"In the future, everyone can be famous for 15 minutes" is one of Andy Warhol's choice aphorisms. When he said that in the late 1960s, the point had already been proven with a vengeance by Edie Sedgwick: Warhol's one-time muse, collaborator and platonic lover (with Warhol, such a thing was possible).
"Factory Girl" is a movie about Edie, aka New York's most coveted "It Girl" — or the miserable "Poor Little Rich Girl," depending on how she was feeling after lunch. Edie was from a family with serious money; her sculptor father owned a ranch in Santa Barbara and could trace his lineage to one of the signees of the Declaration of Independence, and at the age of 22, fresh out of art college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she sashayed over to Manhattan and into Warhol's famed Factory, which in its heyday functioned as a free-for-all atelier for the East Village's creatively inclined. Later, Warhol would be shot by one of the self-proclaimed "artists" who hung about the Factory — but that's another movie, "I Shot Andy Warhol."
When Andy was still hanging out with Edie, the Factory was a veritable playground where drugged-out couples copulated on a sofa beside which a horse whinnied as Warhol and his crew shot the whole scene and made it into a movie.