Andy famously promised fame to everybody for 15 minutes. The 4-minute screen tests at hand would thus, strictly speaking, seriously short-change his baker's dozen subjects. But you won't hear them complaining.

You won't hear them at all, in fact. The black-and-white film is silent, and the sound consists of live music rather than dead speech in "13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests," the elegant multimedia presentation that has its world-premiere last weekend at the Byham.

Jointly commissioned by the Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts, "13 Most Beautiful" features large-scale projection of Andy's pseudo-audition footage (shot between 1964-1966) to the live accompaniment of new songs by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, formerly of the Manhattan indie band Luna.

Warhol shot some 500 of his screen tests in all, portraits of the famous and infamous entities and non-entities who visited his "Factory" studio in New York. There's sad-eyed Ann Buchanan, frozen in what seems to be a still-frame loop, until we spot the slowly emerging teardrop that treks down her cheek. There's Billy Name with his cigarette and shades, occasionally twitching to a sort of Tibetan mantra. And Jane Holzer, the Toothbrush Girl, increasingly frothy for her four famous minutes.

Ho-hum.

But then there's tragic Edie Sedgwick -- dead lo these 37 years -- her huge, scared eyes caught doe-like in Warhol's headlight/spotlight, to the strains of a lovely pain-filled ballad called "It Don't Rain in Beverly Hills."

Ingrid Superstar's turn is likewise wonderful: Looking like a blonde Hitchcock heroine of the period -- Tipi Hedrin or Janet Leigh -- she measures her face with long slender fingers to the sweet tune "Eyes in My Smoke." And who can resist Lou Reed, drinking a Coke (a veritable plot!) in what would today be a TV ad, melding pop image with commercialism, to the tune of "Not a Young Man Anymore."

Most fascinating of the pieces was the seventh -- a guy who looks a helluva lot like Dennis Hopper with a worried expression that keeps subtly changing. It's a veritable tour de force of acting, under these circumstances. Turns out it IS Dennis Hopper.

All the subjects are captured in stark relief by a strong keylight and filmed by Warhol's stationary 16mm Bolex camera on 100-foot rolls, transferred to Beta SP videotape -- slo-mo'd down from their 2 and  3/4 minute actual time to four minutes by project developers Ben Harrison, Geralyn Huxley and Greg Pierce of the Warhol.

Wareham's pleasantly moody, monochromatic voice is reminiscent of Leonard Cohen. His "dream pop" music -- characterized by languid, New Agey rhythms, melodic guitar, wistful lyrics and Velvet Underground's influence- -- could have been a bit edgier for the occasion.

But the audio is frankly secondary. It's more about the visuals. Warhol's subjects were clearly told not to move, mug or "act," but to take a pose and hold it as still as they could. Only Hopper and Ingrid and Lou violated or subverted that direction.

In the end (as well as the beginning), we and their starkly sensual faces are in a game of staring each other down. That deadly stationary camera leaves it up to the actors to do something interesting -- or not.

Which reminds me of my favorite interview with Warhol back in the early '80s, when I asked him about "Empire" (1964) -- his eight-hour movie of the Empire State Building, shot on a day when it wasn't particularly frisky. The film's big excitement consisted of the occasional crossing of a high-altitude pigeon. I phrased my question as politely as I could: "What do you say to the criticism that it's -- uh, boring?"

I needn't have worried about offending him. Warhol was uninsultable. With a beatific smile, he answered: "I like boring things."

If nothing "happens," you tend to keep watching -- no, searching -- the screen for something boring to become revealing. For or against your will, that phenomenon makes many, if not all, of these "13 Most Beautiful" moments riveting.