In 1971, Warhol and Morrissey purchased Eothen in Montauk, New York, a 12-hectare oceanfront estate on the Long Island shore for $225,000.[7] Morrissey would sell the estate in 2006 to J. Crew CEO Millard Drexler.[8]
In 1998, Morrissey was given the Jack Smith Lifetime Achievement Award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.[9]
Early life and career
Born in Manhattan, New York, on February 23, 1938, to Irish Catholic parents Joseph and Eleanor Morrissey, Paul Joseph Morrissey grew up in Yonkers, New York.[10][11] The fourth of five children, Morrissey attended Fordham Prep and Fordham University, both Catholic schools. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Army,[10] going through basic training at Fort Benning and Fort Dix, achieving the rank of First Lieutenant. While in the reserves following active duty, he moved to the East Village in late 1960 and opened the Exit Gallery, a small cinematheque at 36 E. 4th St., where he programmed a mix of underground films and documentaries, including Icarus (1960), Brian De Palma's first film.[12] Simultaneously, Morrissey began making his own short, silent 16mm comedies, including Mary Martin Does It (1962), Taylor Mead Dances (1963), and Like Sleep (1964).[13][12]
Village Voice ad for the Film-makers' Cinematheque. June 17, 1965
Warhol and Morrissey filming Viva and Taylor Mead in Lonesome Cowboys. Oracle, Arizona. January 1968
While filming a scene in John Wilcock's Manhattan apartment for Warhol's 25-hour movie Four Stars, Morrissey first met Joe Dallesandro, who had friends who lived in the same building.[16] Morrissey immediately cast him in a scene in Loves of Ondine (1967), Dallesandro's first appearance in a Factory film.[17]
The commercial and popular success of Flesh continued into the 1970s with two more films Morrissey directed, produced by Warhol and starring Dallesandro: Trash, featuring Jane Forth and Holly Woodlawn, the first transgender actress ever cast as the girlfriend of a lead character,[20] and Heat, a satire about Hollywood based on Sunset Boulevard starring Dallesandro and Sylvia Miles.
Reflecting on this period in an interview with Lucy Hughes-Hallett in March 1978, Morrissey said: "To me, 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."[23]
Post-Factory years
In March 1973, Morrissey went to Rome and directed two back-to-back features, Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), starring Dallesandro and Udo Kier. Produced by Carlo Ponti and presented by Warhol, their international success propelled Morrissey out of the Factory and into his first and only attempt at directing a studio film, The Hound of the Baskervilles, co-written by Morrissey, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore. It was a commercial and critical flop.[24] Morrissey moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s and returned to independently produced features, starting with Madame Wang's (1981), a satire of the LA punk-rock scene, starring Patrick Schoene and Morrissey's niece Christina Indri.[25][26]
Returning to New York City in the early 1980s, Morrissey began a collaboration with playwright and screenwriter Alan Bowne, directing a film version of his 1981 play Forty Deuce (1982) starring Orson Bean and Kevin Bacon.[27] Morrissey worked again with Bowne on the screenplays for Mixed Blood (1985) and Spike of Bensonhurst (1988), completing a trilogy of films taking a satirical, empathetic look at the political, social and moral decay of New York City and its outer boroughs during the Ed Koch years.[28]
In later years, Morrissey was publicly critical of Warhol, saying that work attributed to Warhol was created by associates without his involvement, and expressing frustration when his films were associated with Warhol's name.[10][29]
Spike of Bensonhurst (1988)
Morrissey's last feature, News From Nowhere (2010), made its U.S. debut at Film at Lincoln Center in 2011.[30]
Speaking to screenwriter and biographer Gavin Lambert, filmmaker George Cukor said of Morrissey's work:
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 original humor.[31]
Personal life and death
Bright Lights Film Journal once called Morrissey a "contradiction": a Warhol collaborator who was a "straight right-wing Catholic Republican".[32] When film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum asked Morrissey in a 1975 interview why he portrayed drug addicts and street hustlers with such sympathy despite his conservatism, Morrissey 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".[33][34]
Morrissey died from pneumonia at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, on October 28, 2024, at the age of 86.[29][35]
For an analysis of each of Morrissey's feature films, see Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
For an in-depth interview with Morrissey on his early years as an independent filmmaker, see "Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side" Clayton Patterson, ed. (New York: Seven Stories, 2005)
An in-depth interview with Morrissey about his years working with Warhol appears in "The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol" by John Wilcock. Edited by Christopher Trela; photographs by Harry Shunk.(New York, Trela Media, 2010.)
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