Posted May 9, 2007
A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory
Director: Esther Robinson

Danny Williams

Harvard dropout Danny Williams moved to New York, edited a couple of early Maysles Brothers docs, and somehow fell in with the Warhol Factory — that creative sweatshop of iconoclasts and hangers-on that its white-wigged Svengali exploited for fame and profit. Williams was an avant-garde lighting designer and aspiring filmmaker, but he was more than a cog in the Factory machine; he was also Warhol's lover, and one of his favorites to boot. Then in 1966, Williams went home to Massachusetts to visit his family, borrowed his mother's car for an after-dinner drive, and was never seen again. In the end, his disappearance marked him a tiny footnote on the page of Andy and Edie.

Forty years later, Williams' niece Esther B. Robinson began a personal documentary quest, foraging for details about her uncle's life with a DV camera and a clear-headed sense of discovery. Incorporating black-and-white 16mm footage from Williams' quite-promising experimental shorts (newly uncovered by the Museum of Modern Art while sifting through "the Warhol collection," as even in death, Warhol managed to put his name on other people's work), A Walk Into the Sea is captivating, astute and artful, even in its straightforward doc structure. Note how the Ken Burns technique of panning over photos has been given an appropriately jittery, pop-art feel, and archive footage often segues to the now with smart match cuts and lo-fi camera qualities so that the decades in-between blend seamlessly to the eye.

Best of all, Robinson orders her talking-head interviews so that you get a contemporary sense of what the Factory dynamics were and are still like. It's strangely both entertaining and depressing to see regulars like Chuck Wein, Brigid Berlin, Gerard Malanga, Billy Name and the highly embittered Paul Morrissey trashing Williams, Warhol and each other, using this film to push their own agendas and juvenile grudges. It's funny then that the most perceptive are also the most famous, like doc filmmaker Albert Maysles (who anecdotally offers the film its title and gives credit to how Williams helped his career) and the Velvet Underground's John Cale (who insightfully defines the Warhol scene as a bunch of nobodies playing invented roles to justify their place). Produced by Doug Block, director of the dysfunctional-family portrait 51 Birch Street, this is a film about a community whose bonds were only dysfunctional, never familial.

— Aaron Hillis