Soap Opera (The Lester Persky Story)

The first movie Jane did for me was Soap Opera, filmed over P.J. Clarke’s, the Third Avenue pub. It was subtitled ‘The Lester Persky Story’ in tribute to Lester, who eventually became a movie producer. Lester introduced the hour-long commercial on television in the fifties that had Virginia Graham showing you all the different ways you could use Melmac, or Rock Hudson doing vacuum-cleaning demonstrations. Lester let us use footage from his old TV commericials, so we spliced sales-pitch demonstrations of rotisserie broilers and dishware in between the segments of Soap Opera. —Andy Warhol