When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion black-and-white footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building.

[3] In 2004, Empire was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, who deemed it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

In April 1964, the upper 30 floors of the Empire State Building were floodlighted for the first time in connection with the opening of the New York World's Fair in Queens.

As the only floodlit skyscraper in New York City,[6] the impact of the lighting was dramatic, with one person calling the tower's illuminated crown "a chandelier suspended in the sky".

[6] For a shooting venue, Warhol made arrangements to use an office belonging to the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building at 51st Street and 6th Avenue.

[11] In the Rockefeller Foundation office, Mekas framed the shot for Warhol's approval, and filming commenced at 8:06 pm, about ten minutes before sunset.

[15] Reporting on the premiere in his Village Voice column, Mekas 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".

[16] According to Robert Fulford of the Toronto Star, 80 people paid $2 per seat, and when they discovered it was "eight hours of film of the Empire State Building at night with no action except for the occasional light turning on or off," half demanded their money back, and one man called the police.

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.

[19] In 1966, Warhol and his colleagues began producing events featuring rock band the Velvet Underground; these went by several names, ultimately becoming best known as the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable."

In addition to the Velvet Underground, the Exploding Plastic Inevitables featured simultaneous mixes of strobe lights, dancers, colored slides and film projections.