Blue Movie was released Elgin Theater in New York City on June 12, 1969, before the legalization of pornography in Denmark on July 1, 1969.[7] The film helped inaugurate the "porno chic" phenomenon,[8][9] in which porn was publicly discussed by celebrities (like Johnny Carson and Bob Hope)[9] and taken seriously by film critics (like Roger Ebert),[10][11] in modern American culture, and shortly thereafter, in many other countries throughout the world.[12][13] According to Warhol, Blue Movie was a major influence in the making of Last Tango in Paris (1972), an internationally controversial erotic drama film starring Marlon Brando.[4]
The film includes dialogue about the Vietnam War, various mundane tasks and sexual intercourse, during a blissful afternoon in a New York City apartment[1][6] (owned by art critic David Bourdon).[15] The film was presented in the press as, "a film about the Vietnam War and what we can do about it." Warhol added, "the movie is about ... love, not destruction."[16]
Andy Warhol described making Blue Movie as follows: "I'd always wanted to do a movie that was pure fucking, nothing else, the way Eat had been just eating and Sleep had been just sleeping. So in October '68 I shot a movie of Viva having sex with Louis Waldon. I called it just Fuck."[4][5]
The film was supposedly filmed in a single three-hour session, with 30 minutes initially cut for the 140-minute version.[3] The climactic section was shot in a 35-minute take.[3] According to Variety, the film has only 10 minutes of actual sex.[2][17]
Warhol explained to Leticia Kent in an interview for Vogue magazine that the lack of a plot in his films was intentional:
Scripts bore me. It's much more exciting not to know what's going to happen. I don't think that plot is important. If you see a movie of two people talking, you can watch it over and over again without being bored. You get involved – you miss things – you come back to it ... But you can't see the same movie over again if it has a plot because you already know the ending ... Everyone is rich. Everyone is interesting. Years ago, people used to sit looking out of their windows at the street. Or on a park bench. They would stay for hours without being bored although nothing much was going on. This is my favorite theme in movie making – just watching something happening for two hours or so.[18]
The film acquired a blue/green tint when Warhol utilized film stock that was meant for filming with tungsten lights, and the daylight coming through a large apartment window resulted in the film's middle reel turning blue.[19][20] According to Wheeler Winston Dixon, a filmmaker and scholar who attended the first screening of the film at Warhol's Factory in the spring of 1969:
"When the film ended ... I heard Warhol asking someone plaintively "Why is the whole second reel all blue?" So I told him about 7242, 7241, and the need to use the proper filter to balance the color when you used indoor stock outdoors, or vice versa. "Ohhhhhhh," said Andy. Long pause. "Well, I guess we should call it Blue Movie."[citation needed]
While it was initially shown at The Factory, Blue Movie was not presented to a wider audience until it opened at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theater in New York City[21][22] on July 21, 1969, with a running time of 105 minutes.[1][2][6][16][23] On its opening day in New York, the film grossed a house record $3,050, with a total of $16,200 for the week.[3] Warhol received 90% of the gross, which recovered the film's $3,000 cost quickly.[3]
Variety reported that Blue Movie was the "first theatrical feature to actually depict intercourse".[3][17][23][24]
Journalist Dennis Cipnic praised the movie and Warhol's filming technique in Infinity, the magazine of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. "The sex in 'Blue Movie' is, in fact, quite charming and a great deal more artistic than the embarrassingly phony gropings of panting actors which predominate in most commercial films," he said.[25] Critic John Huddy of the Miami Herald, who didn't like the movie, wrote "Cipnic should win a Pulitzer Prize for comedy—the most elaborate, best sounding justification for utter slop I've ever read."
Viva, in Paris, finding that Blue Movie was getting much attention, said, "Timothy Leary loved it. Gene Youngblood [an LA film critic] did too. He said I was better than Vanessa Redgrave and it was the first time a real movie star had made love on the screen. It was a real breakthrough."[26]
Controversy
On July 31, 1969, the staff of the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre were arrested, and the film confiscated.[4][6][27] In September 1969, a criminal court ruled that the film is "hardcore pornography" and the theater manager was fined $250.[6][28] Afterwards, the manager said, "I don't think anyone was harmed by this movie ... I saw other pictures around town and this was a kiddie matinee compared to them."[16] In reaction to the controversy, Warhol stated, "What's pornography anyway? ...The muscle magazines are called pornography, but they're really not. They teach you how to have good bodies ... Blue Movie was real. But it wasn't done as pornography—it was done as an exercise, an experiment. But I really do think movies should arouse you, should get you excited about people, should be prurient."[26][16]
Aftermath
In 1970, Warhol published Blue Movie in book form, with film dialogue and explicit stills, through Grove Press.[23]
^ abBockris, Victor (August 12, 2003). Warhol: the Biography. New York City. pp. 326, 327. ISBN9780786730285. Archived from the original on February 4, 2024. Retrieved January 19, 2016.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) [Note – in "view all"/"page 327" – from the book text, "In a final defence of his methods, which were used in Blue Movie for the last time, Andy told Leticia Kent, [in a Vogue interview] ..."]
James, James (1989), "Andy Warhol: The Producer as Author", in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the 1960s pp. 58–84. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Koch, Stephen (1974; 2002): Stargazer. The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol. London; updated reprint Marion Boyars, New York 2002, ISBN0-7145-2920-6.
