Paul Morrissey, Cult Director and Andy Warhol Collaborator, Dies at 86
Paul Morrissey, a cult film director and early Andy Warhol collaborator, died Monday. He was 86.
Morrissey’s archivist Michael Chaiken told The Hollywood Reporter the filmmaker died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City after a bout with pneumonia.
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His most celebrated films as an auteur included Flesh, Trash, Heat, Flesh for Frankenstein and the classic B-picture Blood for Dracula, which starred Joe Dallesandro.
Morrissey’s films also included classics like Women in Revolt and the 1980s New York City trilogy Forty Deuce, Mixed Blood and Spike of Bensonhurst. But it’s Morrissey’s early association with pop artist Andy Warhol that helped establish him as a director and kept his cult status alive throughout his career.
The two artists first met in 1965, and Morrissey signed on to run the publicity and filmmaking for Warhol at The Factory under a contract through 1973. Early cinematic collaborations full of colorful characters like drug addicts and street hustlers include in 1965 Space and My Hustler, a year later with The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound and San Diego Surf and Lonesome Cowboys in 1968.
Morrissey in recent years became defensive over Warhol having taken too much credit for their film collaborations at The Factory.
“Don’t say ‘Warhol films’ when you talk about my films! Are you so stupid, you talk to people like that? I have to live through this for fifty years. Everything I did, 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. He sort of walked through it as a zombie, and that paid off in the long run. But I just cannot take that shitty reference. What were you gonna say, if you can get past that?” Morrissey told Sam Weinberg during an interview in the Bright Lights Film Journal in February 2020.
Typical of the movie posters for their joint films was a top billing for Warhol — as in “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein” or “Andy Warhol’s Dracula,” followed with “A Film by Paul Morrissey” just below — to catch the eye of cinema-goers.
Morrissey was more generous in a March 1975 interview in Oui with Jonathan Rosenbaum, where he allowed that Warhol had at least operated the camera at times, while he did the rest of the logistics and creative decisions. “I just understood what Andy was doing and helped him do it. Andy usually operated the camera. I always did the lights, organized the film, got the actors together, told them what to do. We never ever told actors just to be themselves. That’s a lot of crap,” Morrissey insisted.
Among the other contributions Morrissey made to Warhol’s cult status was helping discover and manage The Velvet Underground and co-founding Interview magazine.
Born in New York City on Feb. 23, 1938, Morrissey graduated from the Fordham Preparatory School in 1955 and four years later from Fordham University.
After a stint in the U.S. military, he moved to the East Village in late 1960 and opened the Exit Gallery. There he screened underground films like Brian De Palma’s debut short, Icarus, and made his own first films.
In 1975, after his collaboration with Warhol had run its course, Morrissey lived for a short time in Los Angeles and set about to finance and make his own films. Among those was a studio film, The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Sherlock Holmes parody that starred Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, and his last film, News From Nowhere, in 2010.
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