IN The Prisoner Of Sex, Norman Mailer describes Valerie Solanas as "the Robespierre of feminism". The critic B. Ruby Rich called Solanas "feminism's Joan of Arc". Mary Harron, who co wrote and directed the movie I Shot Andy Warhol, which centres on Solanas, describes her as "like a lesbian Joe Orlon" and a commentator who could have been "a more apocalyptic Camille Paglia".
Solanas was born in May, 1936, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In her early 20s, she became part of New York's bohemian milieu and one of the peripheral characters at Andy Warhol's studio, the Factory, a world of wild self indulgence, narcissism and opportunism, and she played a role in one Warhol film - ironically, given her views, it was L A Man.
A disturbed and impassioned feminist, Solanas was the founder and sole member of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, and author of the SCUM Manifesto which Mary Harron describes as a paean of hatred - a 55 page diatribe blaming men for everything that is wrong with the modern world yet the tone is deadpan, icily logical and elegantly comic. A strange juxtaposition, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist."
Writing on male sexuality in her manifesto, Solanas declares: "Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service." And: "To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo. It's often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure." The manifesto ends with the suggestion that in order to create a healthy society, men should be exterminated, but not all men - some should be saved, including "good scientists, supportive journalists and publishers, faggots and philanthropists".
On June 3rd, 1968 - two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King and three days before Robert Kennedy was assassinated - Valerie Solanas walked into the Factory offices in New York and shot Andy Warhol three times with a .32 automatic. "He had too much control over my life," she told police when she turned herself in a few hours later. Warhol survived the attack, but he was seriously wounded and became more paranoid and distant than ever. Solanas served three years in a psychiatric prison after which she returned to a life on the streets, and she died of pneumonia and emphysema in a San Francisco welfare hotel in 1988, at the age of 52.
In I Shot Andy Warhol, the story of Valerie Solanas is explored with insight and assurance by Mary Harron. The film features Lily Taylor in a riveting performance as Solanas and begins with the shooting of Warhol before flashing back through her life.
MARY Harron was in her early teens and living in London at the time of the shooting.
Her father was a comedian, but she spent most of her life with her mother and stepfather, Stephen Vizinczey, the author of hi Praise Of Older Women.
Born in Canada, Harron moved to London with her family when she was 13. Her journey into directing feature films - of which I Shot Andy Warhol is her first - was a circuitous one during which she wrote on punk rock for the NME, Melody Maker and Village Voice, on theatre for the Observer and on television for the New Statesman, before working as a researcher for the South Bank Show.
"When I was in my teens it never occurred to me that I would ever direct a feature film, because there were no female directors then, apart from a few I hadn't heard of," Mary Harron said when we met at the London Film Festival recently. "I did English at Oxford, although I thought about going to art school, and if I had, I probably would have gotten into film a lot earlier. I had a lot of friends in television and I was very envious of what they were doing - it seemed so interesting.
"Now, when I look back on it, I'm sure I could have approached it more directly. I think it had a lot to do with lack of confidence. Making a film seemed such a difficult thing to do because I had no formal training. In many ways I think it's good to take a long time to get somewhere - you do learn things along the way. And I was feeling bitter and frustrated, which probably helped when I was writing the Warhol script, because it's about somebody full of frustration."
Mary Harron's interest in Valerie Solanas developed in the late 1980s when she was researching a Sourth Bank Show documentary on Andy Warhol and she found a copy of the SCUM Manifesto in a Brixton bookshop. "I knew all about the SCUM Manifesto, or thought I did," she says. "She used to sell it on street corners to indifferent passersby. It was - it had to be - a deranged rant whose blurry mimeographed pages had been lost in the gutters of the 1960s. And yet clearly it had survived, because a women's collective had just reprinted it. I bought a copy and read it on the subway, an experience that literally changed my life. Nothing I read had ever affected me so profoundly.
"When she was saying those things she was saying, they were incredibly provocative and dangerous, and she was scorned and mocked and alienated - all of which contributed to her isolation and her madness. I'm not justifying the shooting, but I think that this vision she had was one that in many ways none of us would argue with as an attack on the male supremacy of the time. I think she was really surprised at how totally dismissed she had been, that nobody had bothered to look at what she had to say."
Harron believes that, if Solanas had been born just a few years later, her incendiary writing might have found an audience. "Even as a celebrity assassin, she was in the wrong time," she says.
"Now, a Valerie Solanas would have a book contract. Her case would be debated on talk shows and she would be interviewed by People magazine. Then, however, there was nothing. Warhol may have envisioned and defined the cult of celebrity, but in 1968 it had yet to take hold."
Did casting the gifted but difficult to dislike Lily Taylor as Solanas not soften the story inevitably? "Lily has a very sympathetic presence," Mary Harron agrees, "and obviously more so than the real life Valerie, so you could say that casting her softens the story in a way. But if you cast someone who was really grating, nobody could watch the movie."
Casting the role of Warhol was more difficult and Harron grimaces at the reminder of Crispin Glover as Warhol in Oliver Stone's The Doors. "They wanted us to cast a big name in the role," she says, "and they sent us this ridiculous list with Christian Slater, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey junior - anyone between 18 and 35 who's ever been successful". Encouraged by her casting director to see Jared Harris, the actor son of Richard Harris, she was struck by his presence and by the humour he caught in Warhol. "There's an underlying pain and anger in the Manifesto," she says, "but the tone of it, the way it's written, is very funny."
MARY Harron's next film will deal with the 1950s pin up, Betty Page. "She's another emblematic story," she says. "Betty was a girl from Nashville who came to New York wanting to become an actress and she ended up as this huge pin up queen of bondage pictures in men's magazines. Then she got caught up in the Senate crack down on what they called pornography. She's now this big icon and one of the most sought after images of the 1950s."
Betty Page will be played by Guinevere Turner, who starred in the lesbian romance, Go Fish, and has written the Betty Page screenplay with Mary Harron. Harron also hopes to film her own adaptation of the notorious Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho. "We're going to do it as a kind of satire on the 1980s, which, I think, is what the book really is. It's not particularly violent."
Clearly, Mary Harron does not plan to shirk controversial subject matter. "You might as well start as you intend to carry on," she says. "Then, in a few years, I can go and work for Walt Disney and make family films about mammals.