For a month in the spring of 1966 at the Dom, a Polish dance hall on St. Marks Place on the Lower East Side, Warhol produced a multimedia psychedelic extravaganza originally billed as Andy Warhol, Up-Tight and then renamed The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. “It was very exciting,” remembers one frequent visitor. “It was the kind of place where your blood pressure jumped thirty points when you entered the door.” Warhol projected his movies on the floors, ceilings, and walls as strobe lights flashed and Mary Woronov, a statuesque Cornell University girl with a taste for sadomasochism, and Gerard Malanga danced with bullwhips and giant flashlights. Amidst ear-splitting feedback, the Velvets in their insect-eye shades, tight black jeans, and stiletto heels screamed through “Venus in Furs” and “Waiting for the Man” and backed up Nico on “Femme Fatale” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” For Warhol, the Dom was the ultimate canvas. He was no longer just a painter, he was a conductor, a conduit for people’s emotions and ideas.

The Velvets’ first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, produced by Andy Warhol, came out in March 1967 with Warhol’s silkscreened image of a banana peel on the cover; its centerpiece was Lou Reed’s towering “Heroin,” probably the most powerful and moving drug song ever written. Ubiquitous today on lists of greatest rock albums, The Velvet Underground and Nico came out at the wrong time. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year for San Francisco and tie-dyes and bell bottoms and flowers in your hair. Accordingly, the V.U.’s West Coast tour was an unmitigated disaster. The volatile San Francisco promoter Bill Graham hated them; a review of their Los Angeles show at the Trip on the Sunset Strip predicted, “They will replace nothing except maybe suicide.” Undeterred, that summer they were back in the studio in New York recording the feedback and fuzz-drenched White Light/White Heat, a steel-toed bike boot in the teeth of the “Summer of Love.”

The Factory era coincided with the blossoming American independent-film movement. For the first time, portable 8-and 16-millimeter movie cameras were available to artists everywhere. Inspired by the hand-held aesthetic of Jack Smith’s transvestite extravaganza Flaming Creatures, which had just been confiscated by the New York City police, and supported by the enthusiasm and practical distribution know-how of Jonas Mekas, Warhol made more than sixty movies over five years, starting in the summer of 1963 with Sleep, a six-hour portrait of the handsome young stockbroker-turning-poet John Giorno sleeping naked on a bed in his Upper East Side apartment, his torso wrapped in a sheet. Warhol’s second film, Eat, featured artist Robert Indiana in his studio taking forty minutes to eat a mushroom.

Feeding reel after reel of silent film into a stationary camera mounted on a tripod, then splicing the reels together end to end, Warhol could not have made movie-making more simple. Warhol grasped the essence of his new medium immediately: “The lighting is bad, the camera work is bad, the projection is bad, but the people are beautiful.” In 1963 and ’64, he worked primarily with Malanga on silent films, a series of three-minute-long portraits called Screen Tests; on Blow Job, a half-hour close-up of an anonymous Factory visitor’s face as he is supposedly being brought to ecstasy just beneath the frame; and on The Couch, a sex flick starring one of the Factory’s only pieces of furniture.

After he bought his first sound camera at the end of 1964, Warhol coined the term “superstar” to describe the people in his movies. A few of them, like Mario (Maria) Montez, the thrift-shop, drag-queen star of Warhol’s first sound film, Harlot, were underground-movie veterans, but most had never acted before. The women tended to be beautiful, slightly twisted offspring of the ruling classes like Edie Sedgwick, the tragic blond daughter of a wealthy Santa Barbara family with a history of mental illnesses; or Viva, a Catholic schoolgirl rebel with a skinny body and a nasty mind. The men tended to be desperate and uninhibited street boys like Candy Darling, who died of cancer in 1974 brought on, many felt, by the female hormones he was injecting, and Eric Emerson, who died two years later.

During the summer of 1966, Warhol was shooting as many as three movies a week. Many of them were scripted by Ronald Tavel, an avant-garde novelist and playwright from Brooklyn who had worked with Jack Smith. Tavel’s fruitless attempts to convince the casts to memorize their lines often turned into part of the film. At the time, three of Warhol’s reigning female superstars—Nico; Brigid Polk, the zany, kindhearted daughter of Richard Berlin, president of the Hearst Corporation, who’d assumed her surname in honor of her favorite way of ingesting speed; and Susan Bottomly, a vain young model from Boston who performed under the name International Velvet—were all living at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. Though many of his reels were actually shot at the Factory or in a West Village apartment, Warhol decided to set all of his films at the Chelsea.