The Factory began as a cheap loft repurposed into a film studio

Evidence

By the end of January, Warhol had moved into the large East Forty-Seventh Street loft that, once the theatrical designer Billy Linich (later Billy Name) covered the walls with aluminum foil and silver aluminum paint as he had the walls and ceiling of his Lower East Side apartment, became the Factory. It was also a movie studio, the location for the three-minute portraits that would be known as “screen tests,” as well as for the movie that would be a prolonged reaction shot, Blow Job. The act was unshown; the title alone ensured that the movie was unshowable. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 496

Categorization

• XREF: Core evidence for the reader’s thesis that cheap physical space underwrote invention density — connects to gentrification-origin material later in the book.