Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Bowie when you become involved.”
During a break in the tour, eighties art star turned
film director Julian Schnabel was in New York,
finishing a biopic on eighties art star turned
cautionary tale Jean-Michel Basquiat. When he
conceived of the film, a movie “about an artist by
artists,” as he told Charlie Rose, Schnabel reached
out to his famous friends and acquaintances to cast
it. Making seemingly an odd choice, Schnabel
asked Bowie if he would be interested in playing
Andy Warhol, Basquiat’s mentor. “He’s a very known
person,” Schnabel said. “I need a pop icon to play a
pop icon.” Bowie’s Warhol is not an impression so
much as an abstracted interpretation. He doesn’t try
to mask his English accent but still manages to
affect Warhol’s speech with tone and rhythm. He
wears the black turtlenecks associated with the art
star but reminds us, with his garish leather coat, that
this is the eighties Warhol. Crispin Glover in The
Doors and most recently Guy Pearce in Factory Girl
have brought the world-shaking sixties Warhol to life
on-screen, but only Bowie, using perhaps his own
memories of eighties inertia, tapped into the
searching, fatigued energy of sixties and seventies
icons in the go-go era. “I don’t even know what’s
good anymore,” he whines to Jeffrey Wright’s Jean-
Michel as they collaborate on a massive mural. Take
away the “gee” and grimaces and the fey hand-onhip
posture, and it could easily be Bowie talking
about his own career at the same point. The film
stars many people who actually knew Warhol,