Film Schedule

During the summer of 1966, after shooting a number of short films featuring his associates, Warhol “got the idea to unify all the pieces of these people’s lives by stringing them together as if they lived in different rooms of the same hotel” – the Chelsea Hotel. The Chelsea Girls, one of Warhol’s most ambitious and commercially successful films, is a brilliant example of the artist’s signature technique of assembling complete reels of unedited film in various ways. Shown in double-screen format, the twelve 33-minute tableaux featuring beauty, sex, drugs, and danger gave a wider range of viewers a genuine glimpse of the underground, and the dark side of Pop.

The Chelsea Girls premiered at Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque at the Forty-First Street Theater on September 15, 1966. Since, as per Warhol’s usual practice, more reels were shot than actually included, it was at those first screenings that the optimal number of reels and their order was explored. Shortly after, when the film opened at commercial theaters uptown the order was standardized. The film is now comprised of twelve different reels of film, projected side-by-side in six successive pairs of images.