Screening of Andy Warhol’s Bad at Filmex

The Filmex screening of Andy Warhol’s Bad in Los Angeles turned the film’s ordinary details into oversized Pop images. For Andy Warhol, the large screen changed the scale of what he saw: a Santa Claus knickknack on a refrigerator suddenly carried the weight of an image made for public attention. The screening’s significance lay not only in the film’s reception but in the way exhibition itself altered its visual force.

Production and Early Reception

Bad had been shot in New York in 1976 on 35mm film with a union crew. Its cast brought together performers associated with Warhol’s studio, including Geraldine Smith and Cyrinda Foxe, and Hollywood professionals such as Carroll Baker and Perry King. Jed Johnson directed, and Warhol’s diary-keeper had co-written the screenplay. The film was well received: before Filmex, George Cukor told Warhol that he loved it after seeing it with Paul Morrissey at Susan Pile’s screening at the Picwood Theater. That screening drew 750 people, including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Julie Christie.

The Filmex Screening

On March 26, Warhol left a party to attend the Filmex screening. He described the experience as a change in scale: with the image enlarged across a theater screen, each element seemed to acquire greater significance and become more Pop. The example he retained was specific and domestic, a Santa Claus ornament on Carroll Baker’s refrigerator. The detail did not change; its prominence did. The theater made an incidental object newly legible as an image worth looking at.

Reviews and the Desired Encore

The Filmex screening came amid strong critical response. That day Warhol read a rave review of Bad in the Los Angeles Times, following the praise he had heard from Cukor. He returned to the practical consequence of the large-screen experience: he wanted to rent a big theater in New York for another screening. The diary records the wish but not whether he carried it out. Filmex thus left both a critical endorsement and a concrete plan in its wake.

Scale, Pop, and Looking

Warhol’s response connects the screening to his broader attention to how images meet an audience. In the film, a refrigerator ornament became more than background when projection magnified it; the enlarged image made ordinary material available for Pop-style attention. The moment also reverses the usual hierarchy between story and detail: rather than emphasizing plot, Warhol remembered a knickknack. His account presents cinematic scale not as a neutral container but as a force that can redirect attention and make a minor object seem consequential.