Free POPism by Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett Page B

deep, full voice to do it right. At the
Tarzan
screening there was a fat guy named Lester Judson who every couple of minutes would point at the screen and say, “This isn’t a movie—it’s a piece of shit! You call this a movie?” Finally Charles got fed up and almost blasted him off the chair with “Oh, shut up, Lester! Here you’re putting it down and this whole underground thing is just trying to get started!”
    I liked Charles and I asked if I could call him to be in a movie of mine sometime. He said sure, any time.
    One of the things that happens when you write about your life is that you educate yourself. When you actually sit down and ask yourself, “What
was
that all about?” you begin to think hard about the most obvious things. For instance, I’ve often thought, “What is a friend? Somebody you
know
? Somebody you talk to for some reason over a period of time, or what?”
    When people describe who I am, if they don’t say, “Andy Warhol the Pop artist,” they say, “Andy Warhol the underground filmmaker.” Or at least they used to. But I don’t even know what the term
underground
means, unless it means that you don’t want anyone to find out about you or bother you, the way it didunder Stalin and Hitler. But if that’s the case, I can’t see how I was ever “underground,” since I’ve always wanted people to notice me. Jonas says that the film critic Manny Farber was the first to use the word in the press, in an article in
Commentary
magazine about neglected low-budget Hollywood directors, and that then Duchamp gave a speech at some Philadelphia opening and said that the only way artists could create anything significant was to “go underground.” But from the different types of movies people applied it to, you couldn’t figure out what it meant—aside, of course, from non-Hollywood and nonunion. But did it also mean “arty” or “dirty” or “freaky” or “plotless” or “nude” or “outrageously camp”? When I use the word myself to describe our movies, all I mean is very low-budget, non-Hollywood, usually 16-mm. (Luckily, at the end of the sixties the term was retired and replaced by “independently made films,” which was probably what “underground movies” should have been called from the beginning.)
    When the independent filmmakers grouped together in ’59 to form the New American Cinema Group, the organizing force behind it was Jonas Mekas. The N.A.C.G.’s stated purpose was to look into all the different ways of financing and distributing independently made movies. Along with Jonas there was Shirley Clarke, Lionel Rogosin, and De on the original board of directors. Before long, though, the way it is with most movements, factions developed when members realized that they had different ideas about how to get the main objective accomplished, and also that they had misunderstood each other all along on what the main objective was. Mainly, there were two types of underground film people: the ones who looked at their films from a scholastic or intellectual point of view—as works of art—andthought of themselves as “underground filmmakers,” and the ones who looked at their films as commercial vehicles and thought of themselves as “independent filmmakers and distributors.” Out of what survived of the New American Cinema Group, Jonas created the Film-Makers’ Co-operative.
    Although at first Jonas seemed to be interested in both the scholarly and the commercial aspects of making films, by the end of the sixties it was clear that what he really was, was a scholar—he seemed completely content running his Anthology Film Archives. And by then, of course, he was famous.
    As De told me, “Jonas is very clever, particularly at promoting himself. He took over that movie column in the
Voice
at zero