, running around the Factory making Camp, part of that film and a little bit of Jack Smith and all these people and its really exciting and then, all of a sudden, by the end you get this slippy Warhol self-portrait and an maniacal laughing Henry Geldzahler and the film runs out. I mean, how prescient is that about what happened? It’s insane.

ESF: There’s something I have to read to you. Have you ever read a book of interviews with Warhol, I’ll Be Your Mirror?

ER: It’s out of print, right?

ESF: Well, the edition I have is from 2004. There’s an interview from 1966 by Gretchen Berg. I want to read a section, because Warhol mentions Danny. He’s talking about the Death and Disaster series and says,

“…The death series I did was divided into two parts: the first on famous deaths and the second on people nobody ever heard of and I thought that people should think about them sometimes: the girl who jumped off the Empire State Building or the ladies who ate the poisoned tuna fish and people getting killed in car crashes. It’s not that I feel sorry for them, it’s just that people go by and it doesn’t really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered by those who, ordinarily, wouldn’t think of them. (Oh, hi, Paul). I wouldn’t have stopped Monroe from killing herself, for instance: I think everyone should do whatever they want to and if that made her happier, then that’s what she should have done. (There’s something burning here, I think. Don’t you smell something?) In the Flint heads I did of Jacqueline Kennedy in the death series, it was just to show her face and the passage of time from the time the bullet struck John Kennedy to the time she buried him. Or something. The United States has a habit of making heroes out of anything and anybody, which is so great. You could do anything here. Or do nothing. But I always think you should do something. Fight for it, fight, fight. (There is something burning here! Danny, will you please get up? You’re on fire! Really, Danny, it’s not funny. It’s not even necessary. I knew I smelt something burning!) That was one of my assistants; they’re not all painters, they do everything; Danny Williams used to work as a sound man for the film-making team of Robert Drew and Don Alan Pennebaker…”

He goes on to talk about some other stuff, but I just thought that was a weird encapsulation of so many things.

ER: Yeah, I haven’t seen that at all. That’s interesting.

ESF: It was published in 1966 in the East Village Other. It was conducted by Gretchen Berg, who was the daughter of the film historian Herman Weinberg.

ER: That’s funny, I’ve heard all the tapes but I didn’t hear that one. That’s interesting. There’s a bunch of tapes at the museum of her interviews, but they’re mostly about Andy’s art, so I never heard the one with Danny on the sofa.

ESF: I just thought it encapsulated so many attitudes.

ER: No, yeah, it’s very… sad. All that stuff makes me sad. I’m so glad I don’t have to read all that anymore [laughs]. When you were reading I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, I used to be so tense’. You’d crack open a book and just scour for anything and generally what would you find was heartbreaking in some weird way that you couldn’t even really explain and if you put it in the film no one else would understand. So, you recognize why that’s interesting, because you have all this stuff to bring… funny.

ESF: Well, in preparing for this I went through some of the Warhol books I have, to look for references to Danny, and it was pretty fleeting a lot of the time.

ER: Imagine being his mother and doing that.

ESF: Another thing. I first heard about this film from Adam Sekuler at the NWFF, when he told me about the films they were going to show at SIFF and when he mentioned that one of them was a documentary about Danny Williams, I thought he was talking about Danny Fields and got confused, because I thought, right, Danny Fields, he did all those photographs and so on, so when I started researching, even before I saw the film it was like, oh, Danny Williams, he was the EPI guy.

ER: Yeah, yeah! There’s a ton of other people too. I mean, it’s kind of endless but… it’s interesting too how people know everything, but don’t know him, but there’s other people that get mentioned tangentially, you know, like Freddy Herko, who doesn’t want to know more about him? Andy’s first boyfriend? I mean, I wish he had made films too.

ESF: Yeah, that’s a whole other aspect of Warhol’s persona that doesn’t get explored. He kind of projected himself as being utterly asexual, but he had this whole string of boyfriends, like Jed Johnson and all these guys…

ER: Yeah, he had boyfriends all the time. There’s nothing asexual about Andy Warhol, except for people’s desire for him to not have sex.

ESF: Well, yes, that’s the general perception of his body and how people would say ‘oh, he was so sickly he could never do any of that stuff,’ but then you read some account of him on the make. Again, in I’ll Be Your Mirror, there’s a profile on Warhol from 1966 by Jim Paltridge, a UC Berkeley student who acted as Warhol’s chauffeur/tour guide when the Velvets played in LA. He’s showing Andy around LA, taking him out for window-shopping and dinner and a good chunk of the piece is about how flirty Warhol is and how he’s totally trying to get him drunk and get into his pants, but he finds it amusing because Warhol is so witty and charming. That’s an aspect of him that often doesn’t get talked about. About how he could be a strongly sexual person.

ER: There’s no way he could get that much done with all those boys if he weren’t charismatic as hell and that level of charisma is generally often wielded in advance of sex [laughs]. It’s like ‘duh’. It’s just interesting to me, I guess, I think maybe in part because our culture is still grappling with how embrace a successful gay man but, again, stuff will all come out over time. Especially once all the audiotapes are released. I mean the audiotapes paint a very sexualized portrait of Warhol and that will come out.

ESF: Oh, I’m dying to hear that stuff.

ER: It’s embargoed to quote, but you can go and listen to any of them.

ESF: Really? Where?

ER: At the museum.

ESF: The one in Pittsburgh?

ER: Yup. You have to remember though, you will be listening to mono, crappy recordings with omni-directional mikes, so it’s hard-going, but infinitely fascinating, having heard hours and hours and hours of them.

ESF: I want to ask just a little bit about where the film currently is. Is the film still in the festival circuit or are you getting close to doing the theatrical release?

ER: Both. We’re looking to do the theatrical in November. I think November 15, but that’s not entirely sure so, sometime in November. We’re going to do some more domestic festivals. We’re going to be at the Dallas Video Festival. Actually we’ll be in the Vancouver festival, which isn’t in the states, but is up by you guys. It looks like the West Virginia Festival and then we have a ton of festivals in Europe in the Fall and then it looks like it will come out in the UK theatrically in the Fall and in Australia and probably Germany.

ESF: Wow.

ER: Yeah [laughs].

ESF: So, when can we expect to see this domestically on DVD?

ER: The DVD should come out six months later.

ESF: So, sometime next year.

ER: Yup.

ESF: And are you going to try to get his films on the DVD as an extra?

ER: There’s still a lot of clearance issues with Danny’s films, because we have to find a lot of people, so it's us against the clock.

ESF: Oh, you mean in terms of getting releases?

ER: Yeah.

ESF: Oh.

ER: That’s why you don’t see any of the Warhol films on anything but bootlegs.

ESF: Oh really, is that the…

ER: That’s the basic problem. There’s not a culture of releases in 1965 or ’66, in fact the Factory does not start using releases until Lonesome Cowboys and then they literally transcribed the Lonesome Cowboys contract to make a Warhol Enterprises contract, which I think is like ’67 or ’68.

ESF: I always thought the reason those films were withheld from video release was a battle over who would have the rights and the parties could never parse out who gets to distribute this stuff.

ER: No. In advance of that, the amount of money it would take to actually legally clear them is prohibitive, but I think there are conversations about releasing some of them. The sad truth about the Warhol films is they become releasable once everyone is dead.

ESF: And you get that sense about a lot of that stuff. I mean we were saying the full story won’t come out for twenty or thirty years.

ER: Yeah.

ESF: I wanted to ask, you thanked Lou Reed in the credits. What was his involvement?

ER: I’m thanking Lou Reed in the hopes that he’ll sign his release, so I can use his image [laughs]. That’s his involvement.

ESF: Okay.

ER: I’m hopeful he will do that. He’s being very nice, but it’s difficult to pin down.

ESF: A dozen years ago I saw a screening of Nico Icon at the Film Forum on Houston St. at which the director, Susanne Ofteringer, was in attendance and Lou Reed was sitting right behind me, along with Laurie Anderson. I think John Cale and Sterling Morrison are interviewed in the film, but Reed isn’t. During the Q&A, someone asked why Reed isn’t in the film and she said he didn’t really want to participate and I looked back and they were gone, they must have slipped out during the credits!

ER: You know, he was really nice and we tried and tried and tried and we ran out of time.

ESF: So, he was actually pretty cooperative.

ER: Ostensibly, yes. We didn’t get the interview over a few years, but yeah. We were all trying. You know, it’s just, it’s not going to be his top priority to be in a movie about Danny Williams, you know, he’s got a lot of things going. I never attributed that to ill will in any way, shape or form. It was a great sadness to me that he wasn’t in the film. I think he would have had a lot to offer. In the same way that John Cale really brought this kind of compassionate and sort-of outside view, I feel like Lou would have also done that. I said earlier that people who came to the Factory with their art and left with that art intact, in a way, had the most compassionate view over what happened both for Andy as a person and for all the contributors, so I miss having his perspective, but I don’t think the film misses it, I don’t think it’s necessary, I just would have liked it. You know, again, it was my job to talk to everyone that ever knew him and it was hard when people weren’t available. It was literally painful to realize that there may be some facet of his person that would remain unknowable, because someone wouldn’t talk. And there’s a ton of people who just flat-out refused and they’re obviously absent, but Lou Reed was never one of those people, he just couldn’t make it work.

ESF: I wanted to ask a little bit about the music and who did the music. I’m assuming that you were going for a sort of Velvets sound.

ER: No, actually, we tried to stay away from that in the beginning.

ESF: Oh, really?

ER: Yes, really. The composer is T. Griffin and he’s a great composer. We started first with just a general palette, but he’s an obsessive researcher and had me and Shannon listening to all sorts of stuff. In a way, a deeper influence than the Velvet Underground was the stuff that influenced the Velvet Underground, which was 1960’s bubble gum pop. When we were doing our research at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh we came across a set of reel-to-reel mix tapes that were Danny’s. So we knew what he was listening to and then we also got a clear sense of what they were listening to at the Factory, which ranged from totally over-the-top opera music, serious opera queens, like Billy’s a total opera queen, so Billy’s tapes are one thing, but Danny’s tapes are all, like, these funny tapes, which he made for Andy, that are, like, Sally Go Round The Roses ten times in a row, which was one of Andy’s favorite songs. So, Sally Go Round The Roses was a signature audio piece for us, but Todd’s process was really to steep himself in the music of that era and, obviously, he knows the Velvet Underground. I mean, we all know it. Actually, we don’t all know it, my associate producer’s father had never heard them, which I thought was really exciting, but we shied away from that actual music and if you look at the sound score itself, it’s not very Velvet Undergroundian. We ended up having, at the last minute, the conundrum of what to put under the Velvet Underground material, under the EPI section, and had to confront the giant elephant in the room, which was the Velvet Underground and sort of figure out how we were going to both reference that and not duplicate that, but we didn’t think about them directly until we found out that we weren’t going to able to use the Velvet Underground song that is actually under Ron Nameth’s material, which we had been led to believe was cleared through him and then found out that it wasn’t. So about a week before, we had to pull that material. So all the colored light section, all that had had Velvet Underground music under it and then when we pulled it, we had to put something else under it and what ended up being great was that it’s actually so much better without it, because I think the Velvet Underground music was too easy and you didn’t actually see what you were looking at, you felt like you already knew it. So, I was actually glad that we pulled that out.

ESF: I remember hearing some music in the movie that had a drony sound that reminded me of them.

ER: That actually came out of a different inquiry. I had asked Todd to develop a palette based on the Rockport material.

ESF: By Rockport you mean an aural sense of…

ER: …the sea, of the walk into the sea. So there’s like an audio metaphor for his leaving and his disappearance that is different from the audio metaphor to his working. I had a couple of criteria. I wanted instruments that you didn’t necessarily recognize, but didn’t seem unfamiliar and I wanted sounds that you would hear by the ocean and so I wanted sounds that sounded like blowing over the top of a bottle or I took Todd to the harbor where Danny disappeared and there’s all these sort of crazy whining sounds, like gear sounds and halyards, which are like the ropes that hang off of sailboats clanging, you know, just all this crazy sound and so one of the things we decided to explore was we worked with a number of musicians, a friend of ours from Montreal, a percussionist named Bruce Cawdron, who’s in Godspeed You Black Emperor! And he brought the palette of bowed marimba and that’s, I think, the thing you’re hearing, but that was actually his collaboration with Todd, trying to come up with sea sounds, it just happened to work in this other way as well.

ESF: So, I think that… I’ve run out of questions.

ER: [laughs].

ESF: I wanted to say that this has been a lot of fun.

ER: Oh, awesome!

ESF: And, I think, I only looked at my notes twice.

ER: [laughs] You got a chatty Cathy, is that what you’re saying?

ESF: Uh, there was a really good flow.

ER: [laughs] Good, good, good.

Posted by E. Steven Fried at December 3, 2007 9:00 AM