The scene is fascinating: Pop artist Andy Warhol sits at a table. In front of him, there’s a paper bag containing a regular meal from Burger King. Warhol takes the burger from its packaging and starts to eat it. For roughly 5 minutes we watch him eating a burger, like any ordinary person would. And simply because of his fame, we watch ... and watch.
Once Warhol finishes, he sits silently for a moment, as if he were deeply reminiscing what has just taken place, and then he finishes the scene by saying these words, “My name is Andy Warhol and I just finished eating a hamburger”.
This movie was created by Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth in 1981, and it appears in his art movie 66 Scenes from America, a film that stitched together a series of lengthy shots, each a visual postcard from a journey across America. Leth did not know Warhol, but he was a bit obsessed with him so he definitely wanted to have him in his movie. Friends told Leth that he “should forget about it” and that he could never even approach Warhol.
Anyways – Leth was stubborn so when he came to New York for his movie he simply went to the “factory”, the building Warhol had rented to work at and despite all other claims simply managed to get to Warhol’s studio inside where he met Andy Warhol while he was currently working.
Leth just told Warhol about his movie and the idea of having Andy being one of the 66 scenes along with the highly “symbolic” burger. Warhol immediately liked the idea and agreed to the scene – he liked it because it was such a real scene, something he would like to do.
Jorgen Leth was a bit afraid that Warhol would not come to record the scene. He had invited him to a photo studio in new York at 14th Street/5th Avenue that belonged to a friend of him.
Leth had his assistant buy some burgers and directly advised him to buy some in halfway neutral packaging as Leth was afraid that Warhol might reject some brands (Warhol always had an obsession with some of his favorite brands).
So Andy Warhol finally did arrive at the studio, of course along with his bodyguards, and when he saw the selection of burgers the assistant had brought he asked “Where is the McDonald’s?” and Leth – slightly in panic – was immediately like “I thought you would maybe not like to identify… ” and Warhol answered “no that is the most beautiful”. Leth offered to let his assistant quickly run to McDonald’s but Warhol refused like “No, never mind, I will take the Burger King.”
Andy Warhol and Jorgen Leth
Directing the video was pretty simple. Leth said to him: “You simply have to eat this hamburger. And then after you finished, you have to eat it, after you finish you should just tell the camera, to the camera, my name is Andy Warhol, I have just eaten a hamburger.”
Leth was worried during the taking as he forgot to give Warhol a glass of water and the bottle of ketchup was brand new, so it was hard to get it out. But being a real Warhol there was only one take, one try, so Warhol pulled it through in just one take, roughly 5 minutes. But Leth liked the scene and how it came out, so that is why today you can see it here.
Why Coca Cola, Campbell’s Tomato Soup and why a Whopper from Burger King?
Andy Warhol was quoted as saying: “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
In the 20th century people were allowed to smoke in the office, the cinema, at restaurants, indoors and outdoors. Once women were able to smoke freely, smoking became a social norm. Adolescents smoked regularly – doctors even recommended it.
Cigarette sales peaked in the 1960s and have drastically declined since then. Tobacco products were once displayed across billboards and magazine covers. Smokers could enjoy the pleasures of lighting up a cigarette just about anywhere. At one point even pregnant women were encouraged to smoke.
Born 1922 as Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, American singer, actress, dancer, and vaudevillian Judy Garland had a career that spanned 45 years, she attained international stardom as an actress in both musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist, and on the concert stage. Respected for her versatility, she received a juvenile Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Special Tony Award. Garland was the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for her live recording Judy at Carnegie Hall (1961).
Garland began performing in vaudeville as a child with her two older sisters, and was later signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. She made more than two dozen films with MGM and is often best remembered for her portrayal of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Other film appearances during this period include roles in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Harvey Girls (1946), Easter Parade (1948), and Summer Stock (1950).
Although her film appearances diminished thereafter, Garland went on to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in A Star Is Born (1954), and a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). She also made record-breaking concert appearances, released eight studio albums, and hosted her own Emmy-nominated television series, The Judy Garland Show (1963–1964). At age 39, Garland became the youngest and first female recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the film industry.
Despite profound professional success, Garland struggled in her personal life from an early age. The pressures of adolescent stardom affected her physical and mental health from the time she was a teenager; her self-image was influenced and constantly criticized by film executives who believed that she was physically unattractive. Those same executives manipulated her onscreen physical appearance. Into her adulthood, she was plagued by alcohol and substance abuse, as well as financial instability; she often owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Her lifelong addiction to drugs and alcohol ultimately led to her death in London from a barbiturate overdose in 1969, at age 47.
In 1997, Garland was posthumously awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Several of her recordings have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 1999, the American Film Institute placed her among the 10 greatest female stars of classic American cinema.
Take a look at these beautiful photos to see a teenager Judy Garland in the 1930s.
In the 1970s the Punk scene in Britain, as well as in most part of the world, would describe their ideology as simply anti-establishment. No less, no more. So when the Sex Pistols members Johnny Rotten, Paul Cook and Steve Jones at some point all shared on stage in a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words ”I HATE” on top he immediately turned Pink Floyd to a love-to-hate example among not only the working class sub cultures like Punk but also among many ”established” intellectuals and music critics.
Suddenly it became haute couture to like Punk and to dislike sophisticated and talented, really talented, bands in general and Pink Floyd in particular. As critic Stuart Berman had written; ”Pink Floyd represented everything Punk was not: musically skilled, conceptually ambitious, filthy rich, tastefully bearded.”
When asked if the T-shirt was his own, John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten replied: “I’ve no idea where I got it from, it being green, which was an oddity ... not my colour. It might have been something I nicked off a stall.”
“Listen, you’d have to be daft as a brush to say you didn’t like Pink Floyd,” Lydon explained to the Quietus. “They’ve done great stuff. They’ve done rubbish too. Dark Side of the Moon I love. But I go right back to when they were with Syd Barrett. But I grew up with all kinds of music.”
This wasn’t Lydon’s opinion in the mid-1970s, when he was Johnny Rotten – and famous for wearing a T-shirt reading “I HATE PINK FLOYD”. The problem, as he said in the interview, was the band’s “pretentiousness”: “There was an aura of ‘Oh, we’re so great there’s no room for anybody else.’ But you know, I’ve met members of the band and I get on alright with them because they’re not like that at all. There was kind of a misreading and a misrepresentation in the press and they’re not holier than thou. In fact they are just like thee and thou.”
The PiL-leader and Sex Pistol also revealed that he turned down the invitation to perform with Floyd frontman Dave Gilmour in Los Angeles in 2008: “Dave Gilmour I’ve met a few times and I just think he’s an alright bloke ... when they came to LA, they asked me would I come on and do a bit of Dark Side Of The Moon with them and the idea thrilled me no end.
“Well no, it would have been very, very neat but it stunk a little in my head of ‘What am I doing here?’ I came so close to doing it ... it felt like I was trying to set myself up as some kind of pretentious person. I’m very wary of the jam session end of things. I just don’t want to do it. But I wanted to do it. But just not when 20,000 people were there. I’d have gone to a studio and played around with it there. But not for the bigger picture. Privately. I’d love to go into the studio and do something with the album with them.”
David Gilmour, on Johnny Rotten wearing an “I HATE PINK FLOYD” t-shirt: “I thought the Sex Pistols were rather good. I’ve been on a show with Johnny Rotten - it was at Sadler’s Wells - and he said he never really hated Pink Floyd and actually he was a bit of a fan. I confess to not having entirely believed it in the first place. I mean, who could hate us?” – Q Magazine, June 1999.
