Synopsis

Set in 1960s New York, the film follows Valerie Solanas, an ambitious but increasingly unstable writer moving through the city's avant-garde art scene. Her attempts to have Andy Warhol produce her play collapse amid frustration, poverty, and paranoia. As her radical ideas harden into obsession, Solanas turns against Warhol and ultimately commits the act that defines her place in cultural history.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film is based on the real-life shooting of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas at The Factory on June 3, 1968. Warhol survived, but the attack had lasting physical and psychological effects.

• Solanas is also known for writing the SCUM Manifesto, a radical feminist text that later became an important document in discussions of feminist extremism and separatism.

• The screenplay draws on Solanas' connection to Warhol, her play "Up Your Ass," and her dealings with publisher Maurice Girodias. These elements place the shooting within a larger story of artistic frustration and exploitation.

• The movie was Mary Harron's feature-film debut. Its approach is less a conventional Warhol biography than a character study of Solanas and her unstable relationship with the New York art world.

• John Cale, a founding member of the Velvet Underground, composed the score. Lou Reed did not permit Velvet Underground songs to be used, so the film relies on Cale's original music rather than the group's recordings.

• The story begins near the shooting and moves backward through Solanas' life before returning to the attack, giving the event the structure of an inevitable but disturbing endpoint.

• The film became known as one of the more controversial independent American productions of the 1990s, partly because it attempts to understand Solanas without reducing her to either a feminist icon or a simple villain.