Paul Morrissey, an early collaborator of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground and the director of cult movies comparable to Flesh, Trash and Girls in Revolt, has died at 86.
His archivist, Michael Chaiken instructed the New York Occasions that Morrissey died in a New York hospital on Monday after a bout of pneumonia.
Morrissey was an intriguing determine, a lifelong conservative who grew to become a key participant in Warhol’s Manufacturing facility studio, making low-budget movies about drug addicts and hustlers, with the coterie of fashions, socialites, artists, drag queens and transgender actors that got here to be referred to as Warhol’s “superstars”.
His finest identified works embrace Trash (1970), a characteristic a couple of down-and-out heroin addict and his girlfriend, starring Warhol superstars Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn; Flesh (1968), starring Dallesandro as a hustler engaged on the streets of New York; and Girls in Revolt (1971), a satirical tackle the ladies’s liberation motion, starring Warhol fixtures Sweet Darling and Jackie Curtis.
Morrissey additionally collaborated with Warhol on cult underground movies comparable to Chelsea Women (1966), which he co-directed, and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), which he wrote. From 1966 to 1967 he managed the Velvet Underground and Nico, and collaborated with Warhol on the movie The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound. Throughout this time Morrisey additionally co-conceived and named Warhol’s multimedia sequence of “happenings”, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured performances by the band.
Warhol and Morrissey parted methods in 1974. Morrissey later spoke disparagingly of his former collaborator, saying he resented him for taking an excessive amount of credit score for his or her work collectively. He instructed Vivid Lights Movie Journal in 2012 that Warhol
“by no means did a factor in his total life. He form of walked by it as a zombie and that paid off in the long term.”
Born in 1938 in Manhattan, Morrissey was raised Catholic in New York Metropolis, and attended Catholic faculties and college, earlier than becoming a member of the US Military. In 1960 he opened an underground cinema within the East Village, the place he confirmed his personal shorts and the early work of Brian De Palma.
In 1965 he was launched to Warhol, who contracted him to run the publicity and film-making on the Manufacturing facility. He’s usually credited with bringing narrative construction and cinéma vérité path to the collective’s film-making efforts, although he mentioned the actors had been the true stars. “Andy and I actually attempt to not direct a movie in any respect,” he instructed the New York Occasions in 1972. “We each really feel the celebs needs to be the middle of the movie.”
After parting methods with Warhol, Morrissey continued making movies, together with the 1978 Sherlock Holmes spoof The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook dinner; and Forty Deuce, starring Kevin Bacon as a younger intercourse employee, which confirmed at Cannes movie competition in 1982. His last movie was 2010’s Information From Nowhere.
Morrissey is survived by his brother Kenneth, and his eight nieces and nephews.
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