“It’s shocking when you get a call like that,”Wareham says. “It’s odd to think that you would have an opportunity to work with Andy Warhol even though he’s not here. I immediately said yes.” Wareham and his wife Britta Phillips lead one of New York’s most sophisticated indie-pop bands, Dean & Britta, and were enlisted to compose the sonic backdrop for 13 of Warhol’s screen tests, black-and-white silent documentary portraits of visitors to The Factory filmed between 1964 and 1966. “The trick of them is that he shot about three minutes, filmed them at 24 frames per second, but then they play back at either 16 or 18 [frames per second],” Wareham says. “So they play back slower, which gives them all a ghostly, creepy quality and enables you to see more of what’s flashing across people faces.”
Wareham received the call about this dream project out of the blue from Ben Harrison, associate curator of performance at The Andy Warhol Museum, where Luna had performed previously. Harrison invited Dean & Britta to create 13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, a live performance that premiered at the Warhol, is now on tour and makes a stop at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room on Saturday. A DVD of the performance will be released in February.
Harrison suggested 13 because Warhol often collected the screen tests in compilations of that number, with titles like 13 Most Beautiful Boys and 13 Most Beautiful Women. To make selections, Wareham traveled to Pittsburgh to view some 150 screen tests in the museum’s archives. As he researched Warhol and The Factory, he decided to zero in on the players most integral to Warhol’s silvery world, including Billy Name, Edie Sedgwick, Ingrid Superstar, Lou Reed, Nico and Mary Woronov.
“I wanted to focus on people who were central figures, people who were there every day, rather than some famous actor who happened to stop by,”Wareham explains.
Since each of the films runs approximately four minutes, Harrison had individual songs in mind rather than “one long dissonant score,”Wareham says. Of the final 13 songs, eight are originals and the rest are carefully chosen covers. For Nico’s screen test, they perform “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which Dylan wrote for the modelsinger’s Chelsea Girl album. For Lou Reed, they tackle an obscure Velvet Underground song called “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore,” that just surfaced last year on a previously unreleased live bootleg recording from 1967. Wareham says the most difficult part of the process was determining the mood of each screen test in order to compose music that would match it to some degree.
Though some of the screen tests maintain a consistent tone, the mood of others swing wildly from one emotional extreme to another.Those who sit in front of the camera often seem to have a preconceived notion of how they will perform (or not), but their defenses come down in the course of the screen tests, and they can’t maintain whatever persona they originally planned to present.
“Mary Woronov noted that it’s like a psychological exercise,” Wareham says. “People come in and they’re told to sit in this chair by Warhol and stare at the camera. And they come in projecting something.
Like Dennis Hopper comes in really serious, and for the first two minutes he looks like he’s doing some actorly exercise or he’s experiencing some trauma from his youth. And then, it’s hard to hold that for three minutes, so at some point he breaks down and starts smiling and laughing. Ingrid Superstar’s is the opposite. At the beginning she’s laughing and smiling and by the end she’s crying.”
> Dean & Britta
Jan. 17, Allen Room, 70 Lincoln Center Plz. (Broadway at W. 60th St.), 212-721-6500; 8:30,
