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| The Return of Candy Darling
Documentary humanizes Warhol's troubled superstarlet 
Is there room for another Andy Warhol-related documentary? The answer is yes, as evidenced by the screening of Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. It's a story that takes you back to the heady days of the Factory in the '60s and '70s, and benefits from some excellent archive footage and a treasure trove of audio tapes kept safe all these years by Candy's close friend, Jeremiah Newton (who also appears in the movie and is a co-producer). Director James Rasin was in town for his SIFF screenings and sat down for an interview. "He promised Candy when she was very sick that he would really try to keep her name alive." Well, the Jackie Curtis documentary came out [Superstar in a Housedress], and I think he started feeling that if he didn't do it, somebody else was going to make a documentary. And so he recruited me. I had no idea what I was getting into. I'd always wanted to direct a feature film, but something maybe that I had written. I never really had any kind of strong desire to make a documentary. But I've done a lot of things in theater, short films, written screenplays, and I wrote a novel. And I feel that whatever the medium or whatever the genre, it's all really a matter of structure and story and character, whether it's a play or a screenplay or a documentary. It's just about arranging the pieces. Some documentaries I almost find too intrusive, the more "reality TV" - type ones, where you feel you're watching moments that are too private. You're not that in-your-face about it. I got some reactions, where people were like, "Well, I couldn't really get into the film because I don't know where you're coming from. What's your take on it?" Everyone wants so badly to know what the filmmaker thinks. That's why a lot of these personal documentaries are very popular, I think, because it's "This is me, this is how I feel, this is about me, me, me, me, me." And I kind of went out of my way to make my film in a way where I do kind of disappear, I hope. It's interesting that that bothered them, that they needed you to put it into context. They want to be told what they're supposed to think. And I like to think of it more as just like a discussion and you figure it out or you see how you feel. What did you learn from making this film? Well, my own take on Candy, before I started making this film, was she wasn't someone I was necessarily interested in, because what Candy appeared to me to be trying to aspire to was something that I found to be not very interesting - superficiality, a certain kind of a cliched image of what a glamorous blonde woman should be. But what I discovered by making the film and learning so much more about her, was how much there is behind that image, how much discipline and courage and talent went into creating that image. It's like Warhol's paintings: there are people who complain about how they're one-dimensional, just a pop art image, there's nothing behind it. But there is something behind those Warhol paintings that is very, very interesting. And I think there's something behind the surface of Candy's image, an image which is at first glance just a recreation of a Hollywood studio head's idea of what a glamorous woman is, or was in the 1930s. So that was the biggest revelation to me about Candy and who she was and where the artistry lay. I like the different perspectives in the movie. Some people contradict each other. Yeah, we kind of throw out a few different versions. And I don't think people find it confusing; we worked out a way that hopefully that doesn't happen. I mean, Candy's dead, the only way people remember her is through their memories, and memories are notoriously suspect. Well, different people do know different sides of you. And I think Candy, especially, played that game when she was alive. She would reveal certain parts of herself to certain people. It was like the hall of mirrors. I think people had a hard time figuring out who the real Candy was or what lay inside there. One of the things that people would always say to me, which really struck me, was, "Candy was the most genuine person I ever knew." Gee, here was somebody who was a complete construct, totally a creation of artificiality, and yet by becoming this totally artificial persona, they somehow achieve or arrive at a certain kind of truth about themselves that makes them genuine. How does that happen?
by Gail Ragnali - editor@wildworldnews.com --- This story originally published in Mary Jane Magazine #2, Fall 2010. |
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