Chelsea Girls (1966) on Netflix
Twelve vignettes, many of them filmed inside New York's Chelsea Hotel, present the residents there in 1966. Among those who appear are the Duchess, Hanoi Hannah and the Pope.
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- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb5.6/101,836 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes50%
Plot summary
The film is made of twelve vignettes, many of them recorded in rooms of the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1966, with other scenes made in a studio. The performers are largely playing themselves, and much of what happens on screen was improvised; two of the segments were written out beforehand. The vignettes are shown two at a time, side by side, one in color and one in black and white, so a lighter passage runs against a darker one. The two projectors could never be synchronized exactly, which meant the pairing differed from one screening to the next. The segments include one built around Hanoi Hannah and another around the Pope.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Chelsea Girls (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A sequence Andy Warhol shot with Edie Sedgwick was cut from the final film at her insistence, because she claimed she was under contract to Bob Dylan's manager Albert Grossman at the time; the footage went into Warhol's film Afternoon instead.
- Warhol and co-director Paul Morrissey chose the 12 most striking vignettes they had filmed and projected them side by side, which cut the film's 6.5-hour running time in half, to 3 hours and 15 minutes.
- Warhol and his entourage traveled to the 1967 Cannes Film Festival to present Chelsea Girls, but it was not shown: festival authorities said the film was too long, there were technical problems and there was no time.
- In 1967 the British Board of Film Classification refused to give Chelsea Girls a theatrical certificate in the UK.
- After premiering at the Film-Makers' Cinémathèque on September 15, 1966, Chelsea Girls became the first underground film to move from that 200-seat experimental showcase to a conventional Midtown Manhattan art theater.
- The film was the inspiration for Nico's 1967 debut album Chelsea Girl, which included a ballad-like track called "Chelsea Girls", written about the Chelsea Hotel and its inhabitants.
