BIKE BOY (1967)
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Color/sound/109 mins
(filmed August 1967)
Ed Hood/Brigid Polk (Berlin)/Joe
Spencer/
Ingrid Superstar/Anne Wehrer/Viva
Bike Boy on the cover of the
February 1968 issue of
Confidential magazine
Bike Boy was shot during the summer of 1967 and opened at the Hudson Theatre near Times Square in October of the same year after a six-week run of I, a Man. Originally, it was 95 minutes long but the original print has never been found. The uncut full length footage originally shot for the film was included in the 25 hour version of **** (Four Stars). The footage from **** was later cut into a second, longer version of Bike Boy which opened in July 1968 on a double bill with Nude Restaurant at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theater in July 1968. It is this 109 minute version which exists today. (FAW 33)
Joe Spencer and Viva in Bike Boy
(photo: Billy Name)
Some footage for Bike Boy was shot on a personal appearance tour of the west coast that Andy took with other Factory regulars in August 1967 when Chelsea Girls opened at the Presidio Theatre in Los Angeles. (POP235) Warhol and his entourage traveled to San Francisco and wandered around the city at the end of the "big Love Summer." (POP232)
Andy Warhol:
"There were bad vibrations from the San Francisco hippies toward anything that was above a sort of psychedelic poverty level - anything that looked like it cost money was part of the Establishment - and so when we drove around town for a day or two in a Cadillac limousine that the movie theater rented for us, it was like we were waving a red flag; the flower children in the street would turn and glare at us, very contemptuous... Paul [Morrissey] was having a ball - he even figured out a way to antagonize the Haight Ashbury types a little more: he'd have our driver pull over beside groups of kids in beads and flowers, then he'd roll down the limousine window and ask them, "Say, where's the nearest Salvation Army? We want to buy ourselves some hippie clothes... On that trip we did some lectures at colleges and shot some footage for Bike Boy, but we never did come off cheerful enough to satisfy the San Francisco people - if you didn't smile a lot out there, they got hostile toward you." (POP235-6)
Gary Comenas
Warholstars
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