Paul Morrissey, the filmmaker, and Andy Warhol collaborator and business partner, died Monday, Oct. 29. He was 86.
The Andy Warhol Museum confirmed Morrissey’s death in a statement shared on social media. Per The New York Times, Morrissey’s archivist, Michael Chaiken, said the filmmaker died in a Manhattan hospital from pneumonia.
“Morrissey worked on almost every film Warhol made from 1965–1974, working as a soundman and lighting supervisor and receiving credits as director and executive producer,” the Warhol Museum said. “He directed the films Flesh, Trash, and Heat under the ‘Andy Warhol Presents’ banner and later his own independent films like Forty Deuce and The Hounds of the Baskervilles among others.”
Morrissey was already a denizen of New York City’s underground film scene when he met Warhol in 1965 and joined the Factory. At the time, Warhol’s film work centered around lengthy, often static projects, where a camera was pointed at a person or location and allowed to roll, capturing whatever happened in front of the lens.
Morrissey’s films, in contrast, contained more character and narrative (not to mention camera movement), though his films were still out there — with the dialogue often improvised and the stories strange and discursive. Most important, to both Morrissey and Warhol, were the personas and celebrities on the screen. Many of Warhol’s “Superstars” appeared in Morrissey’s films, including Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Jane Forth.
Speaking with The Times in 1972, Morrissey said he and Warhol preferred not to direct, explaining instead, “We both feel the stars should be the center of the film.” He added: “A lot of half‐baked intellectuals have the idea that film is a vehicle for the director. Call it an old idea or an original idea — movies are vehicles for stars. Some of the great directors — Don Siegel and John Ford — they don’t try to take credit for themselves. When a movie is all one director’s eye, it’s devoid of life.”
It was also Morrissey who purportedly tipped off Warhol to the Velvet Underground, when the artist was looking to expand the Factory’s purview into rock & roll. Morrissey and Warhol co-directed 1966’s The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound — which captured the band’s first practice with Nico at the Factory — and Morrissey also helped Warhol come up with his multimedia “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” events (at which the Velvets frequently performed).
Morrissey broke with Warhol in 1974. He went on to make numerous independent films and even one studio project, 1978’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, a comic take on the Sherlock Holmes story that proved to be a commercial and critical flop. His 1982 film about a New York street hustler, Forty Deuce, featured Kevin Bacon in his first major film role. Morrissey’s output slowed in the Nineties, and he released his last project, News Form Nowhere, in 2010.
As he got older, Morrissey grew increasingly dismissive of Warhol and the artist’s contributions to his oeuvre. “He was incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic, Asperger’s — he never did a thing in his entire life,” he told the film journal Bright Lights, in 2020. “He sort of walked through it as a zombie and that paid off in the long run.”
And while Morrissey’s films never shied from controversial, or even flagrant, topics or images, he was staunchly conservative and devoutly religious. In the same interview with Bright Lights, he dismissed any contradiction between his art and politics, saying he found the debauchery of the Sixties and Seventies “idiotic and funny.”
He continued: “It was silly. The people doing it were ridiculous, and in my movies they’re likable and foolish and entertaining. Crime against humanity, because they don’t have a political statement sticker, I guess, but that’s the way reviewers want to write [about it].”
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