“A human being is a sympathetic entity. No matter how terrible a person might be, someone with an artist’s point of view will try to render his individuality without condescension or contempt. That’s the natural function of a dramatist. The movies I’ve made have no connection with what I’m talking about now [politics]. They don’t say, ‘Do this’ or ‘Don’t do that’. They portray a kind of emptiness in people who are living through a transitional cultural period when they don’t know who they are or what to do.” [1]

– Paul Morrissey

“Paul Morrissey was an odd but appealing character. He was thirty-two years old but he seemed much older – perhaps because the three things he hated even more than the auteur theory were sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. He revelled in his counter-cultural contrariness […] For Paul, rock stars were drug trash, a recurring term in his rapid-fire chatter, applied to everything and everyone he found morally repugnant.” [2]

– Bob Colacello

“I love that Paul Morrissey is a Republican. That really endears me to him. When he made Women In Revolt, which is my favourite Warhol film, he was doing a satire on women’s liberation, but it’s a thoroughly feminist film. I love that he doesn’t even realise that his movies promote everything he probably stands against.” [3]

– Bruce LaBruce, director of Hustler White

*****

To fans of his work, it can seem that there were two Paul Morrisseys. One was a filmmaker of wit and compassion who explored the lives of marginalised misfits, denizens of the drug underworld and queer or trans characters, in a style that oscillated between playful satire, deadpan observation and sudden piercing reality. The other was a fiery ultra-conservative who declared in interviews that the ‘permissive society’ was a rot that had poisoned America from within. One made experimental, provocative and often shocking films with Andy Warhol: the other regarded President Reagan as a political avatar of moral decency and conflated liberalism with totalitarianism. Working out how both could be aspects of the same man has vexed many a commentator on the life and work of Paul Morrissey. Was he crazy? Was he kidding?

If the latter, it was a performance he gave so many times that the mask became the face. It’s tempting to think that Morrissey started out playing the role of irascible conservative to carve a contrarian niche for himself among the ‘anything-goes’ oddballs and garrulous speed-freaks of the Factory. There is certainly a sense in his interviews that he liked to shock and outrage the reader. Bob Colacello, who worked alongside Morrissey and Warhol at The Factory between 1970 and 1973, writes in his memoir Holy Terror, “[Paul] would often chuckle to himself after he made a particularly off-the-wall remark, and laugh out loud as he read his own quotes. ‘Did I really say that?’ he’d say.” [4] However, the notion that it was all a ‘put-on’ doesn’t stand up. Morrissey maintained his ultra-conservative political stance for decades, with such unswerving rigour that we have to take him seriously.

But there’s the rub. If he was so very right-wing, he was drastically out of step with his political brothers and sisters. Frankly, most of his films would outrage or disgust conservative America. In The Chelsea Girls, which Morrissey co-directed with Warhol, a gay speed-freak acting the role of ‘Pope’ turns violent and physically attacks a female ‘penitent’. In Flesh, a dignified elderly homosexual pays a buff eighteen-year-old male hustler to pose naked in his apartment for ‘artistic’ photographs. In Trash, a down-and-out woman (played by transexual actor Holly Woodlawn) masturbates with a bottle while her junkie husband lounges naked in a heroin stupor; and in Women in Revolt, two radical feminists punish a wolf-whistling construction worker by administering a forced enema in the street. In each case the characters are portrayed sympathetically. As for his horror films, Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, the dangling intestines of the former and the copiously vomited blood of the latter would hardly make Morrissey a poster boy for Christian family values, and that’s before we consider the lovingly photographed shots of hunky Joe Dallesandro’s ass pumping up and down between the thighs of various female cast members. Yes, sex and violence are acceptable to right-wing viewers as well as ‘liberals’, but homosexuality, alternative lifestyles and genderfuck are unlikely to pass the taste test in Republican households.

Morrissey often described his films as comedies, and it’s certainly fair to say that he satirised rather than celebrated the lifestyles he depicted. But while he may have regarded drug culture and the sexual revolution as absurd, he rarely scorned his characters: they are people striving for dignity, despite the indignities that life, or their own unwise life choices, heap upon them. ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’ seems to be the formula, although the ’sins’ receive a very generous airing: whatever moral judgments he may have had in the back of his mind, Morrissey’s camera was non-judgmental. His affection for the performers, his admiration of their wit and energy, was far from theoretical. It was felt and shared, it radiates from the screen. Take the scene described in Trash, with Holly Woodlawn driven by sexual frustration to masturbate with a bottle: Morrissey’s framing insists that we mentally accept Woodlawn’s femininity; there are no close-ups to undermine her for cheap laughs.

This is not the sort of thing that would warm the hearts of anti-trans conservatives today. Those on the right who might applaud Morrissey when he describes liberal society as a toilet would soon turn up their noses at the ‘stench’ rising from his films. Instead, he had to settle for admirers from the liberal wing of society. Maurice Yacowar, author of an excellent book on Morrissey, put it this way: “Morrissey is an outcast from all the islands, from the independent to the commercial, a man between, an odd man out, with no camp (in either sense) safe from his subversion. Yet so bracing and compassionate are the epiphanies of this reactionary conservative’s films, that they can speak to and for even a dread liberal (such as the author).” [5]

Early Years

Paul Morrissey was born in Manhattan on the 23rd of February 1938 and brought up in the Bronx, where his father was a lawyer. He attended St Barnabas Catholic school in Yonkers, then Fordham University, a Jesuit Catholic institution. After college he worked for a while at an insurance company and the New York City Department of Welfare. A voracious film fan who devoured the output of Hollywood and harboured a passion for Italian and early German cinema, he had attended screenings at MOMA while studying at Fordham. He was especially fond of the English director Carol Reed: “I saw all his films thirty or forty times on TV,” he told Yacowar, “and I still watch them.” [6]

He was perusing the Village Voice one day when he happened upon a column by Jonas Mekas, cheerleader-evangelist of the American avant-garde, who occasionally reviewed experimental films sent in by readers. Inspired by the simplicity of this route to attention, he went out and bought a Bolex camera. As he told the New York Times in 1995, “It was simple … I pushed the button, the film came out and it looked good.” [7]

In 1961 he rented a vacant store at 36 E. 4th Street, just off the Bowery. Using the upstairs as living quarters, he turned the downstairs into a bijou cinema called The Exit Film Gallery and began screening short experimental films that caught his eye, alongside the 16mm films he had started making himself. A sprinkling of adverts at the time in Village Voice suggest that the venue opened on the 26th of May 1961 with a two-week screening of Brian De Palma’s first student film Icarus (1960), alongside two shorts by the co-founder of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Lloyd Williams – Jabberwock (1959) and Fishes (aka Les Poissons, 1957).

Morrissey’s first film was a short called Ancient History (1961, 5 mins). According to the book Recycled Images by William C. Wees it was a found-footage film, defined by Maurice Yacowar as “a rearrangement of a ten-year-old newsreel”.[8] However, some sources suggest that Morrissey’s first film showed a priest giving communion then throwing a choirboy over a cliff – an unlikely scenario for a newsreel! Perhaps the priest and the unfortunate choirboy appear in Morrissey’s second film, Dream and Daydream (1961, 6 mins), about which little information is currently available? The third Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue simply labels it “a fooling around in front of the camera type of film”, a description that sounds very much like a scribbled note from the director. Mary Martin Does It (1962, 16 mins) featured a pretty young litter-picker turned murderess who poisons bums with adulterated booze until an old bag lady throws her under a motorised street sweeper (the title alluded to the TV actress Mary Martin, who took part in a New York anti-litter campaign in 1961). Civilization and Its Discontents (1962, 45 mins) tempts the imagination on account of its longer running time and film critic Donald Lyons’ description of the film as “slapstick neorealism” featuring “a hood in a pea jacket strangling a fat albino”. The content of Taylor Mead Dances (1963, 14 mins) is defined by its title, while About Face (1964, 9 mins) seems to have been a visual record of Karen Holzer walking back and forth. Peaches and Cream (6 mins) was a brief document of work by collage artist Stanley Fisher, and Merely Children (10 mins) depicted Fisher’s children playing. Morrissey also shot his first ‘feature-length’ film in 1964: Sleep Walk (70 mins), described in the Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue as “a somewhat slow and lengthy film, in which someone walks about, meets and talks with other people, and ends up dead.” Adding to the durational challenge presented by this work, “nothing is heard, only seen, the dialogue having been omitted.”

Currently only three of Morrissey’s shorts can be accessed on disc: Like Sleep (1964, 14 mins), advertised at the time as a “heroin lullaby”, depicts two Hispanic youths shooting smack, accompanied by Dionne Warwick’s Walk on By on the soundtrack; The Origin of Captain America (1964, 10 mins) stars rockabilly-quiffed teenager Joseph Diaz moodily browsing the Marvel comic of the same title; and All Aboard the Dreamland Choo Choo (1964, 13 mins) features another moody teenager, Richard Toelk, smoking dope before gorily stabbing himself in the leg with a lino cutter, intercut with shots of the boy’s vacant, inexpressive features. Billed by Morrissey as “Marijuana masochism”, it borrowed its title from a poem for children (“The Dreamland train is coming in, it’s whistling now ‘Choo-choo’ / And all the little passengers are tired and sleepy too.” ) Toelk, who died in 1990, was allegedly fourteen at the time of filming: in 2009 his children tried to sue Morrissey for alleged ‘child abuse’, but when their case was dismissed by the court they sued instead for residuals from DVD sales (the film had been included as an extra on a DVD release of Flesh, Trash and Heat). This case too was thrown out by the court.

Factory Foreman (1965-1968)

On the 16th of June 1965, Morrissey’s friend Gerard Malanga took him to the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on E. 4th Street, just up the road from the Exit Film Gallery. The occasion was a screening of Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, starring Malanga. Morrissey liked the film, which presented a claustrophobic scenario loosely based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. Openly sado-masochistic long before such imagery had permeated the mainstream, Vinyl depicted Malanga being lackadaisically beaten, berated and forced to wear a leather hood while strapped in a chair.

The following day the same venue screened seven of Morrissey’s shorts. Malanga took Warhol to see them. Speaking in 1996, Morrissey described what happened next:

“[Andy] said – he was very childlike and innocent, he wasn’t faking it – ‘Gee, your films are in focus! Good! Mine are never in focus, the guy who’s helping me doesn’t know how to focus, and the sound I’m using now is no good’, and then, ‘Why don’t you come and help me because the guy I’m using is always bunking off’ So I went up and I helped him, I made the lighting and I focussed and I did this and that, and I kept, you know, inserting myself more and more. But I did it gradually because I respected his wish to experiment.” [9]

Warhol’s filmmaking was in transition at the time he met Morrissey. Having moved on from his early ‘minimalist’ work such as Sleep, Kiss, Eat, Blow Job and Empire, he was working principally with writer/scenarist Ronald Tavel on films such as Couch, Harlot, Horse, Vinyl, Kitchen and Beauty #2. These films were built around loosely defined conflict scenarios, arranged beforehand. The performers, such as Malanga and Edie Sedgwick, were given pointers as to where events might lead, along with a few lines of dialogue, then told to stay within the static camera-frame come what may. The overall approach to the actors, according to Tavel, was to “literally torture the performance out of them by being as cruel as possible”.[10]

The first Warhol production to which Morrissey contributed was My Hustler, shot in September 1965. It was based on a scenario suggested by Edie Sedgwick’s boyfriend and manager Chuck Wein, and the question of who directed it is a vexed one: Stephen Koch, in his book Stargazer, credits the film entirely to Wein; Peter Gidal’s book Andy Warhol credits Warhol and Wein; and a 2022 MoMA screening opted for Warhol/Wein/Morrissey. It is thought that Morrissey took control of the camera and conceived the notion of panning backwards and forwards from hustler Paul America, sunning himself on the beach, to the beach-house nearby where client Ed Hood shows off the muscular acquisition to his friends.

This panning shot, which dynamically links two different spaces and amplifies the voyeuristic aspect of the film, has struck many as a decisive break from Warhol’s static camera tendencies, but My Hustler was not in fact the first Warhol film to use camera movement. The rarely seen Space, shot in July 1965, was based on the following idea, described by Warhol to scenarist Ronald Tavel: “Do a thing on space. I have this idea, sort of, people just isolated. I want to use a moving camera.”[11]  According to those who have seen the film, the actors remain static while the camera circles them. Then there was Restaurant (not to be confused with the later Nude Restaurant), made around the same time as Space, in which – according to Gordon Baldwin, who appeared in it – the camera began at one table, moved “slowly to the right”, encountered “an obstacle in the form of a black velvet pedestal”, then passed by until “it arrived at [a] table where Sandy, David and I were seated.” [12]

All of which goes to show that it was in fact Warhol who chose to begin moving the camera. Far from having only one idea – switching on the camera and letting it roll – Warhol was already, by 1965, willing to reveal an active presence behind the apparatus. Whether Morrissey is praised by his fans for panning the camera in My Hustler or upbraided for doing so by early-Warhol purists, it would appear that in this respect at least he was neither innovator nor blasphemer.

From My Hustler onwards, Morrissey became Warhol’s closest filmmaking associate. Tavel and Wein dropped out of the running in 1966, and from then onwards it seems fairest to refer to the films being made at the Factory as collaborations between Warhol and Morrissey. These include well-known titles like The Chelsea Girls (1966) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), plus a range of less frequently discussed works such as Imitation of Christ (1967), I, A Man (1967), The Loves of Ondine (1967), Bike Boy (1967), Tub Girls (1967), The Nude Restaurant (1967) and San Diego Surf (1968). The range and depth of Morrissey’s involvement in these films is difficult to pinpoint accurately, but in many cases he seems to have been the de facto technical director and frequently the source of ‘scenario’ ideas, as Ronald Tavel had been before him.

Some sort of collaboration

Collaboration is a thorn in the side for critics and biographers: it thwarts the desire to accurately credit (or blame) individuals. To make matters worse, those who were present at the time cannot always be trusted, years later, to offer an unbiased description. Whether through self-deception, malice, or mere forgetfulness, their accounts can seem either too vague, weighted in their own favour, or slanted against those they no longer admire. As for critics, the desire to establish artistic value can lead to blind-spots, blanket assumptions, or the dismissal of inconvenient facts.

The Chelsea Girls is a perfect example. Warhol’s admirers are quick to extol the film’s innovative dual screen format, but the inspiration seems to have come via Morrissey. One of his jobs at the Factory was to view the hundreds of reels of film emerging from Warhol’s ever-rolling camera. He soon realised he could speed up the task of viewing these ‘rushes’ by projecting two reels at once and assessing their merits twice as quickly. Did Warhol see what Morrissey was doing and have a ‘eureka’ moment that led to The Chelsea Girls? Or did Morrissey say to Warhol, ‘Why don’t we screen an actual film like this?’ We will never know.

The Chelsea Girls, Morrissey later claimed, “was never a movie. It was different scenes I set up as promising … The scenes were a combination of my giving them some direction when the camera was stopped, and the actors’ improvisation. Once the camera started rolling they really directed themselves.” [14] By this account, Morrissey is very much the director of the film (his comment about actors notwithstanding). We know there is some truth in Morrissey’s account, thanks to the most electrifying segment of Chelsea Girls in which ‘Pope’ Ondine, having shot up with amphetamine, loses his temper with a woman who calls him a phoney. In the lead-up to this event, Ondine says, “I’m willing to hear anybody’s confession, Paul.” A woman enters the frame and begins playacting in a way that jars with Ondine’s style. She ‘confesses’ that she thinks his Pope act is phoney, and violence erupts. Ondine slaps the shocked woman repeatedly, and after she retreats from the screen we hear him berating her off-camera in a prolonged spasm of fury. After the worst is over, Ondine spirals into drug-fuelled self-justification, addressing ‘Paul’ off camera (“You can just [unclear] me now, go right ahead, I’m violence itself. But I’m not, at all, really. Only, I can’t help it Paul…”). Not only does this prove that Morrissey is present: more significantly, it shows that he’s the person from whom Ondine seeks approval. The religious symbolism adds another dimension, as ‘Pope’ Ondine seeks moral affirmation, or forgiveness, from a shadowy ‘Godlike’ presence behind the camera. From the psychological dynamic thus exposed we may infer that Morrissey is – for this segment at least – the director.

1968 was a transitional year at the Factory, with events bisected by the near-fatal shooting of Andy Warhol on the 3rd of June by deranged psychotic Valerie Solanas. The first new film to be shot in ’68 was Lonesome Cowboys in January, made entirely on location at the Old Tucson Lot in Oracle, Arizona. The shoot for San Diego Surf followed in May. After Warhol was hospitalised in June, Morrissey shot Flesh entirely on his own in July and then directed Trash, again solo, in October. Also filmed in October ’68 was Blue Movie, a project for which Morrissey claimed directorial responsibility in 1974 (along with The Nude Restaurant). Later, however, he insisted he had nothing to do with Blue Movie: all he did was to set up the camera, after which he left the room. Retrospective disavowal? Morrissey’s later, extremely negative attitude to sex in the movies may have caused this change of heart. On the other hand, the increased sexual explicitness of the Factory films was an ongoing preference (one hesitates to say passion) of Warhol’s.

One of the most helpful accounts ever published of the shooting of an ‘Andy Warhol film’ appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press in July 1968: a detailed account of the filming of San Diego Surf. The article provides a valuable insight into the way that Warhol and Morrissey worked just prior to the Valerie Solanas attack:

“Paul [Morrissey] and Fred Hughes, his assistant, worked out intricate visual arrangements that would encompass full use of available light for the projected interior setups […] Periodically, Andy would move one or other of the cameras, swing the lens seaward, and peer silently through the viewfinder […] Paul calls the exposure setting at f8; we approach Andy, eyes fixed on the lens diaphragm … It was Paul, pacing the long corridor from living room to courtyard entrance of the beach house, who would come up with the opening gambit for the surfing film: Viva is a successful novelist living in seclusion on the beach, planning to write her autobiography. She had placed an ad in a local paper for a boarder. Louis is a surfer who answers the ad […] Andy behind the camera, the viewfinder an extension of his eye. Andy like this for the next four hours. Paul snapping on earphones, monitoring the sound. […] “Cut!” yells Paul. “Viva, in the story Louis ISN”T a junkie. He’s a surfer. Let’s keep it clean.” […] Again and again Paul cuts, steering the dialogue, shaping the situation.” [15]

Morrissey certainly sounds like the director here. He handles the technicalities of lighting and camera settings, conceives the basic storyline, calls ‘cut!’ to end a scene (remarkable itself on a Warhol shoot as the camera would usually keep rolling until the film ran out), corrects the actors with guidance about how to play the scene, and asks for a retake with a different emphasis. As the article says, he is “steering the dialogue, shaping the situation”. Meanwhile Warhol sounds more like the camera operator, not even director of photography. Speaking to me in 1996, Morrissey had this to say about Warhol’s involvement:

“To keep Andy involved [with the films], he operated the camera. He operated the camera on Lonesome Cowboys and Bike Boy and things like that. At that point I was telling him to stop, move in now, we’ll go here, so here he was just taking – I wouldn’t call them orders, more like suggestions. But even just operating the camera, and letting it go further than I would have liked it to go, was not to my mind satisfactory. So finally I just took the camera and went off by myself, with one person, Jed Johnson, running the sound, the Nagra tape recorder, and made Flesh, and it became much more satisfactory.” [16]       

Flesh, Trash and Heat were directed solely by Morrissey; that much is agreed by all. But what about Lonesome Cowboys and San Diego Surf? Was Warhol in any sense ‘directing’ them when he sat behind the camera? In 1972, during an interview given by Warhol and Morrissey to promote the recently released Heat, Warhol himself had this to say: “We thought just anybody who did the camera work is really responsible for the movie. Paul did the camera work [on Heat] so you should talk to him.” [17] Note the “we” in that sentence, and the fact that Morrissey does not contradict or correct Warhol’s assertion. We know that Morrissey operated the camera on Flesh, Trash and Heat, and Warhol did so on Lonesome Cowboys, so according to the standard agreed by the two men in 1972, Warhol was director of the latter. This chimes with my own instinct: Lonesome Cowboys seems to me to possess a different sensibility to Morrissey’s solo work. In Flesh, Trash and Heat I sense order behind the apparent disorder: in Lonesome Cowboys I sense a curious etiolation, as though an absent centre of gravity is letting go of sound, vision, meaning. There’s also a near-constant erosion, both formal and verbal, of the fragile fictive space, which feels at times quite lysergic in its play with levels of ‘reality’. To me this suggests that Warhol was, if not exactly ‘in charge’, then certainly more effective than Morrissey in defining what Lonesome Cowboys was, or was not.

As for San Diego Surf,  images of the shoot captured by co-star Taylor Mead in his Super-8 films show that both Warhol and Morrissey operating cameras – simultaneously, side by side (see above). Sadly, in the years that followed, no one seemed to care what happened to San Diego Surf. In fact, the footage was not even assembled until 1995, when the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh commissioned Morrissey to sift through the hours of material and make a feature-length cut. When it was screened for the first time in 2012, Morrissey gave vent to what was, by then, his standard approach to discussing Warhol:

“Andy Warhol’s movie? He didn’t have anything to do with it, except his terrible camera work, which I even had to take over most of the time. I did everything, everything, everything! Poor Andy couldn’t suggest a thing. He was so helpless. Andy had no idea what he was doing, but I had to give him something to do, so I let him operate the camera. He had no compositional sense or artistic sense of any kind as far as film was concerned. He was making footage. There was a hundred hours of footage there, and it’s unwatchable footage. You call that a movie? I remember that San Diego Surf didn’t work. I put it together mostly in front of the camera, suggesting what they say, and nothing happened […] By the way, I also photographed all of that film. Do you know what it means to photograph a movie? The man who directs the photography is the one who looks at the scene, looks at the lights, sets the light, and aims the camera from his position. The director of photography was me. The camera operator was Andy.” [18]

Is this true? Was Warhol really as ‘helpless’ as Morrissey painted him? Taylor Mead, who appeared in both San Diego Surf and Lonesome Cowboys, countered: “Paul was working the camera. Of course, Paul claims he made all Andy’s films. Paul was a great influence—I mean, Andy was the influence, though. Andy could be in another room, and it would still be an Andy Warhol film.” [19]

This is a very revealing quote that touches on one of the great undecidables: what influence do we attribute to the Warhol aura, the Warhol ‘magic’? One could argue that many of those appearing in the Warhol/Morrissey films were giving their performances ‘to’ Warhol, or to a version of him in their minds. Warhol had the glamour, the mystique, the allure, the charisma, that inspired people like Ondine or Candy Darling or Brigid Polk or Viva to perform in the way they did: it’s debatable whether they would ever have been the ‘superstars’ they became on camera if Morrissey had been the sole creative director all along. Not to downplay Morrissey’s considerable skill with actors, but there was something about Warhol’s studied passivity, his coolness, his seeming otherness, that made people want to be near him, to impress him, to gain his approval. It made them dredge from their psyches the kind of explosive or hilarious performances that they thought he wanted. The Warhol magic may not have inspired everyone: Joe Dallesandro, for instance, seems to have regarded Morrissey, not Warhol, as his mentor. But if half the cast feel that they’re in a film by Andy Warhol, whose aura they feel bewitched by even if he’s not in the room, they will offer to the screen what they intuit or imagine Andy wants. However misguided or inaccurate their guesswork might be, they are doing it ‘for’ him. Had Morrissey simply left the Factory and set up his own filmmaking studio across town, he would probably have achieved a lot of what we see in these films, but Warhol’s fey, gentle, evasive, slightly eerie, slightly macabre presence drew from people a different shade of themselves than they would have offered had he not been around. You can’t weigh this quality, you can’t quantify it directly, and you can’t measure it by reference to the few technical roles Warhol fulfilled. It’s for this reason that I find it better, ultimately, to discuss the Factory films made between 1965 and 1968 as co-directed by Warhol and Morrissey. This would no doubt have infuriated Morrissey, who may have done the lion’s share of ‘traditional’ directing on many of these titles, but it seems to me that Warhol cannot simply be airbrushed out of the picture. His influence on the whole panorama of Factory life is simply too pervasive and intense to treat as negligible.

Warhol himself was aware of the shortcomings of San Diego Surf. He wrote:

“Everybody was so happy being in La Jolla that the New York problems we usually made our movies about went away—the edge came right off everybody […] From time to time I’d try to provoke a few fights so I could film them, but everybody was too relaxed even to fight. I guess that’s why the whole thing turned out to be more of a memento of a bunch of friends taking a vacation together than a movie. Even Viva’s complaints were more mellow than usual.” [20]

This reference to provoking fights reveals a typical Warhol trick, one that had been central to earlier pre-Morrissey projects like Beauty #2 and would even permeate Heat, shot in 1971. It’s not at all fanciful to suggest that this sort of ‘mood manipulation’ was a form of directing, even if by the time of Heat the director’s chair was more firmly Morrissey’s own…

Flesh and Trash

Made over two weekends in July 1968, at a cost of roughly $4000, Flesh was Morrissey’s first solo flight as director since his pre-Warhol films. It was based, he said, on Mauro Bolognini’s La giornata balorda (The Foolish Day), written by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring a young, devastatingly handsome Jean Sorel, which had opened in NYC in October 1961 as From a Roman Balcony. Flesh does indeed use a similar premise to La giornata balorda, which follows Sorel for a day as he attempts to make money to support his unmarried partner and their small child.

For the star of Flesh, Morrissey chose Joe Dallesandro, whom he’d met when the youth dropped by during an earlier shoot for The Loves of Ondine. Warhol and Morrissey were stunned by the handsome teenager and immediately conceived a scene for him as Ondine’s physical fitness instructor. Morrissey, who had an eye for physical perfection, rightly regarded Dallesandro as a major catch, and built Flesh around him. The film begins with a shot of the youth’s bare ass as he lies naked in bed, asleep, and for a couple of minutes we’re transposed to the very beginning of the Warhol movie cycle: the scene echoes Sleep, for which poet John Giorno had provided the unconscious physical form gazed at by Warhol’s rapt and voyeuristic camera. Morrissey, however, soon asserts his own filmmaking identity, as Joe wakes up and bickers with his girlfriend: the dialogue takes shape, the arc of the story emerges, and we become aware of a significantly more structured and dynamic dramatic form. Whereas Warhol preferred to let the camera roll until the film ran out, Flesh is built from shorter scenes, while jump-cuts speed us through events that may have been occurred in real time but which the director felt were a waste of the audience’s time. Stephen Koch, in his excellent though restrictively purist Warhol study Stargazer, opined that Morrissey was “a very typical young man in a hurry. That was not really the Factory style: Pushiness was out.” [21] Putting aside the question of how a man who worked cheek-by-jowl with Warhol for eight years can be said to be ‘not the Factory style’, what Koch objected to, and what is undeniably true, is that Morrissey wanted to make the Warhol movies more dynamic, less ‘boring’, more dramatically focussed. In films like Flesh, Trash and Heat, Morrissey shot vastly more material than we see in the finished films, then used his own taste and judgment to decide what was worth keeping. It’s a very different approach to Warhol’s studiedly passive attitude, and one can indeed say that it’s a paradigm shift. Yet, if Warhol had not approved, had he disliked the results, we can be sure that he would have frozen Morrissey out. Passive he may have seemed, and passive he may have played, possum-like, but there was steel in Warhol too. He would have found a way to cut Morrissey off at the knees if he didn’t like what he was doing. (Bob Colacello tells a story about Warhol disapproving, in his vague, casual way, when poetry was included in an early issue of the Warhol house magazine Inter/View. Colacello, Inter/View’s co-editor at the time, failed to take the hint and included more in the next issue, only to be told by Warhol in a single terse utterance: “No more poetry”. For several weeks afterward, Colacello felt an arctic chill from Warhol in person, which only thawed when they went to Germany together to promote Trash: needless to say, Colacello did not repeat his mistake.)[22] It may stick in the craw of those who prefer the early experimental films, but Warhol allowed Morrissey his head on the later work, and must have preferred his new role as producer and occasional camera operator to the one he held before. Besides, having filmed the Empire State Building for eight hours, where else to go with holy minimalism?

Flesh was released in New York on the 26th of September 1968, just a couple of months after it was shot. Ads emblazoned with a fetching photo of Dallesandro peppered the New York newspapers, and such was the youngster’s star quality that crowds were soon flocking to the Garrick Theatre at 152 Bleeker Street, redubbed ‘The New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre’ after successful runs of Bike Boy and Loves of Ondine a few months earlier.

Flesh was a hit, running for ten months in New York and scoring international distribution. It proved far more successful commercially than the previous Factory movies, Chelsea Girls included. One suspects that the special ingredient was not just Morrissey’s hands-on directing style, but Dallesandro’s breathtakingly handsome face and classically beautiful physique. Gay men and straight women could see him as desirable and potentially attainable, given his bisexual behaviour in the film and his rootedness in New York street reality, while straight men could admire his physical perfection and quiet self-assuredness. Dallesandro is often described as passive in his Morrissey films, but he’s also kind of indestructible: the verbal slings and arrows of outrageous co-stars bounce off him leaving barely a scratch. Unlike the other Warhol ‘superstars’ he was not a ‘freak’ or a ‘weirdo’ or a threatening maniacal motormouth. Warhol and Morrissey finally had a star who gave viewers the same kind of thrill as young Hollywood actors like Don Johnson (with whom Warhol was besotted) or Jeff Bridges. Born in 1948, he was 19 when he made his screen debut in The Loves of Ondine, although he’d posed for gay muscle mag The Athletic Model Guild as early as 1965. Despite the tawdriness of the films’ street milieux, the actor’s wholesome appeal came across strongly, forging a traditionally iconoic connection with audiences. Little wonder then that Dallesandro would star in four more Morrissey films (Trash, Heat, Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula), all of which were great successes commercially: the films in which he didn’t appear (Women in Revolt and L’amour) were conspicuously less successful.

Next up was Trash, made for $3000 on 16-millimetre. Shot partially in the basement of Morrissey’s apartment, it was filmed, according to Dallesandro’s biographer Michael Ferguson, “mostly on Saturday afternoons over three weekends in October 1969, with a final scene picked up on a Saturday the following spring.” [23] This date, however, conflicts with a Variety article from 3 December 1969, which stated that Warhol and Morrissey began production over the previous weekend (29th/30th of November), with photography expected to continue for at least another week. Variety also announced the title as “Gutter Trash”, although this was later dropped, no doubt because sexploitation/horror auteur Andy Milligan already had a film called Gutter Trash on release (it opened at the World Theatre, NYC, in June 1968).

In a sign that the film took far longer to edit than the earlier Warhol movies, Trash opened theatrically on the 5th of October 1970, almost a year after it had been filmed. Morrissey’s care and attention certainly paid dividends; the film received plaudits far beyond the norm for previous Factory movies, with support from some surprising sources. That winter, for instance, George Cukor, veteran director of Gaslight, The Philadelphia Story and My Fair Lady, let it be known that he was pushing for Holly Woodlawn to receive an Academy Award nomination for her role in Trash. A telegram informing her was addressed to Max’s Kansas City, the NYC bar which the Warhol entourage frequented. Other signatories included Ben Gazzara and Joanne Woodward. The underground was poised to go overground…

Women in Revolt

“Basically, I have a comic outlook on things. But there are a lot of scenes in Flesh, Trash and Heat that aren’t comic. Women in Revolt, which to me is one of the best films ever made, is completely comic. People turned their noses up at it, yet it’s very funny. It’s filled with interesting ideas that aren’t pushed in the face of the audience, and it’s brilliantly performed by great performers. There are so many paradoxes in that film: female impersonators talking about the problems of women’s liberation, how women are dominated and dependent in society. But when you think of it, female impersonators are the most independent people in the world. It was really interesting, because the audience saw a man being a woman and couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t.” – Paul Morrissey [24]

Following the perfectly realised Flesh and Trash, Women in Revolt comes as something of a surprise. It lacks a clear structural dynamic, and its vagueness is peppered with long patches where the improvisational verve of the cast seems to flag. Vincent Canby in the New York Times picked up on this problem in his review: “Women in Revolt is not, by a good stretch, consistently funny. It’s often boring in the very conventional non-Warholian way of a movie that wants to tell a story but isn’t quite sure how. The film, however, does have more than its share of high parodic moments as Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, the three female impersonators who play its would‐be liberated heroines, go lurching from one disaster to another, displaying in their performances the kind of mindless energy that I associate less with acting than with long-distance swimming.” [25]

Perhaps the problem lay with the choice of theme: a film by Morrissey about the burgeoning Women’s Movement, or ‘Women’s Lib’ as it was known colloquially, would inevitably be influenced by the most shocking turn of events ever seen at the Factory: namely the shooting of Andy Warhol by deranged ultra-feminist Valerie Solanas. Women in Revolt had a long gestation period, went through numerous shooting periods, and had an unusually high number of alternative titles. It appears to have started life as Liberty, by which name it was referred to in Plain Dealer on the 13th of Sep 1970: the article stated that the film was already listed on Candy Darling’s resumé. An interview with Holly Woodlawn in Village Voice in December 1970 described the film as “an unreleased flick” called Women in Revolt. Shooting, however, continued through 1971 and possibly into 1972. It was called PIGS (standing for ‘Politically Involved Girls’) in a Village Voice article ca. April 1971, and Sisters a week later, after a backlash to the PIGS announcement. Two further alternative titles actually made it to cinemas: it was called Sex for a sellout midnight show at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on the 5th of November 1971, and then Andy Warhol’s Women for a month at the Cinema Theater, Los Angeles, commencing 17 December 1971. Only on the 16th of February 1972, at New York’s Cine Malibu (a porn theatre), did it revert to Women in Revolt.

Oddly, although Women in Revolt is widely considered to be a Morrissey film, the screen credits list him as ‘executive producer’ and do not name a director at all. Meanwhile, the title card calls the film Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt. All of which leads me to wonder if the filmmakers underwent a crisis of confidence during the long road to completion. What exactly did Morrissey – or Warhol – want to say about the Women’s Movement? How blatantly did they want to parody the extremes of feminism expressed by Valerie Solanas in her notorious SCUM Manifesto? (The acronym ‘PIGS’ of course was a spoof of Solanas’s SCUM aka ‘The Society for Cutting Up Men’.) Solanas was still phoning the Factory even after the shooting: in December 1968, when Andy answered the phone, she threatened to shoot him again if he didn’t arrange for her to appear on the Johnny Carson show, give her a lump sum of £25,000 cash and persuade the New York Daily News to serialise The SCUM Manifesto. In 1969, Warhol heard from a friend that Solanas, now in prison, was threatening to ‘get Andy Warhol’ after her release. She was released in September 1971 (when Women in Revolt was being screened privately at the Factory) but was soon recalled to prison after making threats by letter to Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, millionaire Howard Hughes, and the CEO of RCA, Robert Sarnoff. Did Morrissey respond by tempering his possibly incendiary brand of satire? The endless changes of title seem to suggest that the Morrissey-Warhol team were more than usually sensitive to the way their work might be perceived: in particular, following a letters-page backlash in Village Voice after the title PIGS was announced, the decision to change to the blatantly emollient Sisters shows that nerves were indeed jangling at the Factory.

This rare attack of second-guessing perhaps accounts for the shambolic feel of the film. But if Women in Revolt seems to have difficulty deciding what it wants to say long enough to figure out the right way of not saying it, it does still provide us with some spontaneous dialogue gems. Candy Darling, being berated on the telephone by Jackie Curtis for her lack of political engagement, comes up with one for the ages: “What do you mean, come down off the trapeze into the sawdust? That’s circus talk.” And one would need a heart of stone not to love the scene where Candy and Jackie administer an al fresco enema to an obnoxious wolf-whistling navvy, or the inadvertent slapstick of the scene in which Holly Woodlawn, walking down the Bowery on a winter’s day, tries to help a down-and-out alcoholic back onto his feet on an icy pavement. In fact, most of the best scenes in Women in Revolt feel like echoes of John Waters, whose early films Morrissey had screened at the Factory and for whom he expressed admiration throughout his life. The Candy Darling plot-line, in which our heroine leaves the women’s movement for stardom in Hollywood, contains some surprising digs at the mainstream studio system that Morrissey generally admired: a sordid encounter on the casting couch and a calamitous interview with a gossip columnist out to destroy Candy’s career before it even gets started. (The latter sequence delivers another magic moment, when Candy anticipates her own denouement by dropping a pivotal play on words into her dialogue too early). If the film has one clear point to make it’s that the women’s movement was still hamstrung by its ties to men, chiefly due to sexual desire. Both Jackie and Holly talk the feminist talk, but their desire for heterosexual sex, in the missionary position yet, restricts their political options. In its own peculiar way, Women in Revolt is not so far removed from some of the political (as opposed to psychotic) passages of The SCUM Manifesto: radical separatism baby, that’s where freedom lies!

Taking the Pissoir

While the form and content of Women in Revolt were still being thrashed out, Warhol was becoming impatient. “I don’t know what it’s about,” he told The New York Times. “They talk a lot. I like to use actors who talk a lot. What I’d really like to do is go back and shoot movies for $300 and still make them entertaining.” [26] Clearly Morrissey’s drawn-out process of shaping the material was beginning to chafe Andy’s nerves.

In the midst of all this, another project hoved into view: L’Amour, filmed in September 1970 or very early 1971. This was the first Warhol-Morrissey film to be shot in Europe (in this case Paris). It seems that L’Amour was a retrograde step, inasmuch as it ought to be considered a co-directing credit between Warhol and Morrissey. Variety credited the director as Warhol, Yacowar in his book considers it a Morrissey film, but the film poster calls it “a new film by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey”. Observing part of the shoot, which involved scenes filmed in Paris’s public lavatories, British journalist Sally Beauman gave this account for The Telegraph magazine:

“The camera, with Warhol operating it, is well hidden inside the van, which backs up on the pavement so it can focus most effectively on the starring pissoir… Donna and Jane and Michael line up further down the street. Paul Morrissey tells them to do one thing: Fred Hughes tells them to do another… It’s all getting a little temperamental; the leading actresses are glowering; clearly there are some considerable ego trips involved in this picture… in the midst of all the fracas, Andy Warhol, hand on the camera button, gives a gentle sigh. ‘Oh, come on,’ he says in his sweet way, ‘do anything. It doesn’t matter what they do…’ And it works like magic. The three stars converge on the pissoir… Donna cosies up to the pissoir, and, deodorant cake in hand, goes into a series of gummy pin-up smiles, of lightning cheesecake postures… It is the first pissoir of many. There is then the St. Germain pissoir. The Arc de Triomphe pissoir. The Pigalle pissoir. In each they do several takes until they have one that is good, or the police arrive – whichever happens first. On one particularly good take Andy forgets to press the button, and only when they are finished realises the camera did not roll… Later the same day we watch some rushes. The movie screen is set up in Andy’s apartment, and everyone sits on the floor squinting at the flickering images. All the outdoor shots are over-exposed, so the actors and actresses appear to float around Paris in a ghostly white mist…” [27]

In his book Holy Terror, Bob Colacello insinuates that the reason for the very existence of L’Amour was that Warhol had been buying a lot of expensive Art Deco antiques and wanted to avoid tax by claiming them as production expenses. Shooting a film in Paris, then, was just the ticket. Perhaps this is also why L’Amour played in just a few US theatres before melting away: you don’t want your tax write-off to turn a profit! With its dull title seemingly designed to ensure audiences stayed at home, L’Amour remains virtually impossible to see today and has never been released on video, DVD, Blu-ray or any streaming platform…  

Turning Up the Heat

In July of ’71, Morrissey flew to Los Angeles to shoot his most celebrated film of the period. Heat was filmed at two principal locations: The Los Feliz Castle in Griffith Park (for Sylvia Miles’s home) and the Sandy Koufax Tropicana Hotel at 8585 Santa Monica Blvd (where the poolside and motel-room scenes were shot). The specific motel has long been hard to determine, as the motel’s management took all their signs down before allowing the shoot, perhaps to ensure the place would not be tarred by association with Warhol and his pack of decadents. According to Sarah Miles, pickups were also shot later, “back at Andy’s, in East Hampton … because there was a hippie love cult sleeping in the bedrooms of the castle we rented in Griffith Park.”[28]

Heat plays a louche, strung-out variation on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a fact which Morrissey was happy to point out in interviews. He was a fan of Wilder and loved the theme of that film, with its grand showboating star of the silent era returning in a state of delusional excess to the uncomprehending Hollywood of the 1950s. As he never tired of telling interviewers, modern filmmaking had become too director-centric: the real drivers of Hollywood magic were its stars. In Heat, the scale of Sunset Boulevard is reduced, with comic bathos, to the story of a has-been TV actress (Sylvia Miles) hanging on the telephone for a comeback that seems never to ignite, and an up-and-coming hustler, played by Joe Dallesandro, who uses his desirability to pick up and discard women on his way to the top, but whose one-time child-star status is a career peak he may never repeat. Meanwhile, the eternally lustful motel-owner played by Pat Ast – a 200lb apparition in silk muumuus and giant frizzy hairdo – sees her chance to get hunky Dallesandro into bed, while Sylvia’s kooky daughter (Andrea Feldman) turns lesbian, perhaps just to spite her selfish tabloid-fearing mother.

Morrissey’s status as director of Heat is beyond question, but Warhol did manage to influence events by telephone, calling from New York to the cast in Los Angeles and bitchily attempting to make the female cast jealous. According to Bob Colacello, “The three actresses were meant to hate each other, and after Andy’s calls they did. He made Sylvia jealous of Pat’s Halston muumuus. He made Pat jealous of Sylvia’s star billing. And it didn’t take much to drive poor Andrea crazy.”[29] Tragically, Feldman would take her own life on the 8th of August 1972, three months before the American premiere of Heat, by jumping from the fourteenth-floor window of her uncle’s apartment. Her suicide note was rumoured to contain a bitter attack on Warhol.

Heat cost somewhere between $50,000 – $100,000, considerably more than any previous Factory film. This was maybe because profits from Flesh and Trash were beginning to flood in. According to the terms of Morrissey’s deal with Warhol, he was 50% co-owner of Flesh and Trash, so it’s possible that Morrissey funnelled profits into Heat himself. The investment paid off: after playing the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, Heat took over two million dollars in the USA and was praised in the press by mainstream reviewers such as Vincent Canby and Rex Reed. Variety ran a piece declaring the film the best yet from the Warhol factory:

“If the reception at the New York Film Festival is any indication, Paul Morrissey’s Heat is a sensation. Pic played to a wildly enthusiastic crowd last Thursday night (5) and provided the fest with self-generated electricity when, at the conclusion of the film, a spotlight hit the box where pic’s principals were seated. There, dressed to the nines, were writer-director Paul Morrissey and his troupe of ad-lib players, rising from the underground to accept a standing ovation that could well translate as commercial success. There too was Sylvia Miles, fulfilling, as they say, the ‘star’ role she was born to play and has been playing for some time. It dittoed the reception at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, but as Morrissey said, this was home turf where it really counts […] The audience for the pic seemed younger than most at the festival and much more camp-oriented … but since the house was not papered, the boffo response was undoubtedly a good indication of pic’s ultimate commercial reception in urban keys. In short, the most successful pic yet from the Warhol factory and a winner for Levitt-Pickman which successfully outbid Don Rugoff for the rights.” [30]

Heat received a wildly enthusiastic audience response that evening, and the theatre added a spontaneous extra late show for over a hundred patrons who had waited in the rain after failing to get in. The Q&A session with Morrissey and Sylvia Miles was a lively affair and caught the attention of the mainstream press. Veteran director Elia Kazan, who was in the audience, praised the film. Fellow panel guest Otto Preminger (director of noir classics Laura and Where the Sidewalk Ends), was impressed by the film but disconcerted by the sexual explicitness: Sylvia Miles quipped “There’s no such thing as too much sex, Otto!” During the question-and-answer session, reported Variety, “One anti-Heat viewer demanded to know if Morrissey could have made Exodus to which Preminger graciously replied he couldn’t have made Heat, so what was the purpose of the question.” And when a rather pretentious audience member asked about the ‘psychological meaning’ of the out-of-focus moments, Morrissey responded, “I wasn’t deliberately going out of focus, I was trying to get into focus!” [31] Amid the high spirits, however, a few old guard homophobes stuck their oar in: Time Magazine, for instance, called the film “a faggot rehash of Sunset Boulevard… [that] exploits the sorry selection of freaks who have been recruited for the cast.” [32]

Afterglow

Heat made Morrissey hot. Emerging from the shadows of the Warhol Factory, he was now being fêted as a striking new talent in his own right. Interest and admiration flooded in from far beyond the confines of the underground. Even the New York Daily News, which for years had tended to ignore the Factory films, felt compelled to review Heat, and gave it a three-star review in contrast to the one star allotted to Trash (the only other Warhol-associated film it had deigned to review).

Morrissey found himself fielding multiple offers and suggestions for his next film. In February 1972 he was in talks with Alberto Grimaldi (producer of Fellini’s Satyricon and Pasolini’s Decameron) to shoot a 35mm western called “West” starring Joe Dallesandro. Costed at $750,000, it was scheduled for April 1972. Morrissey described “West” as a “transvestite spoof” of the great American outdoor legend, based on authentic Americana:

“In the early settlements there was maybe one woman for every 100 pioneers, and under such circumstances, the men created their own sex frolics. The one woman in West is an amoral saloon keeper. The others are all drag.” [33]

However, the project eventually fell through, perhaps because of Morrissey’s snarky remarks about Grimaldi’s 1972 hit Last Tango in Paris? The famous line in Flesh for Frankenstein – “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life… in the gallbladder!” – was a dig at what Morrissey saw as the pretentiousness of the Bertolucci film.

Another proposal was an ‘underground’ Sherlock Holmes film to be written by film critic Rex Reed, whom Warhol and Morrissey met at the Venice Film Festival on a trip to promote Heat in August/September 1972. Reed, who’d recently acted in Mike Sarne’s Myra Breckinridge, planned not only to write the film but also to play Watson. The producer of this dubious undertaking was to have been Edith Cottrell, wife of the Paris-based producer Pierre Cottrell, a regular associate of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer – incidentally another filmmaker whom Morrissey loathed.

Meanwhile, producer Robert Weiner had approached Morrissey to direct an adaptation of Gerald Walker’s controversial 1970 novel Cruising, about a gay serial killer. Timothy Bottoms or Jeff Bridges were suggested for the lead role, and up-and-coming heart-throb Jan-Michael Vincent was planned as the killer. New York policeman Sonny Grasso (The French Connection) was lined up as technical advisor, and filmmaker Jack Doroshow (director of the documentary The Queen) was hired as advisor on matters relating to New York’s gay scene. However, this too fell through, and the project was eventually filmed in 1980 by William Friedkin with Al Pacino in the starring role.

Another casualty of the period was “Blue Angel”, a Warhol/Morrissey remake of the Josef von Sternberg film with Dallesandro supposedly doing the Marlene Dietrich role in drag. Though it was discussed with German distributor Constantin in 1972, the project was dropped in January 1973, with Morrissey admitting he had already used aspects of the Blue Angel plot in Heat.

Finally, there was “The Caves”, from the 1914 André Gide book Les Caves du Vatican, featuring an adolescent boy who kills a stranger for no reason besides curiosity about the nature of morality, and a gang of French conmen who scam wealthy Catholics by telling them the Pope has been kidnapped, requiring large sums of money to rescue him. This intriguing prospect was to have been shot in Rome and Paris, starring Rod Steiger, but it too failed to clear the pre-production hurdles.

Frankenstein & Dracula

Instead, Morrissey turned to an evergreen film genre with guaranteed audience appeal. The Atlanta Journal reported in October, “[Morrissey] would like his next project to be something in the order of a horror film. He isn’t exactly sure what he has in mind, but something is there, swimming about, searching to be rescued.” [34] Although he regarded the Hammer films as terrible, and controversially claimed that Christopher Lee was miscast as Dracula, Morrissey had always liked the horror genre. By November 1972, a project called Frankenstein was being mentioned in the trades as his next film. Laying out his intentions to Variety, he claimed that it would “avoid burlesque, spoof and satire […] The idea is to give audiences a good scare with a blend of horror realism, fantasy and sex.” [35]

The initial idea for Frankenstein came from a suggestion by fellow horror aficionado Roman Polanski, whom Morrissey had met with Andrew Braunsberg at a film festival in Columbia in 1971. Polanski was getting cold feet about plans to film his forthcoming What? in 3D, but suggested to Morrissey that he should shoot a version of Frankenstein in the format (Polanski would eventually make an unforgettable cameo appearance in Flesh for Frankenstein’s companion-piece, Blood for Dracula).

The prime movers on the financial side were Italian movie producer Carlo Ponti, and the French company Cine Qua Non, run by Jean-Pierre Rassam and Jean Yanne. Ponti had carved a niche as a producer of art cinema, with major works such as Fellini’s La strada (1954), Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) and Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) on his resumé. In the early 1970s he changed tack, producing violent thrillers for the commercial market, such as Umberto Lenzi’s An Ideal Place to Kill (1971) and Sergio Martino’s Torso (1973). Working with Morrissey was an elegant merger of the two strands of Ponti’s career: an American director of avant-garde underground pictures coming to Italy to make gory horror films. A 50-50 deal was struck between Ponti and Rassam, making Flesh for Frankenstein an Italian-French co-production. Ponti had been impressed by Heat and had noted its commercial success for very little financial outlay. Discussing a possible budget for Frankenstein, Morrissey, by his own admission, pulled a figure out of the air: $300,000. Ponti was delighted and suggested making two for $600,000. Suddenly, the Frankenstein project had spawned a twin: Blood for Dracula. As the arrangements firmed up, Andy Warhol’s name was incorporated as a purely cosmetic detail: no money from Warhol was added to the budget, and he did not serve as producer in any real sense. Instead, he lent his name to the project for commercial reasons, giving them the “Andy Warhol presents” tag as an aid to marketing. (Whether money changed hands for this arrangement is unknown.)

On the 14th of March, Morrissey and Warhol arrived in Rome; Morrissey to begin pre-production and Warhol to enjoy the Roman milieu and schmooze the city’s art scene. As the latter intended to stay for several weeks, or maybe longer, he brought along his dog Archie and his business manager Fred Hughes. Partying for Warhol was the very air he breathed, and the parties in Rome were dazzling. Frankenstein’s leading lady Monique Van Vooren rented an apartment in Palazzo Torlonia and threw regular soirées, with guests including socialite aristos Prince and Princess Von Furstenberg, model/actress Marisa Berenson, jewellery designer Lulu de la Falaise, and Vogue editor Mary Russell. Morrissey, Jed Johnson and Pat Hackett, meanwhile, lived in the Villa Madorli outside of Rome, where Ponti lived with his wife Sophia Loren.

Udo Kier, the star of both films, had first met Paul Morrissey on a plane trip from Rome to Munich. The two men got along well and exchanged telephone numbers. A few months later, Morrissey got back in touch and offered Kier the role of Dr. Frankenstein. He had initially intended to give the role of Dracula to Yugoslavian actor Srdjan Zelenovic, who plays the Monster in Flesh for Frankenstein, but during production it dawned on him that the charismatic Kier was by far the better choice, from both an acting and visual standpoint. Brilliantly supported by relative unknown Arno Juerging, who shines in his comic roles as assistant to Frankenstein and manservant to Dracula, Udo Kier gives two standout performances, especially in Dracula which has the best of the two scripts.

Holding up the Factory end of the deal was Joe Dallesandro, now a powerful box-office draw. In contrast to the decadence of Frankenstein and the sickliness of Count Dracula, Dallesandro exudes raw male charisma, all the more compelling because of his casual manner and incongruous New York accent, the latter striking comic sparks against the European setting. Has Dallesandro ever looked more impressive than when stripped to the waist sweatily chopping logs in Blood for Dracula? Fans of Joe’s “Greco-Roman ass” (to quote a review of Trash that Morrissey enjoyed) are also well served by frequent scenes in which the star sexually services a succession of female partners. While staying shy of pornography, such scenes pay frank and undiluted attention to the physical desirability of a man, exceeding anything seen on the screen to that date.

Flesh for Frankenstein started shooting on the 20th of March 1973. Interiors were shot mainly at Cinecittà, except for some scenes filmed at a Rome apartment. Exteriors were at the Castello di Passerano, about forty minutes’ drive from Rome. The two films were shot back-to-back with only Easter weekend – April 20-22 – to divide them. Dracula was shot entirely on location, chiefly the Villa Parisi in Frascati, and was finished in May ’73. After a month’s break, Morrissey began editing the two films. By November 1973 they were ready for their debut release, oddly enough in Germany rather than Italy or France. (Much to everyone’s surprise, Trash had been a massive commercial hit in Germany.)

Scripting on Frankenstein and Dracula was more traditional than the previously improvised Morrissey pictures. Though he was still writing scenes each day en route to the set, Morrissey also needed dialogue written in advance. Assisting with this on both films was Pat Hackett – co-author of POPism with Warhol and later the editor of the Warhol diaries – who also went on to write the excellent script for the final ‘Andy Warhol’ project, Bad. Hackett’s input to the horror films has often been underplayed, but there’s enough consistency from Dracula to Bad to suggest that it was she who crafted the wittiest dialogue.

A more formal approach to scripting was unavoidable: the foreign actors couldn’t improvise very well, and besides, the presence of a full Italian crew, not to mention the expense of shooting in 35mm (and 3D!), meant the spontaneity of the New York productions was impossible. Nevertheless, other qualities emerged to compensate: elegant camerawork by dp Luigi Kuveiller (whose recent work for Elio Petri and Lucio Fulci had shown him to be a major creative asset), and delightful, sensitive scoring – a first in Morrissey’s career – by Claudio Gizzi. The female cast gave Morrissey European alternatives to his American leading ladies: Monique Van Vooren’s icy snobbery is the old-money flipside of snooty arriviste Jane Forth or garrulous rich-girl Viva; gorgeous Stefania Casini plays the rich, consumerist, sex-mad tramp in Dracula that Candy Darling might have played if the film had been made in New York; and one can almost imagine Holly Woodlawn as the older sister played by Milena Vukotic, darning socks and dreaming of becoming Mrs Dracula. There is also some pricelessly witty work from Roman Polanski as a sly peasant who foxes snooty Arno Juerging, and a classic turn from the father of Neo-Realism, Vittorio De Sica, director of The Bicycle Thieves, who plays a pompous but comically loveable patriarch obsessed with the ’flavour’ of the name Dracula: “Dracula, did you say? Dra-cu-la. The sound is so intriguing. Three syllables. Dra, cu, la. I think I like that name […] There are wine tasters and there are name tasters. Yes, Dracula. Just the right amount of Orient and Occident, of reality and fantasy.”

The ‘horror’ in Flesh for Frankenstein is cartoonish, brash and absurd. One might get a wince or two out of the male monster’s stitches being cut, or the Baron fondling the female monster’s innards while mounting her, but most of the shocking displays are so grandly excessive that a reasonably switched-on viewer surely has to laugh. This, however, did not prevent ploddingly literal-minded mainstream critics responding with a chorus of groans at the plethora of offal waved under their noses by the (dazzlingly effective) 3D process. The less grisly of the two is Dracula, which saves most of its gruesomeness for the climax, as Dallesandro chops Dracula’s arms and legs off with an axe in scenes that may have influenced the ‘Black Knight’ sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

In both films, underlying the humour is the theme of addiction. The Baron is addicted to his fantasy of ultimate power: his obsession with creating a race of monsters makes him ridiculous. The Baron’s wife is obsessed with sex, in particular with Joe Dallesandro: her obsession makes her foolish and vulnerable despite her haughtiness and extreme sense of entitlement. In Dracula, the Count is obsessed with blood, of course, but his need is akin to drug addiction, complete with agonised vomiting after ingesting impurities (like the excruciating ‘bad shots’ suffered by needle-users who accidentally get dirt in the needle). The only characters who are not lampooned are Joe Dallesandro’s Nicholas and Mario, whose sexual prowess and laconic confidence stem from a fit and healthy body, or characters whose desires remain repressed, like Dallesandro’s obviously gay friend Sacha, who becomes Frankenstein’s tragic monster, and Esmeralda (Milena Vukotic) in Blood for Dracula, whose home-making skills, selflessness and modesty belie her passionate romanticism.

Flesh for Frankenstein debuted in the US on the 2nd of April 1974 at Filmex in Los Angeles, before opening commercially in the city on the 8th of May as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. A week later it opened in New York at the Trans Lux East on 3rd Avenue and Trans Lux West on Broadway. The film racked up a huge $102,000 in its first week at these two theatres, running for eighteen weeks. According to Morrissey, speaking in 1982, a shady New York financier called Herbert S. Nitke (producer of porno smash The Devil in Miss Jones) bought the US distribution rights to the two films (for an undisclosed sum) and sold them to the notorious Bryanston Pictures (run by mafiosi Louis and Joseph Peraino) for a total of $750,000. In 1975 a Bryanston rep’ told an advertising trade mag that the two films had already grossed $25 million. One result of Bryanston’s bonanza was that in November/December 1974 the Perainos bought the Trans Lux West and renamed it the Bryanston West, using it as a first-run venue for their own product, the transaction being paid for, apparently, by the big bucks raked in by Frankenstein and their other big hit The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Morrissey probably saw just a fraction of this deal, but both Frankenstein and Dracula were commercial successes by Factory standards, playing in the United States, Europe, and, for the first time, Japan.

Interregnum

Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula were commercial high watermarks for Morrissey. But things were changing. Sadly the horror pictures would be Joe Dallesandro’s last alliance with the Factory. He was disappointed with the response to his request for a raise and complained that he ended up being paid less for Frankenstein than a low-budget horror film he’d made called The Gardener, directed by Jim Kay in Puerto Rico in 1972. After filming Blood for Dracula, Joe stayed in Italy, pursuing a film career and continuing a romantic liaison with his Dracula co-star Stefania Cassini. Over the next four years he appeared in a string of Italian and French productions, including The Climber (d: Pasquale Squitieri, 1974), Donna e bello (d: Sergio Bazzini, 1974), Black Moon (d: Louis Malle, 1975), Season For Assassins (d: Marcello Andrei, 1975), Je t’aime moi non plus (d: Serge Gainsbourg, 1975), The Margin (d: Walerian Borowczyk, 1975), Born Winner (d: Aldo Lado, 1976), and A Simple Heart (d: Piero Levi, 1977).

In some ways one could argue that Morrissey’s decision to make Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula had squandered the commercial opportunities he’d amassed in the wake of Heat’s success. Then, it seemed that the world was his oyster: two years later, with a generally puritanical and humourless response to his horror films to contend with, the golden boy’s chances were shrinking fast.

He was, however, still very well connected. In April 1974 he was seen around town with Bianca Jagger, whom he hoped to persuade to star in his next picture. He spent some time trying to get the aborted “West” back on the starting ramp and was hoping to entice Bianca and husband Mick to sign up. Failing that, he wanted them to appear in the aforementioned “Caves of the Vatican”, or Mick to star in a film about Caligula, or Bianca to star in a film alongside Puerto Rican boxer Chu Chu Malave, aka “the long-haired boxer” and “the hippiest slugger to come out of Greenwich Village”. Sadly, despite Morrissey loaning out his Long Island beach-house to the Rolling Stones for the summer, no more was heard of any of these projects. (Perhaps his contemptuous attitude to rock music queered the pitches?)

In March 1975, Jean-Pierre Rassam announced that he was planning to work with Morrissey again, this time on a private-detective action film to be made in Hong Kong. Rassam was certainly well motivated: Flesh for Frankenstein, he said, had helped him wipe out losses on two of his ambitious arthouse ventures: Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and Marco Ferreri’s western spoof Don’t Touch the White Woman. Sadly, the Morrissey project foundered.

The most profound change in Morrissey’s fortunes came with the cessation of the Warhol connection that had nurtured and supported him for so many years. The details have always been shrouded in mystery. In late 1973, Morrissey, who had been one of the editors of Interview magazine, was dropped from the masthead: “By whom, I don’t know,” wrote Bob Colacello, adding:

“When he got back [from Rome] in late 1973, he didn’t come to the Factory regularly anymore, and often had a young lawyer named Richard Turley call in for his messages. Perhaps he didn’t feel welcome … ‘Why doesn’t Paul come in?’ Andy wondered one day, going uptown in a taxi from the Factory. I said I didn’t know … They drifted away from each other over the next year, though it was hard to say who was leaving whom. There wasn’t a fight, or a divorce, just a permanent trial separation.” [36]

In September 1974, when the Factory team moved from Union Square to 860 Broadway, Morrissey did not join them:

“Paul didn’t have a desk at the third Factory, nor did he have a title in the new company Andy formed. The new stationery, and the lobby directory at 860 Broadway, said Andy Warhol Enterprises–or AWE for short. Andy was chairman, Fred [Hughes] was president, and Vincent [Fremont] was vice-president, secretary and treasurer. Andy Warhol Films, Inc. henceforth existed only as the copyright owner of the movies that Andy and Paul had made together. And Paul was gone.” [37]

Gone he may have been, but he did pop up now and then at the Factory and seems to have remained socially connected for a while, so it’s unlikely that the situation was too acrimonious. Those who truly fell out with Warhol were persona non grata at the new Factory, whereas Morrissey, according to a couple of brief entries in the Warhol diaries, was admitted to the building on occasion. For instance, in Warhol’s diary entry for 1 November 1978:

“Tom Sullivan came by to show Cocaine Cowboys to us on a Betamax. He was smoking marijuana, and it was funny to smell it at the office. Paul Morrissey watched a little of it and said it was too slow, and Brigid was in and out and thought so, too, but I liked it. And I decided I’m not so bad in it.” [38]

Hound of the Baskervilles and Madame Wang’s

There was a four-year gap between Blood for Dracula and Morrissey’s next film, Hound of the Baskervilles, a comedy starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore drawing on a formidable array of British comedy performers, including Kenneth Williams, Irene Handl, Roy Kinnear, Terry-Thomas, Prunella Scales, Spike Milligan, Rita Webb and Max Wall. Morrissey had long been fond of British comedy: as early as 1968 he had hailed the farcical Carry On films as his favourite comedies to a somewhat bemused American journalist. Sadly, his experience on Baskervilles was far from convivial. He entered the fray somewhat weakened physically: production had to be delayed for several weeks after he contracted viral hepatitis. Shooting then began in August 1977, but in many ways it would have been better if ill health had forced him to pull out: Cook and Moore reportedly took over scripting and rewrote scenes to please themselves, and no one seemed happy with the finished result. Morrissey discussed the film later as the one time he did not have control over scripting. Poorly reviewed, Hound of the Baskervilles was a total misfire, although it would be fascinating to see an episode of the British TV arts programme The South Bank Show transmitted on the 8th of April 1978, which featured a set report and interview with Morrissey.

Morrissey returned to the States after this debacle, and in 1979 began work on a project that would eventually see the light as Madame Wang’s. Given the briefest of cinema airings in 1981, it’s a film so unutterably bad that one’s first impulse is to brush it under the carpet and feign ignorance. It is, by a long stretch, the worst thing Morrissey ever put his name to, and unlike the Sherlock Holmes movie this time the blame cannot be apportioned elsewhere. Even Morrissey seemed to regard it as an embarrassment: according to the Seattle Gay Times, when invited onstage to introduce the film at the 1982 Seattle Film Festival, “he nervously stuttered something about Madame Wang’s being an allegory and a basically silly enterprise, and then fled from the stage.” [39] No wonder: if someone who despised Morrissey’s previous work had set out to make a parody, it could not have been more odious. For a man who revelled in deploying the toilet as the symbol of liberal America, it’s ironic that he himself should have delivered this cinematic bowel movement, a film that one could screen next to Andy Milligan’s Surgikill as an example of why New York street-level auteurs should never film in L.A.

Morrissey approaches much of what he sees in Madame Wang’s from a position of idle bemusement (be it the film’s ghastly flea-market hippies or its hopelessly inept punk rockers). The cross-dressing element has a tacky aura of ‘any old wig will do’, as though the cast have simply raided the contents of a rep-theatre laundry basket: we’re a world away from glamorous Candy Darling or scatty Holly Woodlawn, whose wild dishevelment these assholes couldn’t match if their lives depended on it. Yet Morrissey finds no higher ground – artistic or rhetorical – from which to mount a satire. Whether watching a pair of tubby topless bearded queens waving their hands around and doing the Twist in a degraded version of gay theatricality, or gazing at banal no-hoper ‘punks’ atrociously mimicking Iggy Pop, Morrissey is simply adrift in this film. The cast fall flat on their faces, and maybe that’s the point – but so does he. These simpering ‘freaks’ and dumb-as-paint rockers certainly merit satire, but Morrissey is a fish out of water here and merely equals their mediocrity. Patrick Schoene, as the lead character Lutz, must surely have been cast because he acutely resembles the young Paul Morrissey, but any sense that he might convey Morrissey’s point of view is scuppered by his bland performance. The part is so dully acted and boringly written (yes, this is a scripted film) that one simply has no idea whether Lutz’s claim to be a Russian agent is supposed to be a joke or just a delusion. A third possibility – that it is in fact true – seems to me so ridiculous that I’m amazed Maurice Yacowar opted for it in his otherwise excellent Morrissey book, describing Lutz as “an East German undercover KGB agent”. Did Morrissey back this reading? If so, neither the director nor the actor makes it plausible onscreen. One senses Morrissey trying to ape some of the success of John Waters and Woody Allen (take for instance a sequence in which an obese drag queen teaches the hero how to pick pockets on the street, or the use of old-time jazz to punctuate scenes), but the film lacks either the riotous verbal wit of Waters or the finely crafted scripting of Allen. As the 1980s commenced, with Hound of the Baskervilles and Madame Wang’s in the rearview mirror, one can hardly imagine a less promising future for Morrissey’s career…

Forty Deuce

Thankfully, he bounced back with a vengeance. Shot over five chilly days in November 1981, based on a successful off-Broadway stage play by gay playwright Alan Browne, Forty Deuce emerged as Paul Morrissey’s darkest work. A harrowing descent into a world of total commodification, it depicts the ceaseless hustles and moral failings of a bunch of teenagers working the streets of the Deuce, comprising Times Square and the section of 42nd Street bounded by 6th and 8th Avenues: an area packed with movie houses, sex shops, tiny porn cinemas, ‘massage parlours’ and cheap hotels. The sinkhole structure of Forty Deuce pulls us relentlessly towards a moral black hole around which dregs of a fucked-up culture rotate, and into which, finally, a paedophile crosses the event horizon to spend the night with a dead twelve-year-old.

The play had been workshopped at the Perry Street Theatre in the West Village on the 22nd of March 1981, then opened at the same venue for a proper run on the 1st of October. For the film version, Kevin Bacon, Orson Bean, Tommy Citera, Mark Keyloun, Harris Laskawy, Carol Jean Lewis and Bo Rucker reprised their roles from the theatre production, and the play’s producer Steven Steinlauf appears in a brief cameo as a man on the phone at a booth at the junction of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street. Browne, who also wrote the screenplay, told the press that he didn’t have any close connection to the milieu he depicted: “There were some real raised eyebrows wherever I’d show up. I told people then, ‘I have never met a prostitute, male or female, and I hope I never shall.’” [40] Instead, he insisted that the dialogue and scenarios came purely from observation, and conversations overheard as he passed a hustler bar called The Haymarket. It’s not surprising that Browne wished to put some distance between himself and his subject: it would be all too easy for critics to get the wrong idea, given that the Haymarket bar at 772 8th Avenue was a notorious hang-out for boy prostitutes, some alleged to be as young as thirteen. An article published in Newsday in July 1982, linking the Haymarket to allegations of foreign intelligence services gaining access to information about clients’ sexual preferences, claimed that “customers could purchase children and drugs openly … at prices ranging from $50 to $250, the younger children costing the most.” [41] From 1980 to 1984 the Haymarket was allegedly under Mafia control: according to a federal grand jury indictment served in February 1985 it was run by Matthew (Matty the Horse) Ianniello.

Given the moral blackness at the heart of the story, you’d think that child prostitution and paedophilia would be the hardest thing for mainstream critics to stomach, but it turned out that ‘bad language’ was more shocking. Just about every review ever written about Forty Deuce, in both its stage and screen manifestations, complained about the ‘endless torrent of four-letter words’, the “non-stop assault of filthy language” (Rex Reed), “the foulest and most explicit talk” (Douglas Watt, NY Daily News), showing that for uptight critics, propriety outscores morality every time.

The film was screened in Los Angeles at the Filmex Festival on 21st of March 1982, and went to Cannes in May that year, playing to a packed house, although history doesn’t record the audience vibe afterwards: one hardly expects raptures after a film so troubling and extreme. Sadly, Forty Deuce struggled to find distribution afterwards, and was never picked up for cinema release in the USA. After a few screenings in Canada in 1983 (at L’Autre Cinema, Montreal) it basically disappeared from view. Some sources claim that Morrissey refused to allow the film to be screened “in a festival that ‘promotes homosexuality”, namely the 1983 New York City Gay Film Festival, which makes Morrissey sound incredibly – and perplexingly – homophobic, but perhaps the truth was quite the opposite: is it not more likely that he objected to the film being shown in a gay film festival because the sexual theme of the film is not homosexual desire but paedophilia?

In a fascinating interview with John Fitzgerald of the Montreal Gazette in March 1983, Morrissey discussed the view he was taking:

“Forty Deuce I hope is a realistic vision of life on the outer limits of permissiveness […] And it’s a microcosm of what is beginning to happen in our whole society. When people have total freedom without responsibility, they end up seeking punishment and torture. The characters in the movie torture each other verbally. There is no respite from hate. Whether these people are homosexual or not, doesn’t apply. They are beyond sexual gender or sexual persuasion. They are just taking what they can get. They get money for sex and have a good time with the money for maybe five seconds. They don’t have a moment’s thought about responsibility toward another person. Or toward themselves.” [42]

He continued:

“It’s a movie about a kind of life that people don’t normally see. But I’ve always had faith that a realistic, truthful reflection of something is its own justification. If one comes and sits in front of it, one comes away knowing some-thing one didn’t know before. “You don’t see this kind of life in the movies. Life on 42nd St. is more exotic and peculiar and twisted than anything you can imagine. And the movie, I think, is an accurate picture of a sensibility that exists nowadays. It’s a kind of end of the road sensibility. Things can’t get much worse. They either have to get better or die off. In this case, it’s like taking the dog and rubbing his nose in it. I don’t know if people need to see more ugliness than already exists but you shouldn’t overlook what’s there. You have to deal with it in some way so that maybe, you can go past it.” [43]

Sadly, many of the critics who saw Forty Deuce ‘got past it’ by wrinkling their noses and stepping over it as if it were something nasty on the pavement. When it played in 1996 at the Film Forum in New York as part of a Morrissey retrospective, the New York Times delivered a blunderbuss dismissal:

“There comes a point when art that strives to reveal the sordid truth goes so gleefully overboard that the degradation it exposes becomes a laughable caricature. Such is the unfortunate case with Paul Morrissey’s 1982 movie adaptation of Alan Browne’s play Forty-Deuce […] This putative insider’s portrait of the world of male hustlers on West 42d Street in Manhattan is a cacophonous torrent of profanity, ethnic slurs and lowlife street argot that is so self-intoxicated it barely pauses to think […] Ultimately no clear-cut characters emerge in the film. Roper, Ricky, Blow and their pimp, Augie (Harris Laskowy), are all expressions of the same personality flaunting his excremental vision as though it were the only truth worth telling.” [44]

Mixed Blood

In Morrissey’s 1964 short film Like Sleep we observe two young Hispanic boys shooting up a drug that we assume is heroin, given the film’s title and the boys’ droopy eyes at the end. Much is made of the needles poking around in their flesh, and the protracted process of getting the drug into a vein using the old bulb syringes instead of the more efficient plunger variety. Move the clock forward twenty years and Morrissey is back in the same milieu, this time delivering one of his best known and most widely distributed feature films.

Mixed Blood (1984), based on an original script by Forty Deuce creator Alan Browne, depicts a faux-family of breathtakingly beautiful young Hispanic men operating a drug-dealing racket from the shattered warren of Manhattan’s Alphabet City (so named because of the major roads striating the area vertically: Avenues, A, B, C and D). In the early 1980s this region, between Lower Manhattan and the East River, was shockingly deprived and decayed, with collapsed buildings, hollowed-out apartments and bricked-up shopfronts housing a complex maze of drug dens and shooting galleries.

Heading the operation is a formidable middle-aged woman, Rita La Punta (Marília Pêra): mother to one of the gang and symbolic mother to the others. Not that she treats her maternal obligations so seriously: business and self-interest always come first. Even when one of ‘her’ boys is thrown off a nearby roof by a rival gang, she refuses to venture onto the street or even look out of her window to see the fallen child. The only person she really cares about is her hunky dim-witted son (Richard Ulacia), and she dotes upon him in a frankly incestuous way that stunts the hulking brute’s emotional growth. Mixed Blood is a very curious film that depicts characters so blunted in empathy and emotion that we feel their lack of feeling seeping into our own minds while watching. Morrissey depicts acts of violence, cruelty and general hideousness that in another film might have had one gasping for relief, but here leave you feeling as casually accepting as the characters. Vincent Canby described it as “a live action cartoon for jaded adults” and the description is apt, except that the jadedness is more like a fast-acting virus exuded by the film than a pre-existing condition in the audience.

None of the gang-member kids take drugs (an implausible conceit of the story), so the effects of their trade remain off-camera. Instead, ceaseless internecine gang warfare takes centre stage: the addicts are seen only as a never-ending queue of consumers waiting patiently at holes in tenement walls. (One such client, in a single brief scene, is Ari Bolougne, son of Nico, the ex-model and Velvet Underground chanteuse turned avant-garde solo artist whom Morrissey had managed in the late 1960s.)

Paul Morrissey on Drugs

Morrissey’s resoundingly negative attitude to drugs in Mixed Blood was consistent with an attitude he’d been trumpeting in the press ever since Trash in 1970, but in the 1960s he’d expressed himself quite differently. A fascinating interview with Morrissey, Warhol and Nico conducted on the 28th of August 1967 for the radical underground newspaper Berkeley Barb saw Morrissey debating drug culture, and his statements were far more nuanced than the position he took later.

About LSD he was antagonistic and cynical, buying into media scare stories about deformed babies, or at least brandishing them for rhetorical anti-hippy effect, before changing tack and railing against the drug from an angle of cliquish fashionability: “You know, a year and a half ago in L.A. I already thought that LSD was going to become a joke – like, even to mention LSD a year ago seemed so tacky. And it just got bigger and bigger, and it’s still the going thing.” [45]

Conversation then moved on to alcohol, with Warhol asserting, “[P]eople are too awful on alcohol. I mean, they really are.” Morrissey disagrees – “I think they’re more convivial” – but Warhol holds his ground: “But the ones who really drink, you know, they’re always fighting…” [ibid.]

Discussion then turns to amphetamines, the drug of choice among many at the Factory and spur to the endless talk that Warhol so loved in his movies. It’s here that we encounter a very different Paul Morrissey: “I don’t understand why all the real love people are really against amphetamines … I mean, I think LSD is much more debilitating, because I think over a period of years it affects the mind much more quickly – amphetamine takes four or five years before it really makes your mind go away. But on LSD, they act so silly and slaphappy, like a prize-fighter who’s spent a lifetime in the ring and come out of his career with a broken nose and a stupid way of talking and acting. LSD boobs act like that all the time, and they’re maybe only on it a year or so.” Warming to his theme, he makes an interesting distinction: “LSD, I think is […] much more incapacitating. Amphetamine actually capacitates you, you know – it makes you more energetic and industrious … LSD is not really so wonderful … I think, you know, it would be much better to push some of the other drugs.” Warhol asks him “Which ones?” and Morrissey replies: “Well, heroin or amphetamines.” When Warhol protests – “Oh, but heroin is really awful” – Morrissey states, “No, I think I’m really for heroin, because it doesn’t affect you physically, if you take care yourself.” The interviewer asks Morrissey, “But won’t it eventually take its physical toll?” to which he replies, “It really doesn’t. It really helps. You never get a cold – it cures colds. It started in the United States as a cure for colds.” [46]

Could this latter statement have been a wind-up designed to shock the interviewer? Given that the magazine came from the radical fringe of the counterculture, it seems unlikely. Instead it would seem that, in 1967 at least, Morrissey was inclined to give a pass to certain drugs, providing he found their effects admirable. Amphetamines were fine because they made you industrious; LSD was awful because it made you act like a boob; alcohol was fine because it increased sociability (and to hell with violence); even heroin was okay as a cure for the common cold. Obviously, we are seeing Paul Morrissey at a very different stage of his evolution! There would be no such advocacy for heroin in Trash, made two years later. It’s also fascinating to see Warhol here as the voice of reason, despite conventional wisdom that he was the cold amoral observer and Morrissey the red-hot moraliser. As Andy puts it: “I guess if you’re rich, you can really go on it [heroin] and really be very happy. And you can really afford it, because it never gets that expensive. But I guess it’s bad for the ones who can’t really afford it, and have to steal or something like that.” [47]

Warhol touches here on the nub of something that would always elude Morrissey. In terms of drama and aesthetics, Mixed Blood works perfectly within the contrived and isolated bubble it sets for itself. What it doesn’t have is any wider social vision. Warhol’s comments in ’67 point to the roots of this problem in Morrissey. Drug addiction among the Hispanic population of Alphabet City was not the result of liberal permissiveness: it was the inevitable result of social policies that adopt a devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to deprivation and poverty, which is how you end up with the grim horrors of Mixed Blood and Forty Deuce on the streets of the richest nation in the world. Warhol was right: heroin may be okay for the rich, who can afford an endless supply of Grade A narcotics: but it’s bad for those who can’t afford it, “and have to steal or something like that”. From that simple fact springs crime, squalor, degradation, moral decay. Warhol may have been a capitalist, but at least he was aware of the negative role played by capitalism and the pitiless social policies that tend to follow. Morrissey, the raging conservative for whom everything would be fine if only bourgeois norms were maintained, never even hinted at a socio-economic cause for the misery he depicted in his ‘street’ films: instead he fixated on the notion of liberal freedoms creating a ‘toilet society’. One can identify the same socio-economic blind spot in his assessment of what Forty Deuce is all about: boy prostitutes were not being forced into sex in grubby little hotel rooms with sick old perverts because of liberal attitudes to pornography and drugs, but because of callous social policies that leave the poor and unlucky to seek refuge in the gutter, with nothing to console them but the fatuous promises of ‘trickle-down economics’, where, to retool a metaphor so beloved of Morrissey, the only substance trickling down is shit.

Beethoven’s Nephew and Spike of Bensonhurst

Shot over seven weeks in Vienna and Liechtenstein, in February and March 1985, with French finance and an entirely European cast, Beethoven’s Nephew was based on a 1972 book of the same name by the Italian musicologist and writer Luigi Magnani. A film adaptation had initially been considered by Italian arthouse director Liliana Cavani, who had planned to invite either Marlon Brando or Albert Finney to play Beethoven. Morrissey co-wrote the screenplay with actor Mathieu Carriere, who plays Archduke Rodolphe in the film, and cast Wolfgang Reichmann – well-respected in Germany but little-known abroad – as Beethoven. In the role of the nephew, Karl, he cast Dietmar Prinz, a sullenly gorgeous youth with no previous screen experience. The film received its American debut screening in San Luis Obispo, California, as part of the annual Mozart Festival, on the 10th of July 1986. Despite some positive notices, the film did not secure an American release until the 24th of July 1988, when New World Pictures opened it briefly in Los Angeles and a tiny handful of other major cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

Morrissey did his best to establish the project’s biographical bona fides when promoting the film, and he pulled no punches when discussing the hallowed composer:

“No biography has dealt with Beethoven as a real person—this is the first film. Beethoven has been kept a mystery. The biographies romanticize him, making him a deaf old curmudgeon instead of a vile person. While his music was a total success, his personal life was a total disaster.” Beethoven, claimed Morrissey, was “a sordid, sad, pathetic human being. He had no relations with other humans except to badger them until they ran away. Grotesque and unkempt he had stunted fingers and a face pock-marked from the syphilis he inherited from his mother.” He spent years “hysterically obsessed” with wresting legal control of his nephew and was, Morrissey stated, “[a] total bully, vindictive, lacking self-control, and hating people, especially women. He closed himself off to people and his deafness aggravated his isolation.”  He saw Beethoven’s music in the film, principally the 9th Symphony, as serving a special function: “Beethoven can speak from the grave through his music. His personality was so extreme, yet his music so majestic. Imagine, the inventor of the romantic movement of 19th-century music, had no romance in his life.” [48]

Casual homophobia defined some responses to the film, either mislabelling it as ‘camp’ – a cloth-eared assessment based solely on Morrissey’s earlier work with queer and transgender performers – or treating it as a gay indulgence because of Prinz’s good looks. Such are the dangers when a maverick outsider finds himself edging into the mainstream. The Philadelphia Enquirer regarded the mere possibility of homosexual desire as worthy of a shudder in their stupid and obnoxious review: “Prinz does have something of the pouty look of a male-pornography attraction, which is the only indication that the film’s director, Paul Morrissey, is the same Paul Morrissey who started out doing Andy Warhol-produced pseudo-porn films such as Trash. Knowing of Morrissey’s past work, I was afraid that the smoldering looks Prinz kept exchanging with the equally pouty-looking fellow who played his mother’s young lover would explode into action. They never did, thankfully. Paul Morrissey seems to have gone straight.” [49]

Next, Morrissey turned his attention to organised crime, and directed what would prove, aesthetically at least, to be his most mainstream film. Conceived as Throwback, under the auspices of FilmDallas, a company run by Kiss of the Spider Woman producer David Weisman, it went into production on the 23rd of June 1987, on location in Brooklyn, with shooting also taking place at the Rome Boxing Club in the Bronx. Good-looking teenager Sasha Mitchell, craggy old pro Ernest Borgnine and wacky Sylvia Miles were the leads, in a cast that initially included thirty-year-old beauty Beverly D’Angelo. Also in the cast, as Spike’s love interest, was the stunning Talisa Soto, then the girlfriend of superstar model Nick Kamen (what a Morrissey casting coup he would have been…). However, by April 1988 the film was being rejigged under its eventual release title Spike of Bensonhurst, and there appears to have been a second shooting period, which perhaps explains the disappearance of D’Angelo from the finished film. According to the New York Daily News, production had “just wrapped” by mid-August ’88. Spike of Bensonhurst opened on the 11th of November 1988 at the Criterion Center on Broadway, and pulled in some positive reviews, many of which compared it favourably to recent mafia-themed hits Moonstruck (d: Norman Jewison) and Married to the Mob (d: Jonathan Demme). Morrissey said the inspiration came from the much-publicised trial of mafia chief John Gotti, who was acquitted of racketeering and conspiracy: “The angle that struck me,” he told Lewis Beale of the Los Angeles Daily News, “was how popular he was in the neighborhood, and when he was exonerated the neighborhood had a party for him. The positive aspect of the Mafia, as a provider of law and order – that has a long tradition, and to me it’s a comic premise, it’s a human premise. Then I built on the idea. I wanted to have a kid who wanted to belong [to the mob], but he was such a pain, they told him he wouldn’t make it.” [50]

Sasha Mitchell proved a likeable, glib-tongued screen presence as Spike, with the looks and physique to ensure he would be noticed in the industry. Morrissey was so happy with the young man’s talents that he swiftly conceived a second film, “Urban Renewal”, following Spike’s fortunes among the retired Mafia dons of Miami. Sadly the project never reached the starting ramp and instead Mitchell moved on to action roles, playing Jean Claude Van Damme’s replacement in the three Kickboxer sequels.

After that there were only two further projects. Veruschka – Die Inszenierung (m)eines Körpers (2005) was a German TV documentary about the prominent super model Veruschka, a blonde-haired, high-cheekboned contemporary of Morrissey’s old friend Nico. Co-directed with Bernd Böhm, it’s a well-made but entirely conventional piece of work delving into the model’s unhappy childhood in Nazi Germany, her glamorous ascendancy in magazines and movies, and her 1980s revival as a New York fashion phenomenon. Finally, there is the rarely screened, currently impossible-to-view News from Nowhere (2010), shot mainly at Morrissey’s old house in Montauk before it was sold off. Ill health and a hit-and-run accident of which he was the victim forced retirement after that, and apart from career retrospectives and occasional discussions of his back catalogue on Blu-ray, Morrissey withdrew from the industry.

Conundrum

It’s a mark of how private a man Morrissey was that we cannot even be sure about his romantic or sexual preferences. Can we consider him a gay filmmaker? Even after his long career filming amazingly beautiful young men in various states of undress, we’re left wondering. A whiff of the closet seemed to trail behind him, as one reviewer noted when discussing Beethoven’s Nephew: “[D]on’t expect a story hinting at homosexuality. The closest we get to anything at all to do with the subject is Morrissey’s notorious tendency to cast extraordinarily pretty young men whenever he gets the chance.” [51] At times he made statements that rebuffed the assumption that he was gay: he once responded to a question about his orientation by saying, “I wish I was homosexual”. In a 1973 interview, a journalist for the New York Times noted, “Morrissey tears his nails nervously when asked about his private life.” His answer? “Don’t have one.” [52] Nor does there appear to have been anyone special in his life – male or female. If he did have romantic liaisons, he kept them very firmly secret.

Is it impolite or inappropriate to enquire after a man’s sexuality in this day and age? It’s not so much prurience that inspires the query: it’s more a sort of amazement that a man who enshrined male beauty so often, and who moved in the circles he moved in, might actually have been in the closet. If so, why? It’s not as if he would have suffered the disapproval and rejection of his peers. To those who say that Morrissey’s sexuality is ‘none of our business’ I would simply reply that when a man makes his name depicting sexual outsiders it hardly seems impertinent to wonder. If he wasn’t gay, he had the gayest eye in the heterosexual film world. Over and over again his camera lovingly recorded the beauty of young masculinity: consider the glamorous Puerto-Ricans and bequiffed teenage rebels of the short films, the world-class beauty of Joe Dallesandro, Bike Boy’s Joseph Spencer soaping himself in the shower, butch Marty Cove screwing in the nude in Women in Revolt, the ‘young, dumb and full of cum’ rawness of Richard Ulacia and the bee-stung cuteness of Rodney Harvey in Mixed Blood, all the way through to Sasha Mitchell’s klutzy hunk in Spike of Bensonhurst, with all manner of tanned torsos and gluteal delights dotted in between.

One suspects that if anything could inflict such a grievous feeling of restriction on the man it was his Roman Catholic upbringing – not that Morrissey himself would have agreed. Not only did he praise the nuns and Jesuits who conducted his education, he claimed that such an upbringing would be best for all society. All this from a man whose work the Catholic League of Decency consistently classified as repugnant in their monthly film reports, placing it without fail in their lowest circle of hell! It’s almost comical to survey the roll-call of infamy inflicted on Catholic moral values by this alleged devotee of the faith: Lonesome Cowboys – Condemned; Trash – Condemned; Women in Revolt – Condemned; Heat – Condemned; Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein – Condemned; Andy Warhol’s Dracula – Condemned; Beethoven’s Nephew – classified ‘O’ for ‘morally offensive’; Spike of Bensonhurst – classified ‘O’ for ‘morally offensive’. Other Morrissey films avoided classification, mostly by being impossible to see, but you can be sure that Madame Wang’s, Mixed Blood and Forty Deuce would have joined their fellows in this Catholic vault of the damned if only they’d caught the League’s eye.

Baby you’re so vicious

If we can’t get a grip on Morrissey’s sexuality, we can at least examine his attitude to his one-time friend and mentor Andy Warhol, which changed from respect in the 1960s and 1970s to contempt in the 1990s and onwards. Always an anti-intellectual, Morrissey in later years came to despise Warhol’s artistic reputation and tended to dismiss his creativity as a mere figment of pretentious imaginations, a delusion fostered by a clique of hangers-on and pseuds.

In the March 1975 edition of Oui magazine, he told Jonathan Rosenbaum:

“I still enjoy all the films that I made with Andy Warhol. What Andy hit upon was that characters were vanishing from films, characterization was disappearing and was being upstaged by a lot of cinematic claptrap. Andy completely eliminated the claptrap. He just turned on the camera and left the room.” [53]

Note that he gives Warhol credit for conceptual thinking here. By 1995, however, his attitude had turned nasty and it stayed that way until his death:

“Andy not only did not try to put direction in, he was incapable of it […] He didn’t even think in sentences, only disconnected nouns and fragments. He would say ‘bathtub’, then ‘It’s outdoors’, then ‘Viva’s in it’. For him, that was a scene.” [54]

(We only have to read Warhol’s interviews in the fringe press to see that he was quite capable of speaking in coherent sentences when the fancy took him: the monosyllabic version was a construct, a wind-up for the mainstream media, and Morrissey must have known this.)

By 2005, Morrissey’s insults about Warhol took the form of amateur clinical diagnoses. “It was like promoting a learning-disabled child,” he told Robin Finn of the New York Times, before, as Finn put it, “assigning to the artist shreds of every ailment from autism to agoraphobia to dyslexia”. When asked by Finn whether Warhol was a bit of an idiot savant, Morrissey replied, “I don’t know about the savant part.” And as Finn remarked, “[that’s] plenty acid-tongued for a guy who never dropped acid and never, according to him, put mean-spirited people in his movies.” [55]

So why the change? When newspapers hailed Warhol as an icon of American culture, did Morrissey begin to feel edged out, overshadowed by the captivating allure of the Warhol ‘brand’? Did a handful of lazy reviewers describe Flesh and Trash as Andy Warhol movies and stir up old anxieties? Having honed his wit in the febrile atmosphere of the Factory, it’s sad and rather shameful that only after Warhol passed away did he turn his blade on the person who had given him so much. Was he always so contemptuous of Warhol? Did he keep a lid on it for careerist reasons? One hates to think so.

The Other Morrissey

Despite his mean streak, Morrissey had a system of ethics regarding the role of a writer or director. His job, as he saw it, was the accurate and sympathetic transcription of character, to be done “without condescension or contempt”. Behind this, however, lay a person who regarded much of what he saw as either absurd, disgusting, or indeed contemptible. One has to say that his bifurcated approach – artistic ethics on one side, political views on the other – served him well in his career. Scorning in interviews the values of the counterculture whose members merrily trooped in to see his ‘comedies’, he had his cake and ate it for fifty years.

But where to go with all of this, now that he’s no longer with us? What choice do we even have? When I interviewed Paul Morrissey by telephone in 1996, I liked him. I’m sure I would have liked him even more if I’d been sitting in the same room looking him in the eye. The man had charm. One sensed he just loved to fling his cutting bon-mots and quotable daggers of opinion, and he could make the most outrageous remarks funny in the telling.

In closing I will mention another Paul Morrissey, active in New York in the 1980s and 90s, whose name I kept coming across as I researched this essay: an aggressive Catholic campaigner against abortion, homosexuality and pornography who disrupted public meetings, shouted abuse, attacked public officials as they left work, and sought to frighten and assail those whom he felt were ‘the enemy within’. After much confusion, and a creeping sense of dread that he and the director of Flesh might be one and the same, I discovered that this was in fact a different person, three years younger than his namesake … and yet his ultra-conservative views and violent acts of disorder made him seem like a disturbing fairground-mirror version of the filmmaker.

There but for the grace of cinema? One shudders to think.

Rest in peace, Paul. Cinema is poorer without you. And if there really is a God, let’s hope he’s a tad more open-minded than the Catholic League of Decency!

Stephen Thrower is a British author whose books include Nightmare USA (a biographical study of American independent horror), Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, and two volumes on the prolific Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco: Murderous Passions and Flowers of Perversion. He contributes to numerous Blu-ray releases in the horror genre, curates The American Horror Project for Arrow, and presents the ongoing video series “In the Land of Franco” for Severin. As a musician he has worked for Derek Jarman (The Angelic Conversation), George Barry (Death Bed), Peter De Rome (Encounter), and Lucile Hadžihalilović (Evolution). His previous contributions to bynwr.com include a deep dive into the swamps with Florida filmmaker Luke Moberly and a study of Texan sexploitation director Dale Berry.

Photo Credits:
The Estate of Taylor Mead and The New American Cinema Group/The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

[1] Paul Morrissey interviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum in Oui magazine, March 1975.

[2] Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (NY: Harper Collins, 1990), p.36

[3] “Bruce LaBruce on Gen Z, GHB, and Double Penetration”, by Jake Nevins, 16 May 2024,  https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/bruce-labruce-on-gen-z-ghb-and-double-penetration

[4] Colacello, Holy Terror, p.36

[5] Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey, Cambridge University Press, p124

[6] Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey, p14

[7] William Grimes, “A Warhol Director On What Is Sordid, Then and on MTV”, New York Times, 26 December 1995

[8] Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey, p16

[9] Paul Morrissey, speaking to the author in Eyeball magazine, #4, 1996, collected in The Eyeball Compendium, FAB Press, 2003

[10] Ronald Tavel, speaking in the BBC documentary “Warhol’s Cinema: A Mirror for the Sixties” (1989).

[11] Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1986), p.502

[12] Gordon Baldwin, 25 September 2006, quoted by the website Warholstars.org

[13] Colacello, Holy Terror, p34

[14] Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey, Cambridge University Press, p20

[15] “Warhol Shoots the Surf”, by Aaron Sloan, Los Angeles Free Press, 26 July 1968, p31

[16] Paul Morrissey, speaking to the author in Eyeball magazine, #4, 1996, collected in The Eyeball Compendium, FAB Press, 2003

[17] Quoted by David Morgenstern in “Warhol’s Heat”, Los Angeles Free Press, 27 October 1972, p3

[18] https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/san-diego-surf-warhol

[19] Ibid.

[20] https://www.jjmurphyfilm.com/blog/2012/10/14/san-diego-surf/

[21] Stargazer by Stephen Koch, pub: Marion Boyars, 1985, p.80

[22] Colacello, Holy Terror, p.45

[23] Little Joe, Superstar: The Films of Joe Dallesandro (California: Companion Press, 1998), p.90

[24] Paul Morrissey interviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum in Oui magazine, March 1975

[25] “She’s Beautiful, Plucky—And a Man”, Vincent Canby, New York Times, 27 February 1972

[26] “…Or Has Andy Warhol Spoiled Success?” by Grace Glueck, New York Times, 9 May 1971

[27] But the People are Beautiful,” by Sally Beauman, The Telegaph Magazine, 5 February 1971

[28] Who Is Sylvia? ‘I’m a Big Star’ by Chris Chase, New York Times, 31 October 1971

[29] Colacello, Holy Terror, p.131

[30] Morrissey’s Ad-Libbed ‘Heat’ Whams N.Y. Fest; Could Have B.O. Wattage Too”, by Addison Verrill, Weekly Variety, 11 October 1972, p.7

[31] ibid., p.27

[32] Cinema: A Festival’s Moveable Feast”, by Jay Cocks, Time Magazine, 16 October 1972

[33] “Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey Stirring Things Up In Rome”, Daily Variety, 14 March 1973, p.12

[34] “Morrissey: Film Belongs to the Actors”, by Terry Kay, Atlanta Journal, 16 October 1972, p.35

[35] “Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey Stirring Things Up In Rome”, Daily Variety, 14 March 1973, p.12

[36] Colacello, Holy Terror, p.181-182

[37] ibid, p.237

[38] Pat Hackett (ed.), The Andy Warhol Diaries (NY: Warner Books, 1989, p179

[39] Seattle Gay News, 25 May 1982, p.15

[40] “Hey Mary!” by Steve Warren, Bay Area Reporter, 22 May 1986, p.24

[41] “Boy Prostitutes Linked to Spies”, Newsday, 27 July 1982, p.3

[42] “Morrissey movie keyhole view of ugly world”, by John Fitzgerald, The Gazette, Montreal, 31 March 1983, p.D-10

[43] ibid.

[44] “A Very Seamy Side of Life”, Forty Deuce review by Stephen Holden, New York Times, 19 January 1996

[45] “Warhol Mind Warp” by Richard A. Ogar, Berkeley Barb, 1-7 September 1967, p.9-10

[46] ibid.

[47] ibid.

[48] “Behind the Myth” by Donna Rosenthal, New York Daily News, 14 June 1988, p.29

[49] “Relative Woe by the Score” by Ben Yagoda, Philadelphia Daily News, 7 October 1986, p.62

[50] “Paul Morrissey’s ‘Spike’ filled with lopy filmmaking style” by Lewis Beale, The Register (Monmouth County), 11 November 1988, p.8C

[51] Beethoven’s Nephew Hits a Flat Note’, The Gazette, 23 April 1986

[52] “Morrissey – From Flesh and Trash to Blood for Dracula” by Melton S. Davis, New York Times, 15 July 1973

[53] Paul Morrissey interview by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Oui magazine, March 1975

[54] William Grimes, “A Warhol Director On What Is Sordid, Then and on MTV”, New York Times, Dec. 26, 1995

[55] “A Filmmaker and a Castle, Both With a View”, by Robin Finn, New York Times, 18 July 2001