I spent my 21st birthday year 1964 mostly in the US Navy. I say mostly because I was a civilian for 48 days in the middle. I left active duty in July at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After my reenlistment (regrets? I've had a few), I reported to the USS Hector in Long Beach, California. At no time during 1964 was I aware of Andy Warhol.
Warhol was most famous for his paintings (Campbell’s soup cans, anyone?), but produced and directed about 150 films along the way. No less than 30 of them in 1964 alone. They weren’t big Hollywood productions. One would have had to see them in small independent theatres.
Nick Offerman is probably most famous for his role in the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation. He starred in a series of Lagavulin Scotch Whiskey commercials starting in (maybe) 2019, and I found them to be very worth seeing even though I can’t stand the taste of the product. Some of the commercials were shown on TV, but there was one that ran about 45 minutes, much too long for TV. I found it on YouTube and watched it all the way through. The camera never moves. The fireplace never moves. Offerman is seated beside the crackling fire and never moves except that occasionally he sips an amber-colored substance from a tumbler. And that’s it. For 45 minutes. I thought it was brilliant.
Tom Robbins is an American novelist, one who captured my heart with his first novel Another Roadside Attraction back in the 1970s. His autobiography Tibetan Peach Pie came out when he was in his early 80s (he’s 91 now). In it, Robbins reveals that there was a time in the 1960s when he was addicted to “non-commercial” movies that were shown at midnight on the first Thursday of the month at New York’s Cinematheque. One such movie he saw was Henry Geldzahler, which ran an hour and a half, silent, black-and-white, and produced/directed by Andy Warhol in 1964. Geldzahler, a friend of Warhol’s, was the only person on screen, sitting for the full 97 minutes smoking a cigar. Robbins was the only one of Cinematheque’s patrons to watch the whole thing, mesmerized by the length of the cigar ash and wondering when it would fall off.
The Lagavulin commercial was a stroke of original genius. Or so I thought. But now I know they were just following Warhol's script from half a century before.
Maybe nothing in this world happens for the first time. Maybe Warhol faked his own death and inhabited Offerman's body. Maybe one person will read this little blog entry all the way through. Maybe it will win the Pulitzer Prize.
