being cast according to conventional acting criteria. All of that could be excised, along with the story, the setting, etc., in order to produce nothing but excess or surplus. The aforementioned apparatus—not to be described in technical terms alone—was key for the creation of star quality. While it’s true that star quality is part of the surplus of industrial production, it is as dependent upon its dispositives as Maria Montez was upon ineffectual plaster. Warhol’s notion of filmmaking was based on a certain notion of industrial production. Indeed, Annette Michelson was completely right when she called the early Factory a direct reaction to culture industry practices. In fact, she goes so far as to declare that the factory was a carnivalesque parody of the culture industry, in the Bakhtinian sense. [7] However, she follows the line of the Factory historians, and especially Warhol’s own, when she claims that after the attempt on Warhol’s life, nothing was the same anymore, and that the evil Paul Morrissey then aspired to turn it all into a real culture industry. Yet, as far as the Factory’s film production is concerned, I think one should not overestimate the importance of this rupture. As a director or filmmaker, Warhol had

always tried to stay out of the foreground as much as possible and—to paraphrase many familiar aphorisms—to meld with the machine. It is easy to recognize the reason for the machine metaphor: it makes it possible to connect the state of technological development with economic factors. To put a fine point on it, Warhol wanted to personally embody anonymous industrial production methods, in the truest sense of the term. He wanted to incorporate and thus rationalize the industry and the apparatus. He tried to simplify the production of star quality by transforming the relationship between the industrial apparatus and the star into production relations that were not only less expensive and less complex but also socially uncomplicated: he located them quite simply in the bohemianism of the Factory. The Factory was supposed to be a production workshop that manufactured industrial star quality—only, the special effects and illusions were not created by technology, but by sociology, so to speak. It follows that Warhol preferred to constantly delegate tasks, to let things run their course. Other people were allowed to leave visible marks: for instance, Ronald Tavel wrote scripts or gave