Late 1960s: Edie Sedgwick was all over the pages of WWD in those days. And Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview. Wild child, bleached blonde hair, frenzied-face, she was to these naifs who knew only that it was a party scene for the coolest, the hot one. She was a desperate debutante on a mission: rebellion.

One of the kids in clubland (which was something new on the scene too).

Sienna Miller as Edie

Up until then discos were for the chic and fashionable. Discotheques, they were called. The Stork Club had finally gone out of business. El Morocco too. On came Arthur, L’Interdit, Shepheards, Ondine, Regines, Il Mio, L’Oursin (in Southampton), Mitty’s General Store (in Bridgehampton) where the younger set went. There was Steve Paul’s Scene farther west (in the West 40s), and Il Jardin where it got down just a little. New Yorkers first saw boys dancing together (they were known as bisexual). Of course, they weren’t, but the general public didn’t know. People went to look. They had no idea. It was the kids who went and drank all night. Pills – few knew much if anything about these things, quaint as that sounds. Andy Warhol was far-out. An artist. Gritty. Downtown when downtown was gritty, when they were first calling the desolate area south of Houston Street, SoHo.

Edie Sedgwick, it turns out, knew about all this.  The rest of us only knew what we could see in a photograph: Edie looked like a lost lamb, to those who sympathized. A pipped-up, hipped-up, fly-by-night floozie to those who didn’t. From a very good New England family; Brahmins they.  This was part of the package that resonated with the public – the family background. WASPs making their last stand.  The public in general who followed the Warhold Factory kids had really no idea of what they were up to except what they occasionally read. Drugs were talked about and used but not in a way that made them mainstream and living room conversation. Few knew they were watching a disaster in the making, an accident waiting to happen.

All that seems naïve in retrospect, even incredible all these years later. It was so obvious. Edie Sedgwick turned out to be a forerunner of a whole generation out of which sprang the world of mass rehab, out of which sprung a sophisticated, labyrhinthian world drug and alcohol use. Which is now so mainstream that much of it is now familiar even to pre-teeners, even with experience.

And so the film Factory Girl, a testimony of that age has a special appeal for New Yorkers, especially the 21st century historical  peers of that crowd.  Where it seems to have all started on a mass basis. Edie is emblematic and historical in conception and intent to many of us who remember those days and that young woman in the Warhol entourage.

The Cinema Society and Calvin Klein hosted its screening here in New York for a clamoring crowd of movie stars, rockers, supermodels and the just plain fabulous. Flocking to see it. 

The film’s stars Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce and Jimmy Fallon were all on hand, along with director George Hickenlooper, for the supper at the Gramercy Park Hotel, following the SRO screening at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.

The two stars got raves from their peers for their  dazzling portrayals of the drug-drenched party girl and the art world’s budding icon. Cinema Society Founder Andrew Saffir welcomed a crowd that would have charmed Mr. Warhol himself: Sharon Stone, Josh Lucas, Rob Thomas, Moby, Steve Buscemi, Dean Winters, Griffin Dunne, Rufus Wainwright, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Marley Shelton, Carson Kressley, Beth Ostrosky, Francisco Costa, Italo Zucchelli, supermodels May Andersen, Gemma Ward & Julia Stegner, Jacquetta Wheeler and Alexi Lubomirski, Milla Jovovich, Frederique Van Der Wal, B-52’s Fred Schneider, Dominick Dunne, Sante D’Orazio, Cari Modine, Jennifer Creel, Renee Rockefeller, Rufus Albemarle, Marina Rust, Meredith Melling-Burke, William Norwich, Sally Singer, Plum Sykes, Alexis Bryan, Debbie Bancroft, Dayssi Olarte de Kanovas, Zani Gugelmann, Allison Sarofim, Euan Rellie, Daniel Benedict, Marjorie Gubelmann Raein, Vanessa von Bismarck, Ann Dexter-Jones, Helen and Tim Schifter, Carol McFadden, Carlos Mota, Amanda and Chris Brooks, Ferebee Bishop, Johannes Huebl, Peter Davis, Jackie Astier, Calvin Klein’s Malcolm Carfrae, and the film’s Meredith Ostrom and Armin Amiri.