Factory Girl is a 2006 American film based on the life of 1960's underground film star, socialite, and Andy Warhol's Superstar Edie Sedgwick. The film portrays the story of Edie Sedgwick and how she came into Andy Warhol's life.
! --> The pics on this blog are real pics of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick.
Plot:
Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) is a young heiress studying art in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moves to New York City, where she is introduced to Pop Art painter and film-maker Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce). Intrigued by the beautiful socialite, he asks her to perform in one of his underground movies.
Soon she is spending time with him at the Factory, his studio and also the hangout of a group of eccentrics, some of them addicts. Her status as Warhol Superstar and success as a fashion model gain her popularity and international attention.
Her Cambridge friend Sid introduces her to poet and singer Billy Quinn (Hayden Christensen). The makers of Factory Girl created this character so as to resemble Bob Dylan. Edie sees that Andy is irritated when she tells him about Billy.
She tries but fails to keep her love affair with Billy a secret. To reconcile them, she arranges a meeting. Although he agrees to be filmed by Andy, when Billy visits the studio he shows his contempt. As he is leaving, she tries once more to make peace, but Billy calls Andy a "bloodsucker" who will "kill" her. Seeing that she will stay, he kisses her forehead.
As addiction takes its toll, Edie's relationship with Andy deteriorates. Confused, she is unaware of the danger while smoking in bed and starts a fire, surviving with burns. Vogue magazine refuses to hire her as a model, editor Diana Vreeland (Ileana Douglas) explaining that Edie is considered "vulgar". Interrupting a luncheon of Andy and his friends, she demands to be paid and accuses him of ruining her, shouting obscenities.
When Sid sees her again, she has become a prostitute. In a taxi, he shows Edie, who is very depressed, a photo of herself when they were art students. He says that he fell in love with her then, and tells her that she can still be an artist. She says that she cannot bear her loneliness but interrupts him, asking the driver, "Can we go?" When the driver says that they are stuck in a traffic jam, she leaves the cab and runs frantically down the street.
The scene changes to a hospital, years in the future. She tells an interviewer that she is overcoming her addiction and is glad to be home in Santa Barbara. Captions give facts about her last few years, her struggle to control drug abuse and her marriage to another patient, which ended in less than four months when she died of an overdose.
Notes:
Andy Warhol was often blamed for Edie Sedgwick's descent into drug addiction and mental illness. However, before meeting Warhol, Edie had been in mental hospitals twice and came from a family with a history of mental illness. She was only close to Warhol for about a year, from approximately March 1965 to February 1966.
Another fallacy was that Warhol ditched Edie after using her up whereas the truth was that it was Edie's decision to leave the Factory, lured by promises of stardom by Bob Dylan and his manager, leaving Andy feeling slightly betrayed.
Edie was first institutionalized in the autumn of 1962 after suffering from anorexia and, like her brother, attended the Silver Hill mental hospital. Her anorexia continued until she weighed only ninety pounds at which time she was transferred to Bloomingdale, the Westchester Division of New York Hospital.
Whereas Silver Hill was fairly liberal, Bloomingdale was very strict. Near the end of her stay there, she became pregnant while on a hospital pass and had to have an abortion.
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