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With Factory Girl, the new movie based on Edie Sedgwicks life, coming out soon I figured it was time to get the real deal on what Edie was like by talking to someone who actually knew and worked with her. I got a chance to speak with David Weisman who not only directed Edie in her last film but also recorded tons of audio of Edie just talking. He has included much of those recordings in his new book Edie: Girl on Fire.

Buy Edie: Girl on Fire

Daniel Robert Epstein: How long have you been working on this book?

David Weisman: Well, you could say 35 years. John Palmer and I finished Ciao Manhattan after five years in 1972 and immediately we came into contact with Jean Stein who had been very close to Edies older sister at college. She started interviewing us for her book that she did with George Plimpton called EDIE: American Girl, which came out in 1982. After her book came out and Ciao Manhattan finally got released, I had closure with all of this on a conscious level but certainly not on a subconscious level. In the late 90s I was looking through storage and I came across an amazing treasure trove of 30 hours of black and white 35 millimeter outtakes from Ciao Manhattan. That revived all the subconscious strands and I reached back to Jean Stein, who I hadnt seen in 20 years, and got back all the materials that I had given her in 1972, which included these remarkable voice recordings that John Palmer and I had made with Edie Sedgwick in the last ten months of her life. In those Edie tells her entire life story. We did them only for purposes of reference to help us come up with ideas for what we were going to shoot. So I never even thought twice about giving them to Jean Stein. When I heard them, I was astonished. I started playing them for people and when I would play these tapes in a room, everything would stop and people would say, Who is that and what is she saying? It began the current mission of this book.

Three years ago [Vanity Fair editor] Graydon Carter offered us an article because he felt it was time to take a new look at Edie. There was something in the air that somehow has made Edie totally in sync with the current zeitgeist in a very strange way. Graydon Carter authorized one of his writers named Frank DiGiacomo to work on an Edie piece and he and I spent many days interviewing people and he interviewed me and John together. Akin to what had happened with Ciao Manhattan, the article kept getting pushed back and back. After a year Frank DiGiacomo said to me, What would be great is if you could come up with some unseen Edie photography. I said, Well, Ive got a few things myself but let me sniff around. So because I have a compulsive/obsessive personality disorder, I had sought out and accumulated about 300 unseen, beautiful shots. Then I played some of the Edie tapes for Melissa Painter who knew the executive editor of Chronicle Books and she wanted to show all the materials to her. The following week the editor of Chronicle, Sarah Malarkey, came down and we made this deal to make this book Edie, Girl on Fire.

DRE: But you also did new interviews for Edie: Girl on Fire.

DW: Yes we interviewed over 60 people.

DRE: Was everyone willing to talk about Edie?

DW: Oh, very much. Many of these people were people who appeared in the Edie biography by Jean Stein and George Plimpton but are now looking back three decades to how perception has changed and how Edie has changed peoples thinking about themselves and the 60s.

DRE: Whats happened that has made Edie so popular again?

DW: It really has been happening gradually. When Ciao Manhattan was finished and Edie was dead for a couple of months, the reaction was Oh, who cares about Edie Sedgwick, shes so 60s, so yesterdays papers. That was a very painful time for me and for John and for anyone who had spent five years doing the film and had lost a dear friend. Then when the biography was published in 1982, an explosion took place. It was in the New York Times top ten for months. The following year it came out as a Dell paperback with a multicolor cover and that image started imprinting on people. Young women coming of age started to discover Edie Sedgwick as someone who represents something about themselves. Its about a woman who lived her life the way she wanted. She didnt give a shit what anyone thought. Edie Sedgwick never had a publicist. She never sought publicity, she lived her life as a life artist, which so astounded people at the time. Wherever she went, she broke the rules, set the trends and walked the tightrope and everyone just walked behind her to see what would happen.

DRE: How and when did you first meet her?

DW: I was an art student at Syracuse University in 1960 and in all of my art classes there was this guy from Long Island. We were the two weirdoes on campus. This kid from Long Island was Lou Reed. In 1962, we went to see the first foreign language film that either of us had ever seen called La Dolce Vita. Afterwards we sat there just so stunned and I got up and said, Im dropping out of school. I went to Italy and I didnt see him for five years because he finished school and I didnt. Then later in New York I started hanging out at The Factory with Andy Warhols crowd. There was a splinter group from the Warhol factory. There were seven of us and we all decided to make our own movie in 35 millimeter, not in 16 like Andy Warhol was. We had a frustration with underground films because there was this joke in the newspapers saying that everyones making underground movies but no one ever sees them. Even Andy was a joke. I met Edie in the Chelsea Hotel and we proposed that we would work together on Ciao Manhattan. So the splinter group started making a real movie with a real script and we just gathered together whoever was intriguing.

DRE: Was Ciao Manhattan always supposed to be all about Edie?

DW: There was this transformation that took place. I cant tell you exactly when it happened but first we were making a fiction film and little by little it transformed into Edies story, the story that she wanted to leave behind because its almost as if she knew where she was going. When people say Edie is the first Paris Hilton I have to laugh because she was the end of the Salon Tradition. Edie Sedgwick was the most brilliant, witty, charismatic person that anyone had ever met. She stopped all traffic in a room even if you were turned away from her. It was like having Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan or Marlon Brando walk into the room. She was engaging.

DRE: Who asked you if Paris Hilton was the new Edie Sedgwick?

DW: Oh, everyone asks me.

DRE: Thats so stupid.

DW: Of course but its endemic of the level of cultural exposure we get when youre living in a celebrityocracy where everything is sound bytes. Edie never went anywhere and had her people prepare for her arrival. She never was on a red carpet in her life. Thats what she was running away from. Edie was muse to the two most important artists of the time, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, they both knew why she was fascinating. No other woman can make that claim. Right now, Edie is somewhere between James Dean and Joan of Arc with a touch of Marilyn Monroe.

DRE: What was she like in those last ten months?

DW: What she was doing in those last ten months was putting the last final brush strokes on her life. She was definitely leaving her legacy and Edie Sedgwick was making sure that her story gets told. She would say everyday Its got to be real. If its not real, theres no movie. I never knew exactly what she meant but I didnt really try to find out. I just marched with that step. She called the shots just like she did with Andy.

DRE: You said you saw Factory Girl. What did you think of the movie?

DW: Well I made a film called Kiss of the Spider Woman about 20 years ago. The author of the novel [Manuel Puig] was a towering figure, very similar to Andy Warhol. They both were fey figures who created art out of common objects. Andy was visual and with Manuel Puig it was all words. They both lived with their mothers. They both died three years apart from toxic shock after gall bladder surgery after resisting the hospital for years. I wasnt very close with Andy but I was very close with Manuel Puig and he taught me one thing early on in the game. He said, Anybody can make a bad movie from a good script but nobody can make a good movie from a bad script. Thats all I have to say.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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