Main Cast: Brigid Berlin, John Waters, Patricia Hearst, Paul Morrissey, Taylor Mead
Release Year: 2000
Country: US
Run Time: 75 minutes
Plot
Like Susanne Ofteringer's Nico-Icon (1995), Vincent Fremont's Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story chronicles the life of one of the more colorful and unforgettable women to emerge from Andy Warhol's menagerie of artists, actors, lost souls, and hangers-on. The daughter of wealthy, powerful, and conservative parents who were fixtures of Manhattan high society, Brigid Berlin rebelled at a young age, enduring a whirlwind marriage and a spell at a fasting clinic in Mexico before making her way to Warhol's Factory, where she earned fame for her Polaroid photos and her habit of recording phone conversations. Although her parents weren't enthusiastic about their daughter's work in such Warhol films as The Chelsea Girls and Bike Boy, Berlin remained a fixture on the Warhol scene, gaining further notoriety for her one-woman shows and the paintings she created using her breasts as brushes. Among the people director Vincent Fremont interviews is filmmaker John Waters, who cast Berlin in a small role in his 1994 Serial Mom. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Review
Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story chronicles the unlikely Warhol superstar, daughter of Dick Berlin, the man behind the Hearst Corporation. An obsessive-compulsive motor-mouth, she occasionally went as Brigid Polk in honor of her amphetamine shots. Brigid's food addiction landed her in exclusive weight clinics from which she would always escape. During life with Andy Warhol she appeared in Chelsea Girls, made Polaroid and collage art, carried around the infamous "Cock Book," and gave live performances using a tape recorder, a telephone, and mother-baiting. Pie in the Sky alludes to Brigid Berlin's influence on Warhol's work and includes interviews with John Waters (Patty Hearst and Berlin finally met on the set of Serial Mom in which both appeared) and Paul Morrissey. While it may not offer innovation, Pie in the Sky does affectionately serve up a fascinating woman, as much now as then. These days Berlin's hyper activities include organizing her collection of Pug dog figurines, year-long anxiety about receiving a clean bill from her heart specialist -- which she celebrates with a cigarette, and precisely measuring her food. She just has to avoid a local bakeshop's key lime pie, for which she'd sell her soul, and in one harrowing scene she basically does, illustrating how painful pie can be. The binge prompts a gasp of disappointment from the audience, not in her but for her, as she has endeared herself. ~ Jessica Masselink, All Movie Guide
