Esther Robinson on ‘A Walk into the Sea’

A chance encounter led Esther Robinson to make a remarkable documentary about her late uncle, an artist once connected with Andy Warhol. David Jenkins hears her tale

Esther Robinson never really wanted to make films. After unearthing a creative connection with her late uncle, little-known artist and filmmaker Danny Williams, she was impelled to make ‘A Walk into the Sea’, a documentary chronicling his short life. A Harvard drop-out from New England, Williams moved to New York in the early 1960s.

Here he worked in film, initially editing the Maysles brothers’ ‘Showman’ (1963) and ‘What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA’ (1964), before moving on to make his own experimental shorts on 16mm. It was rumoured that he was Andy Warhol’s lover for some time, and he created the pioneering light shows for Warhol’s ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ happenings. Despite these achievements, in 1966, aged just 27, he excused himself from dinner at his parents’ house and was never seen again. His car was found abandoned at an ocean cliffside.

The story of how Robinson came to make a film on her remarkable uncle combines a series of odd coincidences and an overly inquisitive grandmother. ‘I worked for a place called Creative Capital, which is housed and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts,’ says Robinson. ‘I worked in a swanky office and my grandmother thought that was really cool, so she came up to visit me. We’re wandering around and we run into the head of the foundation, a super-sexy blue-blood called Arch Gillies, and, of course, my grandmother starts flirting with him.

All of a sudden she’s saying stuff like, “You know, my son, Danny Williams, was Andy Warhol’s boyfriend. He lived with Andy and his mother.” I’d never heard her speak of my uncle in this way. As she’s doing so, a woman called Eileen walks by and hears the name Danny Williams. Eileen is old friends with Callie Angell, who was in film marketing and had stumbled across a bunch of Danny’s films. She’d told everyone in her circle that if they ever heard about Danny to please let her know. So, Eileen hears my grandmother talking about Danny Williams, pulls me aside and tells me I need to call Callie Angell. She doesn’t tell
me why.’

Fretful of what she might discover about her uncle, Robinson eventually made the call. ‘Callie picks up the phone and I explain, “My name is Esther Robinson, I was given your name by Eileen, blah, blah, blah.” Then there was a really long pause, and she replies, “I’ve been trying to find your family for about seven years. I have all your uncle’s films.” That was the beginning for me. Suddenly there are these movies, and movies are something I understand, something that I love.’ ‘In the beginning it was a big question mark fraught with peril,’ Robinson says of hearing about her uncle’s films. ‘He could have been talentless, a wash-up, he could have been, you know, an asshole.'

It was at this point that Robinson decided to dig further, interviewing her grandmother about her uncle’s activities as an artist, and at the same time trying to trace his link to Warhol’s Factory. ‘I had no idea what I was getting into. If you told me then it was going to be seven years of my life, I would have said no.’ Taking her own passion for filmmaking into account, Robinson quickly decided that film was the best way to tell Williams’s story. ‘I think the first step in this process is to recognise the medium. The first time I actually got to see his films was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. It’s up there with getting married. I’m meeting this kid, who had been totally erased from my life, and I’m meeting him through his movies.’So there was an instant connection?‘ Not everyone loves experimental film, but I know people who make these movies and I understand how their hearts and minds live in these movies. So when I saw Danny’s work, I really felt like he was speaking to me.

With the film, I wanted to provide a context for that conversation; I wanted to give this person a space for his voice.’ Robinson’s film succeeds as a kind of artistic and spiritual exhumation of her uncle’s creative and emotional temperament, but it also offers a revealing window on to some of the more seamy aspects of Warhol’s often fanatical cadre. Interviews with scenesters such as filmmaker Ron Nameth, Warhol acolyte Paul Morrissey, Velvet Underground linchpin John Cale and loose-lipped ‘star’ of Warhol’s ‘Chelsea Girls’, Bridget Polk, reveal that the sheen of unity and sociable artistic collaboration was not as deep as one may have suspected.

‘There are a lot of things people do and say on camera that you can totally destroy them with,’ comments Robinson. ‘When it comes to Warhol, people say some very provocative things. Basically, here’s the thing: when you sign up to make a movie about that era, you have to know what are you going to add. What I wanted to add was a story about the people. To me, Danny was a watcher, and a lot of important times are chronicled by the watchers and not the central characters. The people who are articulate, who are centre-stage, who have charisma, they tell our recent history, but long-term history is often told by the people on the sidelines quietly observing and recording. Danny was one of those people.’

‘A Walk into the Sea’ is screened at the ICA on Aug 17 and released on DVD on Aug 18.

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