BILLY NAME: Whenever people would come to the Factory, especially as they began to become famous, Andy would say ‘Oh, can we do your screentest?’ And it made them feel so wonderful, because in a sense it was a continuation of his portraiture – no longer on canvas, but on film.”
DAVE THOMPSON: “The screentest was a ritual every visitor to the Factory underwent. That same chair and much the same background would host poet John Giorno and actor Dennis Hopper, drag queen Mario Montez and filmmaker Barbara Rubin, superstar Baby Jane Holzer and Queen Edie, alongside every one of the Factory regulars, past and present. Through these short movies – or stillies, as Warhol called them, because so many of his subjects froze before the motionless camera – the artist would ultimately build up an unparalleled portrait of the New York avant-garde of the mid-1960s: Dylan, Donovan, and Dali; Ginsberg and Burroughs – 189 different faces floated before his cameras, some just once, some on several occasions. One day he would decide what he wanted to do with them.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “If you look at a still from Edie’s screen test you can see there the whole story. She is exquisite, but looking more closely you see something quite disturbing: a beautiful, frightened animal that has been tracked down, shot in other words, by Andy Warhol, and preserved as a kind of trophy, like the head of a deer on a big game hunter’s wall. Her face is vacant and afraid. She just isn’t there.”
MARY WORONOV: “The brilliance of the screentest was the way the subject’s expressions changed, making it a psychological study, the idea of conferring immortality onto unknowns, the deafening speechlessness of it.”
HENRY GELDZAHLER: “Seeing a film he made of me, I suddenly realized that Andy’s nature really is a great portraitist, and that if you sit somebody in front of a camera for an hour and a half and don’t tell them what to do, they’re going to do everything, their whole vocabulary. I went through my entire history of gestures. I could see from viewing the film later on that it gave me away completely – the extent to which I am infantile, the extent to which I am megalomaniacal – all the things one tries to hide come through on the film.”
