Paul Morrissey, whose loose cinéma-vérité films made with Andy Warhol in the late 1960s and early ’70s captured New York’s demimonde of drug addicts, drag queens and hipsters and turned an unlikely stable of amateur actors into underground stars, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86.
The death, in a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, said Michael Chaiken, his archivist.
In films like “Flesh,” “Trash,” “Heat” and “Women in Revolt,” all made on budgets of less than $10,000, Mr. Morrissey brought movement, character and something resembling a story line to the Warhol film aesthetic, which had consisted of pointing a camera at an actor or a building and letting it run for several hours. (Warhol’s “Empire” was a continuous shot of the Empire State Building that lasted eight hours and five minutes.)
Relying on a shifting collective of amateur actors, like Joe Dallesandro and Viva; transgender performers, like Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling; and marginal downtown characters, Mr. Morrissey concocted a distinctive blend of squalor and melodramatic farce that captivated many critics and even, in some instances, translated into box-office success.
The scripts, such as they were, were almost entirely ad-libbed. The stars simply portrayed themselves. And the plots defied synopsis.
“Trash,” Mr. Morrissey’s biggest critical and commercial success, followed the trials and tribulations of Mr. Dallesandro playing a heroin-addicted gigolo earnestly, if groggily, trying to support his wife, played by Ms. Woodlawn. “Women in Revolt” took the theme of women’s liberation and grafted it onto a sendup of Hollywood women’s pictures of the 1930s, with Ms. Curtis, Ms. Woodlawn and Ms. Darling striking poses and reflecting on their status in a sexist society.
In any case, Mr. Morrissey believed fervently in star power first and last. “Andy and I really try not to direct a film at all,” he told The New York Times in 1972. “We both feel the stars should be the center of the film.” Holly Woodlawn, he insisted, would be remembered long after Pablo Picasso was forgotten.
Mr. Morrissey finished his tour of duty with Warhol by making two horror films intended for a broader audience: the 3-D “Flesh for Frankenstein,” released in 1973 under the title “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein”; and “Blood for Dracula,” released in 1974 as “Andy Warhol’s Dracula.” They were dismissed by most critics as campy gore fests.
“He was great because he shot beyond the margin,” Maurice Yacowar, the author of “The Films of Paul Morrissey” (1993), wrote in an email. “In the party scene in ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ John Schlesinger gives us a teasing glimpse at the new subculture, but Morrissey really dug into that world. Henry Jaglom, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley — all the American independents who give us big feelings from small stories about offbeat characters — their founding father was Morrissey.”
Mr. Morrissey was born on Feb. 23, 1938, in Manhattan to Joseph and Eleanor Morrissey, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y. He attended Roman Catholic schools and studied English at Fordham University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955 and began making 16-millimeter silent films. His first effort, a one-reeler, showed a priest saying Mass on a cliff top and then throwing his altar boy over the edge.
Despite the subject, Mr. Morrissey was not rebelling against the church. He enjoyed perplexing interviewers by fully endorsing his Jesuit education, heaping scorn on liberals and denouncing sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll even as he presented, without comment, scenes of shocking degradation on film.
“With us, everything is acceptance,” he once said of his collaborations with Warhol. “Nothing is critical. Everything is amoral. People can be whatever they are, and we record it on film.”
After serving in the Army, Mr. Morrissey ran, and lived in, an underground cinema in the East Village, where he showed his own films and those of others, including “Icarus,” an early effort by Brian De Palma. Mr. Morrissey later took pains to explain that he was not part of the experimental-film movement. With his interest in stars and narrative, he was, as he liked to put it, “independent of the independents.”
Mr. Morrissey was introduced to Warhol in 1965 by the poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga at a film screening, and the Factory phase of Mr. Morrissey’s career began. At the time, Warhol was making experimental films at the commercial loft on East 47th Street known as the Factory. The titles capture their static, impassive aesthetic: “Hair Cut No. 1,” “Shoulder,” “Couch.” The camera stared, unblinking, and whatever happened, happened — or didn’t.
Accounts differ about this period. Mr. Morrissey himself revised his version of events, gradually reducing to the vanishing point Warhol’s participation in the films that went out under his name after 1965.
At the time, however, Mr. Morrissey conceded more ground. “My films derive from Andy’s, but his were being made without direction, without preparation, with total improvisation,” he told The Times in 1972. “I use a lot of this technique but add direction, story and a little more selection.”
After working on “My Hustler” (1965), Mr. Morrissey took over as director on “Chelsea Girls” (1966), the first Warhol film to break completely with the catatonic approach typified by “Empire” and reach a wider, if still underground, audience.
“Lonesome Cowboys” (1968), a series of arch allusions to the Hollywood western (with a cross-dressing sheriff), disturbed audiences with a gang-rape scene, and Mr. Morrissey later found it wanting. With “Flesh” (1968), “Trash” (1970) and “Heat” (1972), however, he moved to the front ranks of independent filmmakers, a position solidified with the giddy “Women in Revolt” in 1972.
Bigger budgets did not translate into better films. Warhol and Mr. Morrissey both believed that they could achieve box-office success on a Hollywood scale, hence their collaboration with the Italian producer Carlo Ponti on “Flesh for Frankenstein” and “Blood for Dracula.”
Neither of those films was as big a hit as they had hoped, and Mr. Morrissey parted ways with Warhol in 1974. He went on to direct a series of films that made little impact with either the critics or the public, including a misbegotten comic version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1978), with Peter Cook as Sherlock Holmes and Dudley Moore as Dr. Watson; the gritty New York street drama “Forty-Deuce” (1982), with Kevin Bacon as a male hustler in his first big film role; and the Mafia comedy “Spike of Bensonhurst” (1988). His last film, the drama “News From Nowhere,” was released in 2010.
He is survived by a brother, Kenneth Morrissey; and eight nieces and nephews, Jessica Tietjen, Christina Caposino, Nicholas Indri, Marisa Crawford, Rebecca Burns, Sarah Aliberti, Che Indri and Patrick Indri.
As the years went by, Mr. Morrissey became increasingly critical of Warhol, deriding his work and saying that much of it had been produced by associates who had slapped his name on it to raise the price without his ever seeing it.
Warhol, he said, “had no idea about anything.”
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