The Making Of An Underground Film - CBS News 1965

The Making Of An Underground Film - CBS News 1965 with Piero Heliczer, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Stan Brakhage, Velvet Underground.

The year 1965 was perhaps the most important year for much of the 60’s underground’s imaginative and innovative activities. For Piero, there is little doubt it was the high point in his creativity and eminence. The remarkable Walter Cronkite of the CBS News, always on the alert for an interesting story, decided to do a feature on “underground” film. His first investigations coincided with a day Piero was shooting a 12-minute short called Dirt, part of the later unfinished 3 hour epic, with music performed by Velvet Underground. The CBS News crew did a 6-minute report of Piero’s film Venus in Furs, and included Velvet Underground, asking only that wear their shirts, as they had been topless at the first meeting.

“The Making of an Underground Film,” was a profile of Piero Heliczer and Velvet Underground, and turned out to be the one and only television coverage for both the band and the filmmaker. It’s interesting that Walter Cronkite and the CBS News also showed 30 seconds of a Brakhage movie, with poetry by Creeley/McClure a sort of stutter-stammer rapid-fire montage made up with hazy images. All very difficult to understand or make head or tail out of it. Writing about it now, I wonder what Cronkite thought about it. Maybe he dug it as people claimed but it was unlikely that the CBS or people watching the program took the underground seriously. Was it all just a joke to them? Was CBS News making fun of the underground scene or just having fun?

Heliczer usually shot his films silent and added sound on tape; in fact, his “screen adaptation” of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in 1968 is “a film for tape recorder, no projector needed.” But, in some instances, Heliczer used live musicians to provide a soundtrack to his films, and ph_flyer_first rushes one ad hoc group playing behind the screen at a Heliczer installation entitled The Launching of the Dream Weapon in early 1965 changed its name later that year to the Velvet Underground. In November, Heliczer had the Velvet Underground perform on the set of his film Venus in Furs and this shooting was filmed by a CBS News crew for an episode of Walter Cronkite Presents entitled “The Making of an Underground Film,” which was, in part, a profile of Piero Heliczer and turned out to be the only network television exposure for both the band and the filmmaker.

Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol, Piero Heliczer, New York 1965