Wednesday, October 6, 2010

SCREEN TEST




Dancer Freddy Herko was a sometimes-roommate of Billy Name on East 7th Street, and appears alongside Name in Warhol’s Haircut. He had been accepted at the American Ballet Theatre at age 19, and later performed his own choreography with the Judson Theater. He was also one of the A-men, amphetamine poppers who frequented the Factory. “The people I loved,” said Warhol, “were the ones like Freddy, the leftovers of show business, turned down at auditions all over town. They couldn’t do something more than once, but their one time was better than anyone else’s.”

Herko’s Screen Test is tough to watch when you already know he would be dead a few months after it. He smokes, shifts around, looks gaunt and exhausted, and the film itself seems to run extra slow, stretching to five minutes. He lived that summer in 1964 in an apartment in St. Mark’s Church, and his behavior became ever more erratic. He started giving away all his possessions. Finally his roommate asked him to move out. On October 27 he ran into Johnny Dodd at a diner. Dodd invited him back to his 5th floor walk-up apartment on Cornelia Street. Herko went inside to take a bath. Dodd put Mozart’s Coronation Mass on the hi-fi. Herko emerged and began dancing naked around the apartment. When the record got to “Sanctus,” he danced right out the window, all the way to the sidewalk across the street. We never did listen to the Mozart piece; instead Britta played me an acoustic track in a minor key, all flutes and acoustic guitars, that she had been working on. We decided to electrify it, rehearsing with our live band, watching Herko’s every move on a laptop computer, starting with an ominous floor tom, building slowly to the point where Herko rises from his chair, switching keys, and ultimately changing to a major key for the final 45 seconds. Herko’s life ended tragically, but with an element of triumph; we wanted the music to do the same.

http://www.warholstars.org

http://www.factorymade.org

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