Paul Morrissey

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For other people named Paul Morrissey, see Paul Morrissey (disambiguation).
Paul Morrissey
Photo by Ewa Rudling
Born (1938-02-23) February 23, 1938 (age 86)
New York City, U.S.
OccupationFilmmaker
Known forWarhol superstar

Paul Morrissey (born February 23, 1938) is an American film director, known for his early association with Andy Warhol.[1] He is the director of several landmarks in American independent cinema including Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), the first film in which a transgender actress, Holly Woodlawn, starred as a girlfriend of a main character, and Heat (1972), all three starring Joe Dallesandro and produced by Warhol. [2]

Morrissey, who from 1965 - 1973 was the film and publicity manager at Warhol's Factory (he also managed The Velvet Underground and Nico in 1966 and was one of the principle founders of Interview Magazine in 1969), began making films on his own in 1975, starting with his lone studio effort Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), co-written with Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke. This was followed in the 1980s by a trilogy of acclaimed independent features satirizing New York City's decaying political and social infrastructure during the Ed Koch era: Forty Deuce (1982), starring Kevin Bacon, Mixed Blood (1984) and Spike of Bensonhurst (1988).

Life and career[edit]

Paul Morrissey in 1967

Of Irish Catholic extraction, Morrissey was born in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx, and attended Fordham Prep and Fordham University, both Catholic schools, and later served in the United States Army where he earned the rank of First Lieutenant before being honorably discharged from active duty.

Moving to New York City's East Village in 1960, Morrissey spent the early part of the decade making short, silent comedies while also owning and operating the Exit Gallery, a nickelodeon style cinema at 36 E. 4th Street that exhibited a mix of underground and documentary films including Icarus (1960), the first film of Brian De Palma.

Introduced by poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga, Morrissey first met Andy Warhol in June 1965 at the Astor Place Playhouse where Morrissey was presenting a retrospective of his own work. Impressed with Morrissey’s resourcefulness and ability to properly focus a 16mm camera, Warhol offered him an opportunity to assist with the making of his film Space (1965), filmed in July 1965 and feauring Edie Sedgwick, Danny Fields, Donald Lyons (a friend of Morrissey's from his Fordham days) and folk singer Eric Andersen. Several succesful collaborations followed including My Hustler (1965), Chelsea Girls (1966) and I A Man (1967), among others.

Morrissey came to work at The Factory (first on E. 47th Street and then at 33 Union Square) nearly every day between 1965 – 1973, acting as the de facto publicity and film manager at the Factory, co-conceiving (and naming) Warhol’s traveling multi-media roadshow The Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring The Velvet Underground and Nico (who Morrissey managed during their first year at the Factory) and co-founding Interview Magazine with publisher John Wilcock and Warhol.

For nearly a decade, Warhol and Morrissey functioned something like twin-brains with a single-minded purpose: recreating in New York City the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s via the Factory. The relative success of Chelsea Girls gave rise to Andy Warhol Films, Inc., an independent filmmaking studio and distributor that began producing what Morrissey characterized as “comedy of manners”. Shot without a script and very little money, I A Man (1967), Imitation of Christ (1967), Bike Boy (1967), Loves of Ondine (1967), Lonesome Cowboys (1968) and San Diego Surf (1968) satirized sex, drugs and the social mores of 20th Century American life, fueled by Warhol and Morrissey’s determination to capsize the fashionable notion of film as a “director’s medium”. “To me,” Morrissey told British Vogue in 1978, “moviemaking is dealing with personalities, people who are always the way they are in every film, like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, that kind of film-star personality which is not very fashionable now. It doesn’t really matter what the camera’s doing as long as the people are worth watching. . .”

After the attempt on Warhol’s life by Valerie Solanas in June 1968, Morrissey began directing features on his own under the Warhol banner (“Andy Warhol presents. . .”), aspiring to the heights reached by his cinematic forebearer and friend George Cukor, an “actor’s director” with few equals, who shared with Morrissey a belief that movies are, first and foremost, a performer’s medium, one that lived or died with an audience’s interest, empathy, and fascination with the personalities they encountered on screen.

Just as decades earlier Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow and James Cagney captured the movie going public’s imagination, Morrissey promoted his own on-screen troupe of self-invented Superstars for the 1960s and 1970s: Viva, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Jane Forth, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. With Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), Women In Revolt (1971) and Heat (1972), Morrissey’s determinedly populist gambit paid off: the critical and commercial success of these films made Joe Dallesandro and Candy Darling counterculture icons; the extraordinary prescience of these films prefiguring virtually every turn in fashion, style, and culture over the next 50 years. “I think it’s funny,” Morrissey told an interviewer in 1980, “that a person like me, who’s basically kind of square, should be the only one who really left a record of a kind of strange world during a certain period of time that nobody else dealt with.”

After the international success of Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), filmed back-to-back in Rome and starring Dallesandro alongside Udo Kier, he left the Factory and turned his attention to gothic horrors closer to home, a trilogy of films set in New York City and its outer boroughs: Forty Deuce (1982), Mixed Blood (1984) and Spike of Bensonhurst (1988). Dark comedies exploring the failures of liberalism and the utopian dreams of the 1960s, these films, among Morrissey’s most accomplished, offered a new coterie of Morrissey Superstars for the 1980s: Marília Pêra, Rodney Harvey and Sasha Mitchell.

When critic Jonathan Rosenbaum asked Morrissey why he portrayed drug addicts and street hustlers so sympathetically despite his own personal convictions as a lifelong conservative Catholic, he responded:

“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 to my personal beliefs. 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."

Morrissey was among the first film directors to cast transgender women in prominent roles in his films Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1971).

Director George Cukor once remarked of Morrissey:

“He makes a marvelous kind of world, and a marvelous kind of mischief, holding nothing back and just watching it happen. . .”Personal expression” is a much abused expression, but these films are real expression. . .Nobody has done anything like it. The selection of people, the casting, is absolutely brilliant and impertinent. The life they see, the gutter they see, or the world they see is so funny and agonizing, and they see it so vividly, with such humor. . .such original humor. . .”

For an analysis of each of Morrissey's feature films, see Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge UP).

Filmography[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Grimes, William (1995-12-26). "A Warhol Director On What Is Sordid, Then and on MTV (Published 1995)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
  2. ^ Stevens, Christopher (2010). Born Brilliant: The Life Of Kenneth Williams. John Murray. p. 406. ISBN 978-1-84854-195-5.

External links[edit]


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