Factory Reject

Danny Williams, subject of Esther Robinson's documentary portrait A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, was a '60s casualty. A Harvard dropout from an old New England family, Williams was an aspiring filmmaker who apprenticed with the Maysles brothers before drifting into that great high-school-cafeteria-cum-religious-cult known as the Factory — and even into an affair with the pale duke himself. Robinson, who is Williams' niece, suggests that he was written out of history. Not true: He does figure in two Andy Warhol biographies, if not in Warhol's memoirs. Still, interviewed by Robinson, narcissistic cool kids Bridget Polk and Gerard Malanga have long since forgotten her uncle, and other Factory habitués seem to have regarded him as a threat. Williams disappeared off the beach at Cape Ann in 1966. Was he driven mad by methamphetamines? Too many strobes? Factory catfights? Excerpts from Williams' 16mm movies, discovered by Warhol historian Callie Angell, give A Walk Into the Sea additional ballast. Hyperlit and edited in the camera, these films seem to be mainly studies of Warhol. But who was Williams? He has a different look in every blurry photo, and, perhaps out of deference to her family, Robinson has little to say about his background. Or maybe it's a strategy — that Williams' personality never comes into focus has the effect of making his 15 minutes of fame all the more sad and ghostly.
Feb. 22-28, 2008