Oh Danny Boy

Factory and family search for forgotten filmmaker

A less mature director might have taken the story of Danny Williams – a young man who was Andy Warhol’s lover briefly, worked at his infamous Factory making startling innovations in lighting and outstanding art films, then disappeared from a family gathering in 1966 and was never seen again – and created something entitled A Flight towards the Sun. In it, a tragic narrative would tell how a mild-mannered young man and budding film genius was destroyed by an explosively creative drug-propelled environment of competition and collaboration; how Danny’s colleagues tore him down as his cinematic prowess sharpened rather than let him get his due credit, thereby stunting the rise of a film pioneer.

Fortunately the very mature Esther B. Robinson, Danny’s niece, has put his story on the screen in A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory. The film is unexpectedly restrained, shedding light on the legacy of Warhol’s Factory through interviews with surviving members including Brigid Berlin, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Danny Fields, Paul Morrisey and Chuck Wein among others. These run alongside interviews with Williams and Robinson’s relatives, providing the personal family narrative that accompanies the much-researched Factory stories. Though several interviewees expose themselves to easy punches – particularly Morrisey – Robinson holds back, leaving the inconsistent stories and self-interested credit-snatching uninvestigated. In doing so, ex-Factory members keep more dignity than the would-be director of A Flight towards the Sun might have left them with. Their scars and insecurities, still visible forty years on, come off as humanizing foibles rather than demonizing vices. That said, we simultaneously envy the hell out of them for having been there then, while we’re stuck experiencing the Factory life vicariously now.

The film’s most exciting glimpses into that lifestyle come with A Walk into the Sea’s major payoff, Danny’s recently-recovered films, which convey some of the period’s exuberance that surviving members have difficulty articulating. These clips from Danny’s films give a sense of who the young man was more effectively than any Factory- or family-member’s testimony, a fact of which Robinson seems well aware.

NYPress: Seeing the quality of Danny’s work, was it tempting to make a film that built him up into a tragic genius type of figure?

Robinson: That was obviously a lure. Danny’s a talented filmmaker, but I didn’t want to push Danny as a genius. I think he’s a really talented kid who made movies for five months when he was 26 years old. And he made really beautiful movies, but history will tell us where they fit, and that won’t be my job.

With the heavy-handedness of many contemporary documentaries, why did you choose to tell Danny’s story with so much restraint?

There are people who object to that in my film, saying “it should be meaner,” or “we need to know this…” and often my question to these people is: “Do you understand these different things?” And they understand all of it. I believe that there is a joy in knowing something and allowing the person that you know it about to both keep their dignity and reveal it to you, like a present. You are given a gift as a filmmaker and how you choose to treat that power exchange is an individual choice.

Given the enormous body of work on the Warhol Fatory that this film adds to, how did you want to set yourself apart?

It’s like there’s two giant tributaries like rushing rivers, and it’s either “Andy Warhol was a genius,” or “Andy Warhol is the man who killed Edie Segwick,” and all the little rivers end up getting sucked in. I needed the movie to be intimate and on a human scale, and I feel like a lot of artifacts, or the books or the movies [on the Factory], almost operate on a mythic or iconic scale. I was really cognizant about not wanting that. What you end up seeing then is this kind of intimacy that allows you to really understand what happened in this way that’s really different from a lot of the other work.

How did you try to approach those familiar issues surrounding Warhol and the Factory differently in light of all that other material?

I feel that by not making a movie about Andy Warhol, I made a really good movie about Andy Warhol. Because it’s intimate, and you may not know what happened in the fact by fact way, but when you hear everyone talk and you see how the pressures of that experience has formed each of them in a similar way, you know what happened. I came to love the idea of all these kids coming together, and again not as icons, but as kids, as being twenty in New York City in 1965: you’re so hot, you’re never gonna be so hot again, you’re getting laid whenever you want, you’re taking drugs, you don’t even understand that drugs are bad yet because it’s the sixties and people are really naïve and doctors are giving them to you. That joyfulness, I wanted some of that to be in my movie. Because Danny’s films have that joy, they’re this window in into this thing, and most of the people I interviewed don’t remember being happy, just because there was so much unhappiness that followed.

Why is your film, with regards to Danny’s disappearance, more contemplative than investigative?

I never needed to know what happened to Danny. I wanted the audience to see each of the possibilities, so my goal was less to excise than to make sure that all the component parts that I felt came into play were clear. The beauty for me was always that at the end of the day we have [Danny’s] movies. I don’t have to make a case. And that’s why there’s so much of Danny’s films in the film. When you see Danny’s eye and you see how he makes films, he’s most articulate when he’s working in his world, and he speaks for himself.

A similar version of this review and interview appears in the December 12 issue of the New York Press, which can be seen here.