And here is where the film achieves its most eerie and haunting resonance. Rasin found a wealth of material about Darling from Jeremiah Newton, her friend and roommate, who remains obsessed with Candy some 35 years after her death. Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon photographed her, and she starred in one of Tennessee Williams’ later plays, “Small Craft Warnings,” before dying of lymphoma in 1974 at the age of 29. As John Waters observes in the film, many other transvestites were freakish, whereas Darling was genuinely beautiful. Yet there was something unique about Darling. Warhol met Darling and cast her in a few of his shoestring productions, along with Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn (who is still alive and is interviewed by Rasin).
#Candy darling movie movie
Those who are not well versed in Warhol movies of the 1960s and ‘70s may not remember Darling, but James Rasin’s incisive documentary, “Beautiful Darling,” which received its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, not only tells Darling’s intriguing story but also makes a larger comment on the lust for celebrity that is one of the enduring, unhappy legacies of the Warhol era.ĭarling was born James Slattery, a Long Island boy who always felt like a misfit until he imagined that he might reinvent himself as a movie star in the mold of his idol, Kim Novak. He managed to carry that cool mystique with him for the rest of his life.BERLIN (Hollywood Reporter) - Several of Andy Warhol’s stable of performers achieved the 15 minutes of fame promised by their guru, but one of Warhol’s pets, the transvestite performer known as Candy Darling, probably achieved a few more than her allotted minutes before fading into obscurity. People could choose to be freaks instead of suburban housewives and preppy nobodies. Kids loved it and adults tried to make sense of it.
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It was weird, chic, trashy, cool, dark, sexy, and druggy. In the 60s wasn't every young person disenfranchised? In that sense he was WAY ahead of his time. The dangerous ones, at least.Īlso, I think part of it was that Warhol embraced the young, the beautiful, the fashionable, and the disenfranchised. After that he put up walls and barriers to keep the freaks out. Everything worked out for him for a brief time.Īnd then someone shot him.
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He himself was amazed that for a few years he was on top of everything. I think it just worked out that way and it couldn't have happened at any other time or place. He just did what he wanted and for a brief window in the 60s he was the arbiter of all things cool and weird.
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I don't think Warhol was the self-appointed king of anything. Whereas the depraved, perverted, queer, harder-edged New York crowd knew that it was all just a joke. They actually believed the things they said about peace and love. He (or it may have been Paul Morrisey) noted that the difference between New York counter culture and the west coast is that the hippies were taking it all very seriously. There's a telling passage in Popism when Andy is in San Francisco trying to make sense of West Coast hippie counter culture. Andy knew better and gave them a certain kind of cool, alternative fame instead. It's kind of tragic that they believed they would make it. It had absolutely nothing to do with talent.ĭrag queens and toothless trannies as cinematic sex symbols? It was hilarious and brilliant that he tried to pull that one off. He wanted to see the grit and imperfections. Andy wanted them to be dirty and badly made.
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It was basically him and Paul Morrissey putting their friends and hangers-on in really bad home movies and then showing them galleries and movie houses. He didn't actually take any of it (or them) seriously. R4 - If you've ever paid attention to anything Warhol did you'd know that all of that Factory Superstar stuff was very tongue in cheek.