This is partially because his films are obviously an inspiration to him personally. Haynes spends a lot of time on Andy Warhol. Yet, he still captures the period’s experimental tone. Haynes includes every scrap available, along with still photos and talking heads, to make the documentary chronological and straightforward. There is very little footage of the 1966 Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, which is a shame because Warhol was noted for filming everything. The documentary uses split screens, like Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, but also clips of his other movies, including his Velvet Underground camera tests. It earns its bona fides by including a smorgasbord of excerpts from experimental films. The Velvet Underground spends an hour in New York’s burgeoning and contradictory underground of the early 1960s. Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker thought the “healthy-looking” Californians should “get real.” Named after Michael Leigh’s 1963 book about the sexual subculture, The Velvet Underground – Reed, Cale, Tucker, and Sterling Morrison – were as real as the city streets and as psychedelic as a Dream Syndicate. Because The Velvet Underground’s songs were about drugs and dregs, Zappa thought they were a group of heroin junkies looking for a banana to smoke.

They even had a spat with their west coast counterparts, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, who were also musically adventurous, and virulently anti-hippie. With The Velvet Underground, director Todd Haynes effectively evokes the Andy Warhol Factory’s experimental celluloid renderings, and captures both why Warhol was so taken by the band, and the reason the Velvet Underground were not made for factory settings.īoth Lou Reed and John Cage are renowned as antagonistic agitators, and the band had nothing but disdain for much of their contemporaries.

Lou of the velvet underground crossword