Remaking an icon: On the set of 'Factory Girl'
By Alexandyr Kent
January 22, 2006

Actor Edward Herrmann talks with actress Sienna Miller during a rehearsal for the filming of "Factory Girl" one recent Thursday afternoon at the intersection of Texas at McNeill streets in downtown Shreveport. At right is director George Hickenlooper. (Jim Hudelson/The Times )

Since early December, the makers of "Factory Girl" have been pulling scenes of mid-1960s New York from the fabric of downtown Shreveport.

How can a relatively small Southern city be transformed into a bigger place existing during a different time?

Surrounded by 1960s-era cars and with a large group of extras clad in retro clothing in the background, Boris Malden, line producer of "Factory Girl," presides over a morning shoot near McNeill at Texas streets. He points to the nearby YMCA and says making local places look like part of the Big Apple is easier than one might think.

"We just shot this street scene establishing a New York City apartment building," he says. "You look across (the street) at the building with a couple taxi cabs and a couple of extras dressed in police uniforms and you believe it. It's totally like New York. But that's what we do. It's movie magic."

Who is the Factory Girl?

Wearing knee-high black boots, black tights, a short navy blue dress and a hooded sweatshirt, the whites of her eyes framed by thick outlines of mascara, actress Sienna Miller ("Casanova" and "Layer Cake") holds a cigarette in one hand and script notes in the other.

She is at the street corner with actor Edward Herrmann ("Gilmore Girls" and "The Cat's Meow") near an open cab door. He wears a dark suit, trench coat and fedora and carries an attaché case with an umbrella.

Cameras roll. Miller rushes up to Hermann and pleads for help. "I need money, James. I need it now," she demands.

"It's all spent," he replies.

After a few takes, director George Hickenlooper ("Hearts of Darkness") is satisfied with what he sees and tells the crew to set up for the next shot.

They are filming a desperate day in the life of Edie Sedgwick, a muse of artist Andy Warhol.

Sedgwick was a fixture at Warhol's studio called the Factory, where the artist made his famous lithographs, screen prints and sexually liberated short films. At the Factory, luminaries like Bob Dylan, Truman Capote and Lou Reed rubbed shoulders with the art world's in-crowd. Parties there were notoriously wild.

Sedgwick, a successful model who was living off a trust fund from her estranged family, also had a dark side. She was molested by her father and brothers and struggled with heroin addiction and mental illness.

She met Warhol in 1965 and became one of his "superstars." He featured her in many of his films, which often parodied Hollywood, including "Poor Little Rich Girl" and "Chelsea Girls." The two parted ways in 1966. "Factory Girl" is a film about their time together.

"We wanted to pick a time period that really encapsulated the essence of her life," screenwriter Captain Mauzner says, observing the scene from the middle of a closed McNeill Street while drinking coffee. "Warhol was notorious for looking at a person -- female, male, gay, straight -- and seeing something. He had this amazing eye for talent.

"And if you watch her, she's just a fascinating individual. Her mannerisms, her eyes, there's just so much going on behind what you see. Warhol really keyed in on that, and it was a love-affair kind of moment."

After finishing his morning camera work, Herrmann relaxes on a stool and talks about the moment his character, the Sedgwick family's accountant, just shared with Edie.

"She's run through her trust fund. He's warned her that she's burning the candle at both ends and she's going to go bankrupt. She won't listen," he says. "He's a reasonable sympathetic guy, but he's also a numbers cruncher. Inflow equals outflow, that's it. And here, the money is all gone and she approaches him in the street. She's clearly a mess. He may not know it, but we (the audience) know that she's on heroin now."

His sympathy changes when she reveals her father molested her beginning at age 8.

"It's an absolute shock to the man," Herrmann says. "He had absolutely no idea that this friend of his for 30 or 40 years (her father) is a pederast. He's completely disoriented. He tried to talk to her as Ms. Sedgwick and he breaks down and calls her Edie and gives her money."

During a break on a day when actors Jimmy Fallon ("Saturday Night Live"), Guy Pearce ("Memento") and Illeana Douglas ("Cape Fear") will appear on the set, Hickenlooper explains his fascination with Sedgwick while walking to Hayride Diner nearby.

"I think she's sort of a universally tragic figure. I think American culture has become so fragmented, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century with the advent of television, the rise in the divorce rate and the breakup of the nuclear family," he says. "These are sort of broad generalizations.

"But I think Americans suffer from something that's called acute abandonment anxiety, which means they're looking for love outside the family. (It is) that whole phenomenon of celebrity and fame where people look to be loved by the public because they can't find love at home. And Edie sort of epitomizes that."

Sedgwick died of a drug overdose in 1971. Hickenlooper points out why her fame endures. "It's a very human, universal story. And I think that's why she remains iconic in ... the mainstream subculture of American culture.

"She had an outstanding sense of fashion. In addition to that, she had to be the most beautiful, the most loved and most charismatic creature."

Finding the right atmosphere

Extra Eric Gipson is happy to work on a set re-creating an era he romanticizes. "I was born a good 15 years behind my time," he says, later confiding he chose authentic 1960s-era Clubman aftershave to wear to the set.

For the morning shoot, he's playing a cabbie and driving a 1964 or 1965 Ford Galaxy 500 through the background of the scene between Miller and Herrmann. "This is a real trip for me to live in suspended animation."

Even with extras' enthusiasm to fill out a screen world, capturing the spirit of the 1960s remains a challenge. The difficulty in making a period-specific film is not just gathering the right wardrobe and cars; it's finding people who remember how it felt to live during the era, Malden says.

"People were a lot more open, freer. It's creating that sense of freedom," he says. "There's a sense of not being restricted by health hazards that you have today, the legality problems. They are a lot stricter today than they were then. People would walk down the street and drop a tab of acid in the street. You can't do that now."

Herrmann says the decade of the '60s was an important episode of his life. One of his good friends, painter Duncan Hannah, was a part of the Factory.

"Some of the things he's told me are pretty harrowing," Herrmann says. "They got to be very brutal in their feelings and what they were capable of experiencing and trying to experience. It's not a world I was particularly drawn to.

"I was learning to act in repertory theater. And in England, I was a Fulbright scholar at (The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) in the '60s," he says. "In the '70s, I was part of Joe Papp's theater down at the New York Shakespeare Festival. I was part of the artistic matrix that was going on, but I was never a part of (Warhol's) group."

In Herrmann's mind, the 1960s remain a period of great social and even artistic unrest. "To me, it was something to get through. I never liked it very much. Everybody was being murdered.

"It was a chaotic time that people (today) don't really understand. ... In the '60s, Kennedy is shot. Martin Luther King Jr. is shot. Bobby Kennedy is shot. Cities blowing up. ... Folks simply don't understand how near to a total meltdown the political system was."

But Herrmann understands why the era remains intriguing.

"It was not a period that I particularly enjoyed, except that you were young and you were footloose and free love was free and there was no disease. It was extraordinary from that point of view, and there was some very interesting theater going on. So it wasn't a total dark."

Shreveport on screen

Executive producer Morris Bart, who also is a well-known attorney in Louisiana, says the film has a $10 million budget. The shoot originally was scheduled for New Orleans but had to change to Shreveport after Hurricane Katrina. The new location is working well.

"Not only does it have immediate impact with Shreveport with the money we're spending, but, look, we're portraying Shreveport to the rest of the world," he says. The film still will appear to be set in New York.

"We're showing that Shreveport is viable for productions. It's a win-win situation."

"Factory Girl" is the second film Bart has worked on as a producer. The first, "The Shooting Gallery" (originally titled "Pool Hall Prophets"), starring Ving Rhames and Freddie Prinze Jr., was shot in New Orleans and recently released on DVD. Bart hopes to help attract to Louisiana two to three productions per year.

Hickenlooper says shooting here is going smoothly. "I love Shreveport. There's just a lot of good people here, a lot of characters with the heart and soul of the U.S."

Also appearing in "Factory Girl" will be Hayden Christensen ("Star Wars"), Mina Suvari ("American Beauty") and Mary-Kate Olsen ("New York Minute").

Shooting is scheduled to wrap up Jan. 29. The movie is expected to be released in theaters later this year.