Andy Warhol's Bad

Andy Warhol's Bad
Directed by	Jed Johnson
Written by	Pat Hackett George Abagnalo
Produced by	Jeff Tormberg Andy Warhol
Starring	Carroll Baker Perry King Susan Tyrrell
Cinematography	Alan Metzger
Edited by	David McKenna
Music by	Mike Bloomfield
Production company	Factory Films
Distributed by	New World Pictures
Release dates	March 24, 1977 (1977-03-24) (Los Angeles) May 4, 1977 (1977-05-04) (New York City)
Running time	105 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$1,250,000 or $1.5 million

Carroll Baker and Perry King

Bad, also known as Andy Warhol's Bad, is a 1977 comedy film directed by Jed Johnson and starring Carroll Baker, Perry King, and Susan Tyrrell. It was written by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo, and was the last film produced by Andy Warhol before his death in 1987.

Tyrrell won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

Plot

Hazel Aiken (Caroll Baker) runs an electrolysis service out of her home. She also provides a service for clients who need some kind of crime performed, usually murder. She only uses females for these criminal assignments, and she sometimes rents out rooms in her house to the girls. Also living in the house are Hazel's husband (Gordon Oas-Heim), her elderly mother (Mary Boylan), and her daughter-in-law, Mary (Susan Tyrrell), who has a small baby and is constantly awaiting the return of her absentee husband.

Hazel doesn't use men for her hit jobs, but makes an exception when she accepts "L.T." (Perry King) to perform a job for a client who wants to have her autistic son killed, simply because she can't stand dealing with him anymore. While he waits for his call to perform the job, L.T. lurks around the house, stealing pills from Hazel's mother and taking perfume from Hazel's room. Hazel tolerates the behavior because she stands to make quite a bit of money from L.T.'s hit; the client is paying $10,000 cash, $5,000 of which will go to Hazel. Hazel needs the money because she's being shaken down by Detective Hughes (Charles McGregor), the cop who gives her police protection. Hughes is beginning to bear down on Hazel, and demands not only that she pay him, but that she double cross one of her "girls" and allow Hughes to make an arrest.

Hazel sends a young woman, "P.G." (Stefania Casini) to perform a hit on an illegal immigrant who pushed a musician onto the subway tracks during a robbery; the musician's arm was severed, ending his music career, and the musician's wife orders the hit woman through Hazel as retribution for the crime, since the thief only got off with a light sentence. P.G. finds the thief working a late-night job in a garage and crushes his legs under a hydraulic lift.

Another scenario involves a neurotic woman named Estelle (Brigid Polk) who hires two girls to kill her neighbor's dog after she imagines that the man has insulted her. The girls, one of whom is a compulsive pyromaniac, take Mary out for an evening before they perform their hit on the dog. They go to a movie, where one of the girls sets a fire in the projection room. Then they abandon Mary and steal a car, which also winds up torched. The next day, they see on the news that the fire has killed 14 people in the theater. The hit on the dog does not go as planned, and the dog survives, which infuriates Estelle. Hazel writes her off when she calls to complain, telling her to get therapy.

One client of Hazel's requests a hit job on her infant, which cries incessantly. Before the hit girl can arrive, she decides to throw the baby out of her high-rise apartment window herself, saving the money she would have paid Hazel. In the street below, a crotchety looking mother tells her young son "That's what I'm going to do to YOU if you don't shut up!"

Finally the time comes for L.T. to perform his hit, but he cannot go through with it, not out of compassion or remorse, but because he seems annoyed that the mother cannot do the job herself since the boy is so completely helpless and passive. Back at the house, Hughes shows up suddenly in Hazel's kitchen. With no cash from L.T.'s aborted mission, Hazel has nothing to give him and they get into a heated argument, during which Hazel makes a racial slur against him. Furious, he drowns Hazel in her kitchen sink. Mary walks in on the scene after Hazel is dead, but is too simple-minded to understand that Hughes has killed her, so Hughes leaves, taking Hazel's book of clients with him.

Cast

• Carroll Baker – Hazel Aiken
• Perry King – L.T.
• Susan Tyrrell – Mary Aiken
• Stefania Casini – P.G.
• Cyrinda Foxe – R.C.
• Susan Blond – Baby-Killing Mother
• Brigid Berlin - Estelle
• Matthew Anton – Drugstore Boy
• Cathy Roskam – Drugstore Mother
• Mary Boylan - Grandmother
• Gordon Oas-Heim – Mr. Aiken
• Michael Forella – Ice Cream Counterman
• Kitty Bruce - Karla
• Tere Tereba – Ingrid Joyner
• Renee Paris - Sara Leachman
• John Starke - Joe Leachman
• Lawrence Tierney – O'Reilly-O'Crapface
• Ruth Jaroslow – Electrolysis Patient
• Tamara Horrocks – Angry Mother
• Charles McGregor – Detective Hughes

Production

According to Perry King, Andy Warhol wanted to make a movie about "bad women and incompetent men." The film was written by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo. "You come to use Andy's eyes to filter your own thoughts" said Hackett. "But your whole consciousness isn't Andy Warhol's world."

Filming began in May 1976 and it was the first time a Warhol movie started with a definite script. It was initially planned to be low-budget, but the project grew to cost more than three times any previous Warhol film to date — $1.2 million — with the involvement of the Australian music and film producer Robert Stigwood. However, Stigwood eventually dropped out of the project. Warhol decided to produce the film himself using money he had made during six months of doing portrait commissions. Producer Jeff Tornberg raised the funds for production mostly through selling Europe distribution rights – Andy Warhol's Frankenstein had been a big hit. According to former Interview editor Bob Colacello, Warhol didn't invest any money in the film. Warhol's business manager Fred Hughes invested $200,000 and worked out a financing deal with art collector Peter Brant.

Filming had started without an American distributor. "It was the excitement of the unknown", said Tornberg. "Everyone wants to know what Warhol can do with $1 million." "We've always wanted to make a big movie but we've never had the money", said Warhol. "You can't go to an investor and say, 'Oh Holly will improvise, she'll think of something to improvise'. And we love the polish of a professional film. If you can direct this, you can direct anything." The lead role was meant to be played by Vivian Vance but she dropped out and was replaced by Carroll Baker. It was Baker's first film in the US in eight years. Baker had been making movies in Europe where she usually had to take her clothes off. "I'm looking to get away from that", she said. "People don't realize you're acting. They just see you're sexy and they won't take you seriously."

The movie was made without Paul Morrissey and Joe Dallesandro, the director-star team from previous Warhol movies. Perry King played a Dallesandro-type role and says the crew would sometimes call him "Joe". Warhol's longtime partner Jed Johnson, who had assisted Morrissey on previous films, was chosen to be the director.

King says he was cast without auditioning. He had just been in Mandingo (1975) which he says "was a big deal because it was kind of trashy. And trashy, to the Andy Warhol universe, was what they liked. Trash was big art to them."

King said Warhol "makes no effort to communicate his concept of the film, but it's a strong concept. You begin to feel it. There is a short hand among these people. There is a very special Warhol world view here and it's hard to define. But it will lose its edge in the professional technique."

Perry King later recalled "we actually all worked very hard on that film. Both Carroll Baker and I worked very hard especially... I think it was their attempt at a mainstream film... It was cast like it was a Hollywood film." "You can hardly call making an Andy Warhol movie a 'comeback'", said Baker. "It's more like going to the moon! The subject is totally unique. These characters are normal, sweet looking people who are monsters without knowing they are monsters. It's an attack on middle class morality. These people have no conscience whatsoever."

King says he and Baker struggled until halfway through the shoot. "We couldn't count on help from [director] Jed Johnson because he was just a kid and he didn't really know what he was doing", he said. They asked Susan Tyrell for help and she said they made a mistake reading the script. King says, "It sounded insane to me, but you know, she was absolutely right. If you're working on a Andy Warhol film you can't approach it like it's a conventional film with a beginning, middle and a end. You had to forget about the character arc... this was an Andy Warhol movie. You had to give yourself over completely to that world. You had to embrace that world and one of the things you did was to improvise everything. They didn't want to do anything conventionally."

Baker later said ""It had nothing to do with film-making, it had nothing to do with any other experience I ever had. It was like working on the moon. But he (Warhol) wanted me, he cast me in it, I wanted to do it, and it was such a big hit in Europe."

King says he, Baker and Susan Tyrell threatened to quit the film if they shot a scripted scene where a baby was thrown out the window. Jed Johnson promised not to shoot the scene but King says "the minute we finished shooting and had left--they went and shot that. As much as I hate it--it really fits in with the rest of that over-the-top universe."

Release

Warhol noted in The Andy Warhol Diaries that Susan Pile, his former secretary, had a screening party for Bad at the Picwood Theater in Los Angeles on March 24, 1977. The screening attracted over 750 people, including Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Julie Christie, and George Cukor.

The film had its West Coast premiere at a midnight viewing during Filmex on March 27, 1977. It opened in New York on May 4, 1977.

The film was presented at the Deauville American Film Festival in September 1977.

Reception

Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called it "a compellingly revolting experience" and "an occasionally amusing outrage for the Warhol audience. Don't see it after eating."

Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film "isn't so bad as it is merely morbid and depressing."

Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "an artifact of our time as a comment upon it. It's a deadpanned, Grand Guignol comedy." "'Bad' comes close to the sort of thing that Joe Orton, the late English playwright, was doing in plays like 'Entertaining Mr. Sloane' and 'Loot.' It means to be outrageous," he added.

Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "Johnson seems to have more technical polish than Warhol or Paul Morrissey, but the surprisingly crisp, professional cinematography on 'Bad' doesn't improve a rotten sensibility."

Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "Beware of Andy Warhol's 'Bad.' It has very little of the artist's touch ... Right away you can see 'Bad' has Warhol-brand bad taste. But what it lacks is a strong sense of humor."

Maurice Yacowar wrote for the St. Catharines Standard, "The basic tone is of an absurd, catastrophic and banal society approached with detachment and understatement. Warhol remains one of the truly seminal figures in 1970s culture. The film is rich in detail."

Joe Baltake of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote, "Director Johnson … stresses all the perversity and seediness inherent to the subject matter, adding even further color to it with some deadpan humor and touched of Grand Guignol … and regardless of what you might think of it, you'll have to agree that Carroll Baker's performance is the titanic supporting structure here."

Johnson's mentor Paul Morrissey considered it "a good movie. Extremely irreverent, maybe a little too much so. It came out a little harsh. All the characters are terrible. Nobody's sympathetic. But Jed did a very good job, and it's undeniably funny."

See also

• Andy Warhol filmography

External links

• Andy Warhol's Bad at IMDb
• Andy Warhol's Bad at Rotten Tomatoes
• Review of film at Standard