[quote]
Andy Warhol's Sleep
Jonas Mekas, from Movies, edited by Gilbert Adair.
[“Andy Warhol’s famously minimalist eight-hour-long Sleep, filmed in 1964, offered the spectator nothing more to chew on than an endless static shot of a man asleep.”]
I received a letter from Mike Getz, manager of the Cinema Theatre in Los Angeles, reporting on the screening of Andy Warhol’s movie Sleep:
Amazing turnout. 500 people. Sleep started at 6.45. First shot, which lasts about 45 minutes, is close-up of man’s abdomen. You can see him breathing. People started to walk out at 7, some complaining. People getting more and more restless. Shot finally changes to close-up of man’s head. Someone runs up to screen and shouts in sleeping man’s ear. ‘WAKE UP!!’ Audience getting bitter, strained. Movie is silent, runs at silent speed. A few more people ask for money back. Sign on box office says no refunds.
7.45. One man pulls me out into outer lobby, says he doesn’t want to make a scene but asks for money back. I say no. He says, ‘Be a gentleman.’ I say, ‘Look, you know you were going to see something strange, unusual, daring, that lasted six hours.’ I turn to walk back to lobby. Lobby full, one red-faced guy very agitated, says I have 30 seconds to give him his money back or he’ll run into theater and start a ‘lynch riot’. ‘We’ll all come out here and lynch you, buddy!!’ Nobody stopped him when 30 seconds were up; he ran back toward screen. In fact, the guy who had said he didn’t want to make a scene now said, ‘Come on, I’ll go with you!!’
I finally yelled at him to wait a minute. Mario Casetta told crowd to give us a chance to discuss it. Mario and I moved into outer lobby. Thoughts of recent football riot in South America. People angry as hell, a mob on the verge of violence. Red-faced guy stomps toward me: ‘Well, what are you going to do?’
‘I’ll give out passes for another show.’ Over two hundred passes given out.
Decided to make an announcement. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. I believe that Sleep was properly advertised. I said in my ads that it was an unusual six-hour movie. You came here knowing that you were going to see something unusual about sleep and I think you are. I don’t know what else I could have said. However—[shout from audience: “Don’t cop out!! Don’t cop out!!”]—however …’
Sleep continued on. Projectionist kept falling asleep. People are not able to take the consequences of their own curiosity. Woman calls at 11 ‘Are you still there?’ ‘Sure, why?’ ‘I was there earlier. Heard people in back of me saying this theater’s not going to have a screen very much longer so I left.’ Fifty were left at the end. Some people really digging the movie.
http://beebo.org/smackerels/sleep.html
[/quote]
[quote]
BW/Silent/5 Hrs 21 Mins at 16fps/4 hrs 45 mins at 18fps
John Giorno
Andy Warhol: "I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in... Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I'd better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping. Sleep was the first movie I made when I got my 16mm Bolex." (POP33)
Sleep was Andy Warhol's first film. According to Gerard Malanga, Warhol had mentioned to him an idea for making a film of Brigitte Bardot sleeping for eight hours before Warhol actually owned a movie camera. (GMW39)
Although planned as an eight-hour-long movie, Sleep was actually made by looping some of the footage. In Popism, Warhol admits that "I hadn't actually shot that much". This was partially due to the limitiations of his Bolex movie camera which could only shoot 4-minute lengths of film. According to Gerard Malanga, "Sleep runs approximately six-and-a-half hours of equivalent shooting time. Andy duplicated an additional ninety minutes from an equal ninety-minute section of the film to stretch it out to eight hours to approximate the scientifically accepted length of time for normal sleep." (GMW39)
The film was shot in the apartment of it's star, the poet John Giorno, with whom Warhol was having a sexual relationship at the time. On Memorial Day weekend of 1963, Giorno woke up to find Warhol watching him sleep and Warhol asked him if he'd like to be a movie star.
John Giorno: On Memorial Day weekend in 1963 we went away for a few days and I woke up in the night to find him staring at me - he took a lot of speed in those days. That's where the idea for the movie came from - he was looking for a visual image and it just happened to be me. He said to me on the way home: "Would you like to be a movie star?" "Of course," I said, "I want to be just like Marilyn Monroe."
He didn't really know what he was doing; it was his first movie. We made it with a 16mm Bolex in my apartment but had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as Andy rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn't know what to do with it for almost a year.
The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. It was absurd - he was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper's Bazaar before the movie was finished! In the end, 99% of the footage didn't get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long." (GJG)
Warhol first met John Giorno at Warhol's first pop show at Eleanor Ward's Stable gallery in November 1962. (GJG). Although Giorno was working as a stockbroker at the time, he would later quit to concentrate on his poetry. He started the telephone service, Dial-A-Poem in 1968 with sponsorship from the Architectual League and in 1970 he set up a spoken word recording company with $30,000 he received from selling a suicide painting that Warhol had given him. At various times in his life, Giorno was also involved with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Although Giorno's comments indicate that Warhol asked him to star in Sleep on Memorial Day weekend, 1963, the film was not actually shot until July. According to Gerard Malanga it was in July that Warhol purchased his first movie camera - a Bolex. In a later interview, Giorno remembered the night that Warhol and himself left a party they were attending in order to set up the camera and tripod.
John Giorno: "I was sitting on a seventeenth-century Spanish chair as he checked out where to put his tripod and lights and suddenly Andy was on the floor with his hands on my feet, and he started kissing and licking my shoes. I had always heard he was a shoe fetishist. 'It's true!' I thought with a rush. 'He's sucking my shoes!' It was hot. And I got some poppers to make it better. I jerked off while he licked my shoes with his little pink tongue and sniffed my crotch. It was great. Although Andy didn't come. When I wanted to finish him off, he said, 'I'll take care of it.'" (L&D177)
The premiere of Sleep took place on January 17, 1964 at the Grammercy Arts Theater - a benefit screening for the Film-Makers' Cooperative. According to the New York Post, the screening was attended by only nine people - two of whom left during the first hour.
http://www.warholstars.org/filmch/sleep.html
[/quote]
Andy.Warhol's.Sleep.(40.minutes.extract.LQ).avi 
Andy Warhol's Sleep
Jonas Mekas, from Movies, edited by Gilbert Adair.
[“Andy Warhol’s famously minimalist eight-hour-long Sleep, filmed in 1964, offered the spectator nothing more to chew on than an endless static shot of a man asleep.”]
I received a letter from Mike Getz, manager of the Cinema Theatre in Los Angeles, reporting on the screening of Andy Warhol’s movie Sleep:
Amazing turnout. 500 people. Sleep started at 6.45. First shot, which lasts about 45 minutes, is close-up of man’s abdomen. You can see him breathing. People started to walk out at 7, some complaining. People getting more and more restless. Shot finally changes to close-up of man’s head. Someone runs up to screen and shouts in sleeping man’s ear. ‘WAKE UP!!’ Audience getting bitter, strained. Movie is silent, runs at silent speed. A few more people ask for money back. Sign on box office says no refunds.
7.45. One man pulls me out into outer lobby, says he doesn’t want to make a scene but asks for money back. I say no. He says, ‘Be a gentleman.’ I say, ‘Look, you know you were going to see something strange, unusual, daring, that lasted six hours.’ I turn to walk back to lobby. Lobby full, one red-faced guy very agitated, says I have 30 seconds to give him his money back or he’ll run into theater and start a ‘lynch riot’. ‘We’ll all come out here and lynch you, buddy!!’ Nobody stopped him when 30 seconds were up; he ran back toward screen. In fact, the guy who had said he didn’t want to make a scene now said, ‘Come on, I’ll go with you!!’
I finally yelled at him to wait a minute. Mario Casetta told crowd to give us a chance to discuss it. Mario and I moved into outer lobby. Thoughts of recent football riot in South America. People angry as hell, a mob on the verge of violence. Red-faced guy stomps toward me: ‘Well, what are you going to do?’
‘I’ll give out passes for another show.’ Over two hundred passes given out.
Decided to make an announcement. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. I believe that Sleep was properly advertised. I said in my ads that it was an unusual six-hour movie. You came here knowing that you were going to see something unusual about sleep and I think you are. I don’t know what else I could have said. However—[shout from audience: “Don’t cop out!! Don’t cop out!!”]—however …’
Sleep continued on. Projectionist kept falling asleep. People are not able to take the consequences of their own curiosity. Woman calls at 11 ‘Are you still there?’ ‘Sure, why?’ ‘I was there earlier. Heard people in back of me saying this theater’s not going to have a screen very much longer so I left.’ Fifty were left at the end. Some people really digging the movie.
http://beebo.org/smackerels/sleep.html
[/quote]
[quote]
BW/Silent/5 Hrs 21 Mins at 16fps/4 hrs 45 mins at 18fps
John Giorno
Andy Warhol: "I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in... Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I'd better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping. Sleep was the first movie I made when I got my 16mm Bolex." (POP33)
Sleep was Andy Warhol's first film. According to Gerard Malanga, Warhol had mentioned to him an idea for making a film of Brigitte Bardot sleeping for eight hours before Warhol actually owned a movie camera. (GMW39)
Although planned as an eight-hour-long movie, Sleep was actually made by looping some of the footage. In Popism, Warhol admits that "I hadn't actually shot that much". This was partially due to the limitiations of his Bolex movie camera which could only shoot 4-minute lengths of film. According to Gerard Malanga, "Sleep runs approximately six-and-a-half hours of equivalent shooting time. Andy duplicated an additional ninety minutes from an equal ninety-minute section of the film to stretch it out to eight hours to approximate the scientifically accepted length of time for normal sleep." (GMW39)
The film was shot in the apartment of it's star, the poet John Giorno, with whom Warhol was having a sexual relationship at the time. On Memorial Day weekend of 1963, Giorno woke up to find Warhol watching him sleep and Warhol asked him if he'd like to be a movie star.
John Giorno: On Memorial Day weekend in 1963 we went away for a few days and I woke up in the night to find him staring at me - he took a lot of speed in those days. That's where the idea for the movie came from - he was looking for a visual image and it just happened to be me. He said to me on the way home: "Would you like to be a movie star?" "Of course," I said, "I want to be just like Marilyn Monroe."
He didn't really know what he was doing; it was his first movie. We made it with a 16mm Bolex in my apartment but had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as Andy rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn't know what to do with it for almost a year.
The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. It was absurd - he was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper's Bazaar before the movie was finished! In the end, 99% of the footage didn't get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long." (GJG)
Warhol first met John Giorno at Warhol's first pop show at Eleanor Ward's Stable gallery in November 1962. (GJG). Although Giorno was working as a stockbroker at the time, he would later quit to concentrate on his poetry. He started the telephone service, Dial-A-Poem in 1968 with sponsorship from the Architectual League and in 1970 he set up a spoken word recording company with $30,000 he received from selling a suicide painting that Warhol had given him. At various times in his life, Giorno was also involved with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Although Giorno's comments indicate that Warhol asked him to star in Sleep on Memorial Day weekend, 1963, the film was not actually shot until July. According to Gerard Malanga it was in July that Warhol purchased his first movie camera - a Bolex. In a later interview, Giorno remembered the night that Warhol and himself left a party they were attending in order to set up the camera and tripod.
John Giorno: "I was sitting on a seventeenth-century Spanish chair as he checked out where to put his tripod and lights and suddenly Andy was on the floor with his hands on my feet, and he started kissing and licking my shoes. I had always heard he was a shoe fetishist. 'It's true!' I thought with a rush. 'He's sucking my shoes!' It was hot. And I got some poppers to make it better. I jerked off while he licked my shoes with his little pink tongue and sniffed my crotch. It was great. Although Andy didn't come. When I wanted to finish him off, he said, 'I'll take care of it.'" (L&D177)
The premiere of Sleep took place on January 17, 1964 at the Grammercy Arts Theater - a benefit screening for the Film-Makers' Cooperative. According to the New York Post, the screening was attended by only nine people - two of whom left during the first hour.
http://www.warholstars.org/filmch/sleep.html
[/quote]
Andy.Warhol's.Sleep.(40.minutes.extract.LQ).avi 
and the Empire State also 
