Hollywood's sway is not yet absolute. There's a secessionist stronghold of independent movies, and Lili Taylor is its rebel queen.

How we challenge ourselves, how we express ourselves are the prime concerns of this explosively animated actress, whose words erupt in heartfelt bursts propelled by propeller like arm gestures and rocketing eyebrows. Her peers and directors speak of Taylor with awe, and she's starred in more movies than Julia Roberts, but most American filmgoers have never heard of her. Her dazzling turn in Mary Harron's sensational "I Shot Andy Warhol" may go a long way toward correcting that oversight.

The elfin Taylor, 29, has carved out a singular career. She's worked with Oliver Stone ("Born on the Fourth of July") and Robert Altman ("Short Cuts," "Ready to Wear"), but her heart remains with the American underground. Only Harvey Keitel, one of her heroes, has remained so committed to the cause of low-budget serious movies.

Taylor scoffs at actresses (and actgors) "who play this victim thing, that there's no good roles, meaning good roles that pay millions. If you've got $5, an old camera and a few feet of film you can make a movie." The artist daughter of working-class Chicagoans, she blends equal portions of the ordinary and the extraordinary in her characterizations.

In the past few years she's starred as a cerebral vampire ("The Addiction"), a hippie-ish dreamer ('Dogfight") and a genuine urban American holy woman ("Household Saints"). Playing Valerie Solanas, the failed writer who pumped several bullets into startled pop artist Warhol in June, 1968, she's again called upon to unite opposites. In Harron's deeply researched account, Taylor plays Solanas as a madcap psycho, a raging funster, a flirtatious fanatic.

Solanas, founder and sole member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men), claimed that the passive, uninterested Warhol had "too much control over hier life." Taylor feels that she probably wanted his love and approval- she shot him for his indifference. His cool Warholian revenge was that he didn't even care enough about her to press charges. She languished in mental institutions and on the streets until her death in 1989. But as late as 1978, she was still feisty enough to proclaim that her only regret was that she hadn't taken more target practice.

Harron plausibly hints at a strange, mutually unacknowledged kinship between Warhol and Solanas, two blue-collar Catholics adrift in a fashionable avant-garde world. She cites the opinion of a close Warhol associate that they were "equally emotionally disabled."

Solanas' notorious "SCUM Manifesto" has exerted a lasting fascination. Known as a ferocious screed calling for the extermination of men, it's a witty, bawdy and outrageous piece of writing. Harron says that its mix of agression and vulnerability still speaks to young girls afraid of their own anger.

Taylor, who "sometimes spends the whole day angry at the way women are treated in this society," read it in 1991 in San Francisco and was thrilled by Solanas message of "No apologies!"

"When Mary came to me with the part in 1993 it was like destiny," she says, adding a typical Tayloresque flurry: "Valerie was like a genius, she was seeing stuff most of us never see; she had the ability to penetrate society and get to the kernel of things, but of course she was burning at both ends."

While Taylor prefers to see Solanas as a provocateur rather than a serious terrorist, her conversation and performance make clear that the woman was also seriously unbalanced. But Taylor and Harron quickly note how maddeningly narrow the avenues of acceptable expression were for girls of her era (Solanas was born in 1936).

The Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Harron had exhaustively researched the Warhol period while working on a BBC documentary. Later, she interviewed acquaintences of Solanas. For her research, Taylor screened the same two-minute clip of her getting out of a police car "until I wore it out" and Solanas brfief performance in Warhol's "I a Man."

The outrageous humor of "SCUM Manifesto" inspired Taylor and Harron to seek a playful synthesis between Solanas' grim public personna and the antic spirit expressed in her writings. They've been criticized for making her too endearing.

"These are people who knew her who tell me, 'You're wrong,'" the actress says defiantly. "But my truth has to stronger than theirs."

While defending their interpretation, Harron admits to one unforseen problem. The urchinlike '60's street wear favored by Solanas "made Lili look abolutely adorable. We had to counter that."

"I was afraid at first that Valerie would consume me," Taylor admits, but now she's almost reluctant to set the character aside.

She laughs, "I sometimes think I should make little dolls of my characters and burn them when a movie is done. To say, you know, it's over."

This actress who doesn't just wait around for big-paying, career-boosting roles might need a bigger furnace. Taylor has four more movies due out before the end of the year.


Copyright 1996 Star Tribune.

Bob Campbell, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 05-23-1996, pp 07E