Having Another Round of Cocktails With Andy

The floating Andy Warhol party moved to Beverly Hills on Thursday night, where bright, scrawling images covered the otherwise blank walls of the overcrowded Gagosian Gallery. Few guests seemed to notice the art. There was hardly room to move, let alone scrutinize the paintings, and the place was filled with a thousand conversations and the scent of white wine.

“You like the paintings?” one man asked his companion. “What I can see of them,” came the answer. A few feet away someone asked: “Do you know that Warhol allows us to see the room through a child’s eyes?”

It was the opening of “Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat: Collaboration,” an exhibition featuring about a dozen works that mix Basquiat’s Neo-Expressionism with corporate logos from Warhol. (The works were panned by critics when they first appeared, but today all things Andy are au courant.) The two-hour cocktail party drew legions of art-conscious Hollywood types.

Winona Ryder sneaked in quietly with a male friend, prompting some guests to whisper: “Is that her boyfriend?”

Later, Kirsten Dunst arrived and dutifully posed for a photographer. K.d. lang was there trying to keep a low profile. A woman walked in carrying a Spider-Man doll.

“Andy draws them in,” said Timothy Hunt, the New York art agent who helped orchestrate the show. “For quite a lot of people, he’s bumped Picasso and Matisse as the most important artist of the 20th century.”

After the show, everyone met at Morton’s for the party’s after-party. Tables had been cleared to make room for the crowd.

On one wall, clips from Warhol’s avant-garde films rolled: a woman dressed and undressed. A nude couple engaged in an endless kiss. Factory muse Nico, awash in pink, gazed over the crowd.

At a booth near the bar, Dennis Hopper and Victoria Duffy enjoyed the scene. Irving Blum and Eli Broad were nearby. Lang pulled a photographer toward her and said: “Hey, get this picture!” A camera flashed as lang, veteran singer Marianne Faithfull and Roy Orbison’s widow, Barbara, stood together and smiled. Later, Faithfull stood on a small stage in the center of the room. “Here we all are, celebrating a moment,” she said. “It feels kind of weird.”

As Andy Garcia went to fetch Dustin Hoffman a drink at Deep on Thursday night, he inadvertently sprinkled his drink on a woman standing nearby. “Did you feel that?” said Alison Schmidt, a costume designer, to her friend Jessica Kender. “Andy Garcia just spilled his drink on my fishnet stockings.” “Woo hoo,” 26-year-old Kender replied, as she waved her arms in the air. “This is how close we’re going to get to fame.”

Both Garcia and Hoffman were at the club on the corner of Hollywood and Vine for the “Confidence” wrap party, thrown by Movieline magazine. (The heist movie is to open in December.)

At the club, where performers in skimpy underwear danced inside glass boxes above the bar, the movie’s stars and crew reminisced about the making of the movie, as outtakes were shown on a screen and waiters offered comfort in the form of warm chocolate-chip cookies.

Director James Foley was feeling part nostalgia, part relief. “You put your heart in it,” he said, “but when it ends, it’s really sad.” Nearby, producer Marc Butan recalled good times at Deep--part of the movie is set at the club. “It was such a love fest,” he said. After the amour, however, “you get your life back.”

Ed Burns came after 10 p.m., announcing big plans for the remainder of the evening. “I’ll be dancing in the booth later,” he joked. To the disappointment of several in the crowd, he didn’t.

Quote/Unquote

“All those people reacting to God, doing things for God. But isn’t the whole concept of God that God would need no help? He can handle it all, right? How can you say you believe in God and then try to help God at the same time? It doesn’t make any sense.”

--Chris Rock, musing on the Sept. 11 attacks in the

June issue of GQ magazine

City of Angles runs Tuesday through Friday. E-mail: angles @latimes.com