Erin Cramer: Feminists on SCUM

Erin Cramer is an Emmy-winning screenwriter and director from New York, based in London, who makes films in the documentary and fiction genres. Cramer is a graduate of Barnard College (class of '86), where she majored in Women’s Studies with a concentration in Literary Theory.

In the early 1990s Cramer began collecting the SCUM tape interviews for a self-funded project, interviewing radical feminists and actors involved with artist Andy Warhol's studio space, The Factory, in New York City. The interviews all center around Valerie Solanas and her widely-publicized shooting of Warhol in 1968. Solanas was also known for her self-publishing of SCUM Manifesto (1967), wherein the author envisions a world without men. The acronym SCUM, Society for Cutting Up Men, is said to have been added by publisher Maurice Girodias and appeared on the first edition of the text. After Solanas’s conviction for shooting Warhol in June 1968, she received psychiatric evaluation and was sentenced to the prison ward of Elmhurst Hospital. In that same month Girodias published SCUM Manifesto through the independent and controversial Olympia Press, cementing Solanas’s image as a militant misandrist and feminist separatist, with many interpreting the work as satire, despite Solanas claiming the work to be sincere, and her never having identified with the feminist movement. The crime has since been mythologized and theorized upon in both the media and public memory, with depictions likening Solanas to fictional and real tragic idols, such as Medea, or the Unabomber (in Avital Ronell’s introduction to SCUM Manifesto). Alternately, composer Pauline Oliveros has likened Solanas’s fate and legacy in pop culture to that of Marilyn Monroe in her orchestral piece “To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in recognition of their desperation” (1970).

The set of interviews conducted by Erin Cramer in the 1990s give voice to individuals who personally knew Solanas, understood her shooting of Warhol as a political act and came to her aid. Though many of these individuals have publicly spoken out in defense of Solanas on other platforms, the Cramer tapes likely represent the only video interviews on the topic. Speakers include: Florynce Kennedy, a lawyer and radical feminist who defended Solanas; Ti-Grace Atkinson, a feminist activist who had a complex personal relationship with Solanas; radical feminist activist Rosalyn Baxandall, who resonated with Solanas's militant tactics; Dana Densmore and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, founding members of Cell 16, a feminist separatist movement which drew inspiration from SCUM Manifesto; Vivian Gornick, a radical feminist writer who wrote an introduction to the second printing of SCUM Manifesto; Jill Johnston, a lesbian separatist activist and author; influential gay rights activist Jeremiah Newton, who knew Solanas from the downtown scene and edited The Letters and Diaries of Candy Darling (1992) which would go on to be the basis for the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol; and Ultra Violet, an actress in many of Warhol’s films, including I, a Man (1967), on the set of which she met Solanas.