“And you,” Andy Warhol asked Bibbe Hansen when he first met her, “What do you do?” Before she could say a word, Al Hansen proudly blurted out, “I just sprung her from jail!” The curious artist asked, “Jail? Why? Please tell us all about that!” In her element, Bibbe jumped up and performed three or four of her best war stories from the big house. Clapping his hands in delight, Warhol said, “We have to make a movie out of that. Would you come to the Factory and make a movie with me about jail?” Bibbe of course said yes, and Warhol assistants Gerard Malanga and Chuck Wein made plans for her to come to the Factory at the start of the next workweek. “She can’t come Monday,” her dad countered. “She has to go to school! If she doesn’t go to school they’re gonna send her back to jail.” Everyone burst out laughing: “Oh, right, right, right. She has to go to school! Of course!” In a compromise, it was agreed that she could go to the Factory after school let out that Monday, and they eventually shot the feature-length Prison with Edie Sedgwick. The film consists of a static shot of Bibbe telling Sedgwick about her jail experiences as they sit on a box in a bare room; at one point, some female guards burst in and rob them of their possessions.

From Chapter 11 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore