Growing up in the bad hair days of yesterday I was obsessed with everything pop. Popcorn, pop tarts and pop-u-lar music. I regularly watched Countdown on the ABC like every Australian teenager and I remember wearing the official badge of the Monkees Fan Club on my jacket as a kid. In fact I knew the words to every pop song the Monkees recorded! And, I’d run home everyday after school just to watch the repeats of Partridge Family another famous pop group with their own TV show. The first piece of pop theatre I saw was the Flintstones live on stage. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble are the world’s most famous pop cartoon characters and I loved them. The Flintstones TV show is full of pop references and special pop-up guest appearances from stars of the day like Rock Hudson, Cary Grant and director Alfred Hitchcock.
As a teenager I loved Hitchcock. I remember watching all his movies on the big screen at the local cinema on Enmore Road in Sydney. I saw Psycho with Anthony Perkins a million times and always sat at the back with the biggest popcorn I could buy.
Strangely I also related to the world’s most famous pop artist, Andy Warhol. Under age, dressed in six-inch platform shoes to make me look older, so I thought, I remember sneaking into a Warhol film called Trash starring Joe Dallesandro, one of Warhol’s superstars. To be honest I didn’t understand one word of Trash and wondered what the hell a heroin addict was? Was that a person addicted to watching leading ladies of the silver screen? Next up at the local movie house was Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein. Now, in my late teens I was totally delighted by the full frontal nudity and general gore that was on show. In one scene from the film Udo Kier the mad doctor rips open the guts of a young woman spread eagle on a table, and famously declares in a clipped European accent that…’a man has never lived until he has fucked life into a gall bladder.’ The doctor then straddles the girl and pumps away like a crazy, blood splattering everywhere. I remember thinking…’Golly a good fuck is a messy affair.’ Years later I wrote a play on Warhol and his life called Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes Of Fame and got into NIDA on the strength of the original draft. Things have changed in the world since I was a kid playing on the footpath outside my inner city home. The world went digital, pop culture has truly gone global. This change has brought pop into every home and  everything we do. We can pop while riding a tram in Melbourne by taking out our iPhone and pushing the YouTube App. We can pop running around Hyde Park in Sydney with our iPod. We can pop while eating in New York city by flicking a switch and opening Facebook. Pop culture is everywhere…and without pop culture I wouldn’t have written my Warhol play… Without pop culture there’d be no more bad songs played at suburban weddings. Without pop culture there would be no pop stars and important to my story now, there would be no Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame is a story I felt compelled to tell. …driven by a force beyond my control at the time of writing it. It’s not a pretty tale. But, no true story is. It’s a raw and uncompromising look at what it takes to be the leading pop icon in a world gone mad.
Authors note : So what is pop culture?
Well, according to Wikipedi the term “popular culture” was coined in the 19th century. By the end of World War II the meaning of popular culture began to overlap with those of mass culture. The abbreviated form “pop” for popular, as in pop music, dates from the late 1950s. Pop is specific of something containing qualities of mass appeal.
Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes of Fame: In The Raw
Written and directed by Noel Anderson
Where: The Jewish Museum of Australia
When: Sat Nights 2nd, 9th & 16th May 2015
Admission includes Raw Performance and Warhol Exhibition, Geniuses.
Plus, Q & A with writer/director and cast.
Only in Melbourne
Bookings : http://www.trybooking.com/129490
http://australianplays.org/script/ASC-1542