Warhol In The Movies

Writing music for Andy Warhol films is a proposition Dean Wareham just couldn't turn down.

Approached by The Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, he created "The 13 Most Beautiful ... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests." It combines Warhol's lesser known black-and-white silent film portraits of visitors to his studio, The Factory.

"I've always been a fan of Andy Warhol, so it's not the kind of thing I could say no to," Dean Wareham says. "It's the opportunity to work with a good director. Even if they're dead, you jump at [the chance]."

Wareham and Britta Phillips, his wife and musical partner, created a score in 2009 and have since performed live alongside screenings of the four-minute films at Lincoln Center, the Sydney Opera House and Teatro Versace in Milan. Tonight they perform at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

"The 13 Most Beautiful Songs..." is a unique intersection of Warhol's life and work, symbolic of his five-year stretch of forgoing painting for only photography, film and music. During that period he made 60 films, 472 screen tests and was closely involved with The Velvet Underground.

Wareham, who headed bands Luna and Galaxie 500 in the past, opened for The Velvet Underground in Europe during the 1993 reunion tour. He has since created film scores for "The Squid and The Whale" and "Mistress America," which is opening in New York this weekend.

Still, this assignment wasn't your average film composing. Making tracks for posthumously shown works is tough, he says, because picking the director's brain requires extra work.

Wareham began by watching all the films in the set and studying each closely. The way these screen tests were shot made that a little easier to do.

"The films are these in-between portraits ... like the still photographs he took, [but] they grow out of that," Wareham says. "Someone is staring straight at the camera, Warhol's taking a real film of that 20 minutes plus, and then the trick is that he would play them back at a slower speed, stretch them out and make it look eerie."

Having accessible subjects was an advantage. Wareham and Phillips could read up on the lives of the artists -- some of whom were regulars at The Factory, then watch the film portrait to let the combination inform the mood that song would take.

"Sometimes the subject was involved in something we didn't know much about," Wareham says. "So we would take a look at [that subject] and the film and what's going on."

One film featured a dancer who was smoking. Knowing that he was the first drug causality of that artistic circle when he committed suicide just a few months after the film was made brought more meaning to it -- and a somber musical portrayal.

But not all films were pinned so quickly. Most are complex snapshots, an attempt to add more dimensions to the central character than maybe a photograph would allow.

"Some of them were easy, some were difficult," Wareham says. "Some of them change as they look at the camera. One might start serious and end with giggling, but there are others that start with laughter and end in tears."

A lot of the songwriting was trial and error, Wareham says, but most importantly, if it felt boring, it got scrapped.

Wareham and Britta Phillips expected to perform the resulting set of songs maybe seven or eight times, but it exploded into a years long international tour, taking them to more than 80 locations. Performing at iconic spots like Lincoln Center had its own draw. But it was the lesser known stages that Wareham relished -- an outdoor venue in Brooklyn, a town hall in his native Wellington and, most recently, three nights in Saint-Eustache, a 15th century cathedral in Paris.

Coming to see "The 13 Most Beautiful Songs..." near the tail end of the tour means ambitious returns for the audience.

"The show is better, we're more comfortable with the songs and have learned more about the people [in the films]," Wareham says, pointing out a main feature of the event is a discussion of the work. "The stories that we tell got more interesting. It's live music, film and theatrical."

NAN What's Up on 08/14/2015