By Tequila Mockingbird
Photos by Greg Gorman and Tom Cunningham
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 10/12/25 – Jeff Copeland’s Look (or in its current form Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn) feels like a séance — a conjuring of a life that never quite stayed in one frame. Copeland, once the young writer wide-eyed in Hollywood’s shifting shadows, became more than biographer: he became custodian, critic, friend, and sometimes conflicted witness to Holly’s later years. His book doesn’t pretend to be a full “definitive” life — instead it is an imprint, a pulse, a conversation with memory that flickers across time. In Look, Copeland revisits their storied friendship in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the tangled dreams to turn A Low Life in High Heels into film, and the constant tension between myth and mortality.
But Holly’s real stage was long before Copeland — in the silver haze of the Factory, in Warhol’s films, in the kaleidoscopic explosion of underground New York. Her cinematic legacy begins most famously with Trash (1970), directed by Paul Morrissey, where she appears with Joe Dallesandro and others — her lines often improvised, her presence electrifying. In that film, Holly becomes not a side note, but an irreplaceable voice: raw, vulnerable, audacious. Reportedly, the role was expanded for her after original cuts, and director George Cukor (among others) supposedly pushed for Academy recognition.
Almost immediately, she followed Trash with Women in Revolt (1971), a satirical take on radical feminism and political theater — Warhol-style: subversive and fluent in drag, performance, and rupture. Over time she also took on smaller roles, cameos, low-budget films, underground projects, and theatrical appearances, always carrying the aura of Warhol’s world even as it aged and shifted around her.
Copeland’s Look (or Love You Madly) thus performs a double act: telling Holly’s story beyond the Warhol years, but always with one eye on that electric origin. He reconstructs the scrappy, ephemeral Hollywood of the late ’80s — the cheap apartments, failing scripts, fleeting parties — and places Holly in it not as relic, but as survivor, mentor, and ghost. His narrative force lies in showing how those films still crackle — how her Warhol-era identity never died, how New York’s 1970s reflected forward into Los Angeles’ 1990s, how memory blurs between myth and truth.
Holly Woodlawn’s cinematic life is a testament to the power of paradox: she was object, subject, muse, actor, myth, and flesh. And Copeland’s Look ensures that her fire burns for new readers — bridging generations.
