GERARD MALANGA

By the time Gerard Malanga arrived at Andy Warhol's studio in 1963--accepting a job for $1.25 an hour to help with Warhol's large-scale silk-screen paintings--the 20-year-old was already an accomplished poet. By his own account, he had been encouraged by poets such as Daisy Aldan and W.H. Auden (the latter told Malanga he was the best American poet under 25 writing today), been "robbed" of a poetry award in a competition at Mount Holyoke College, and was studying with the poet Willard Maas at Wagner College on Staten Island.Since Malanga had experience working in a screen-printing shop, he decided to make some money on the side at the nascent Factory. Soon, his work evolved from printing and cleaning screens to pulling newspaper images of car crashes and other disasters--the source material for some of Warhol's best-known paintings of the period--to collaborating with Warhol as he experimented with his new movie camera, a 16-millimeter silent Bolex. As Warhol's Factory became a social hub as well as the site of production for the artist's paintings, its focus shifted from paintings to film, and the people who inhabited the studio became the subjects of hundreds of films. Malanga then became a filmmaker. From 1964 to 1966, Warhol and Malanga shot 472 Screen Tests.

-Huffington Post
August 4 2010