was shot on ASA 400 Tri-X stock, push-processed to ASA 1000 to compensate for the dark conditions of filming. The push-processing gives the film a graininess that calls attention to the medium of the film stock itself during projection in a manner that Douglas Crimp compared to the way that ink in Warhol's silkscreen paintings is present as both blobs of ink and as part of the image. Each reel contains a segment of film that was exposed to incidental light during processing, which may be evidence that the final work is unedited. The complete film consists of ten reels, each lasting approximately 48 minutes when projected in slow motion at 16 frames per second, as specified by Warhol. After the film had been developed and printed, Warhol did not have funds to pay the processor, and Palmer arranged with his mother to make the payment. In recognition of his role in conceiving, assisting with and paying for the film, Warhol listed Palmer as co-director. Release Empire premiered on March 6, 1965 at the City Hall Cinema in Manhattan, then the site of Mekas' Film-Makers' Cinematheque. Reporting on the premiere in his Village Voice column, Mekas did not state how many people were in the 576-seat theater, but claimed that after the film had been running for ten minutes, 30 or 40 people surrounded him and another staff member demanding their money back, "threatening to solve the question of the new vision and the new cinema by breaking chairs on our heads". Apart from Mekas' articles, the only other extended discussion of the film around the time of its release is in two articles in Film Culture, a journal of experimental cinema that Mekas and his brother published. Gregory Battcock, a critic who was part of Warhol's circle and appears in several of his films, connected the film with other works by Warhol in terms of its focus on a subject that the viewer already generally knows. He argued this left space to emphasize other issues, particularly the physical medium of film, and the artistic use of long duration as a way of concentrating attention on these qualities. Battcock also observed that Empire had quickly become a classic of the avant garde and promised to have great if unpredictable influence on the development of film. In 1966, Warhol and his colleagues began producing events featuring rock band the Velvet Underground;