Paul Morrissey, Before and After Warhol

A few of the obituaries that have appeared since Morrissey passed away on Monday at the age of eighty-six—William Grimes’s in the New York Times, for example, or Etan Vlessing’s for the Hollywood Reporter—note that in the mid-1970s, not long after he left Warhol’s orbit, Morrissey was fairly judicious when it came to crediting Warhol’s role in the making of such films as My Hustler (1965), Chelsea Girls (1966), and Lonesome Cowboys (1968). But by the time Sam Weisberg interviewed him for Bright Lights Film Journal in 2012, Morrissey had grown bitter.

“Everything I did,” Morrissey told Weisberg, “it’s Warhol this, or he did them with me. Forget it. He was incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic, Asperger’s—he never did a thing in his entire life.” When the conversation turned to Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), Women in Revolt (1971), and Heat (1972), Morrissey asked, “Why do you call them Warhol films?! . . . I did everything!” Joe Dallesandro, the hunky star of most of these films during this period, told Dan Sullivan in Film Comment in 2016 that Morrissey “would always tell me that we were making an Andy Warhol movie that would one day show in museums. And now he rants and raves about how much he hated Andy. It’s crazy.”

Paul Morrissey was a complicated man. Raised as a Catholic in Yonkers, New York, he was twenty-two when he moved in 1960 to the East Village. He claimed to disdain the very idea of the avant-garde, and yet he opened Exit Gallery, where he screened underground films. Bright Lights editor Gary Morris has pointed out that the films Morrissey was shooting on 16 mm at the time were “a combination of anti-narrative experimentation and camp. Civilization and Its Discontents (1962), which featured ‘a hood in a pea jacket strangling a fat albino,’ among other things, has been described as ‘slapstick neorealism.’ In Mary Martin Does It (1962), a bag lady throws a murderess under a large street sweeper.”

After poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga introduced Morrissey to Warhol, Morrissey became part of an ad hoc managerial team that oversaw such Warhol career moves as taking on the Velvet Underground (on the condition that Nico would sing with the band) and organizing such multimedia events as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a psychedelic collision of musical performances, light shows, and screenings. Morrissey—who, by the way, disliked rock and preferred Mozart, Beethoven, and Rachmaninoff—also brought a dash of technical expertise to Warhol’s filmmaking.

Up to that point, Warhol’s films might be seen as falling into two categories. There were the brilliant and immeasurably influential conceptual works more often thought about than watched, such as Sleep (1964), a compilation of looped footage of poet John Giorno sleeping, and Empire (1965), an eight-hour view of the Empire State Building at night. Then there were the more chaotic ensemble pieces such as Soap Opera (1964) and Couch (1964), featuring clusters of scenesters hanging out in the vicinity of the Factory.

Morrissey would come to see in these Warhol superstars—Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Billy Name, Jane Forth, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Jackie Curtis, Ultra Violet, and so on—material he could work with. “What Andy hit upon,” Morrissey told Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1975, “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 . . . I just understood what Andy was doing and helped him do it.”

The last film Morrissey worked on as Warhol’s assistant before Valerie Solanas tried—and failed—to kill Warhol in the summer of 1968 was San Diego Surf, starring Viva and Taylor Mead, whose “largely improvised, hilariously inspired performances speak to something elemental about Warhol and Morrissey’s cinema,” wrote Michael Chaiken in a 2013 issue of Film Comment, “a shared aesthetic that, in the ensuing years, would culminate in the movies Morrissey would direct on his own. In their films, ‘plot’ is the device through which nominal actors externalize psychic processes and conditions, making the inner self audible and visible before the impassive eye of the movie camera.”

After Solanas’s assassination attempt, Morrissey essentially took over the Factory’s film production. “Morrissey’s particular genius,” wrote Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice in 2003, “is transforming gilded-era Hollywood archetypes into showcases for his stable of laconic studs, irrepressible motormouths, blowsy beauties, and arch drag queens.” A near-constant presence is Dallesandro, “riffing on sullen, monosyllabic Brando-style masculinity, as a hustler in Flesh, a smack addict in Trash, and a former child star in Heat. All three films center around Dallesandro’s commodification of his body, which the camera can never get enough of.”

According to the Deuce Jockeys, regular contributors to the Notebook, in 1972, producer Carlo Ponti was looking for someone to direct a period horror movie in 3D when Roman Polanski recommended Morrissey. “The schlocktastic Flesh for Frankenstein [1973] exalts Udo Kier’s performance as Baron Frankenstein—cinema’s superlative interpretation of the character—a masterfully hilarious balance between gravitas of the Grand Guignol text and mockery of an oft-adapted genre,” write the Jockeys. Blood for Dracula (1974) is “the consummate B-picture to Flesh for Frankenstein, its antidotal aperitif.”

Exiting the Factory, Morrissey teamed up with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), a stab at comedy that flopped and became the only film Morrissey directed and then outright disavowed. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who had prompted Morrissey to elaborate on his right-wing political philosophy in 1975, nonetheless championed Forty Deuce (1982), “a probable masterpiece and easily the best Morrissey film since Heat.”

Writing for desistfilm ten years ago, Joe McElhaney made a strong case for Morrissey’s late period. The director had “repeatedly boasted of his conservative politics, his puritanical attitudes towards sex and drugs, and his devotion to Roman Catholicism,” noted McElhaney, and “if Morrissey’s statements are to be taken at face value, then the films have become far more complex phenomenons than he might be willing to acknowledge. Pedro Almodóvar, for example, has spoken of the importance of early Morrissey to his own work, finding in the films a sensibility as ‘amoral’ and ‘playful’ as his own. In the case of Mixed Blood [1985], rhetorical precision is most often elided in favor of a world of suspended meaning, in which the very ‘freedoms’ Morrissey’s film is ostensibly denouncing (or, at least, that Morrissey claims the film is denouncing) are given a voluptuous and, in spite of some melodramatic trappings, profoundly comic form of presentation.”