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“It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented,” Andy Warhol once said. “They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.”
Well, here comes another movie that may tell you how to feel and how to look at things. This time it’s about Warhol himself, and it’ll star Jared Leto, the actor and Thirty Seconds to Mars band member, as the Pop artist. The Hollywood Reporter, which first announced the news, notes that the studio behind it is “not aiming for a low-budget indie with Warhol but rather a strong mainstream project with prestige credentials.” Take that, Factory Girl, Basquiat, and other indie movies that featured Warhol!
The film will be based on Victor Bockris’s book Warhol: The Biography, with Terence Winter, the writer behind The Wolf of Wall Street and Boardwalk Empire, already attached to do the screenplay. The few of us who watched HBO’s already-cancelled show Vinyl, which Winter also wrote, will remember that show also included Warhol in a strange arc that involved his Factory. There, he was (unmemorably) played by John Cameron Mitchell.
So, what are some other mainstream works have featured Warhol? Here are two that Leto will try to best: Oliver Stone’s The Doors, where the artist was played by Crispin Glover, and The Simpsons, one of episode of which includes Hank Azaria voicing Warhol.
I also feel obliged to mention that Bill Hader played Warhol in Men in Black 3. Rather than describing that role, I’m embedding a clip below, so that you can watch it at your own convenience.