AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A fiercely independent filmmaker best known for working with Andy Warhol died this week. Paul Morrissey was 86 years old. NPR's Neda Ulaby has this remembrance.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Andy Warhol was not a super famous artist when he met a skinny, intense film nerd in 1965. Paul Morrissey lived in an underground movie theater he ran in the East Village. He became Warhol's business manager and briefly managed the band the Velvet Underground even though he hated rock 'n' roll. One of his first films with Warhol just showed the group rehearsing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ULABY: Before meeting Morrissey, Warhol made movies, but they were static, like a famous film that's just a single eight-hour long shot of the Empire State Building. Morrissey added cuts, characters, life...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHELSEA GIRLS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Hey, you.
ULABY: ...Like the movie "Chelsea Girls," their first art house hit from 1966. It's an improvised three-hour long peek into the bohemian squalor of New York's Hotel Chelsea.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHELSEA GIRLS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Come in here.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) What do you want?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Your heart.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) My heart. I haven't got a heart.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Yes you do
ULABY: The movie is not always easy to watch. Some of the actors are tripping and naked. There's S and M, violence and a vaporous line between what's real and what's faked. Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey made more than a dozen avant-garde movies over a decade. Warhol paid, Morrissey directed. They were extremely low budget and provocative...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FLESH")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Go ahead. Take your clothes off, man. Hurry up.
ULABY: ...Like the one from 1968 called "Flesh," about a hunky bisexual male hustler. In another scene, his girlfriend asks him, while in bed, for $200.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FLESH")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) For what?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) For my girlfriend's abortion.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Two hundred dollars.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Why do I have to give you $200 for your girlfriend's abortion?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) Because you have the money, and I don't.
ULABY: The director was raised Roman Catholic, like Warhol, but Morrissey identified throughout his life as a deeply conservative Christian. A contrarian, he avoided drugs and sex even in the decadent swirl of Warhol's milieu. His movie sex scenes were controversial, but not sexy. His actors are often wasted or uncomfortable, the opposite of the Hollywood sex scenes Morrissey despised.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PAUL MORRISSEY: Well, it's just the stupidest thing in the world. People huff and puff and heavy breathe and go into clinches and roll around on mattresses with their clothes off. It's ridiculous.
ULABY: Morrissey liked to insist he was pro censorship, even though his movies were often banned. And he often cast transgender women in female roles because he genuinely liked their performances. He told Terry Gross in a 1988 interview on WHYY's Fresh Air that he hated professional actors, who he found pretentious.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
MORRISSEY: And they're artificial. They're mannered. They're phony. And they're boring.
TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: How did you cast people for your early movies?
MORRISSEY: If they were not boring.
ULABY: Paul Morrissey's films, directed under Andy Warhol's imprimatur, are curios from the era. They include two poorly reviewed horror movies made in Italy.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein" is here.
ULABY: After they split in the mid-1970s, Paul Morrissey told anyone who asked, including NPR in the year 2000, that Warhol took too much credit for their cinematic collaborations.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
MORRISSEY: The misconception basically is that Andy was some sort of artist with a creative driving energy or something. He was opposite of that. He was extremely limited.
ULABY: On his own, Morrissey directed a few movies that made little impact and are hard to find, including one from 1982 starring a then-unknown Kevin Bacon as a grimy Times Square hustler complaining about bodega owners.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FORTY DEUCE")
KEVIN BACON: (As Ricky) They shoot up the prices. They take over the Square. They screw the numbers people, the peddlers, the loose joints, the hookers. They charge us up the p-hole.
ULABY: Morrissey said his movies worked because they were funny. When asked if he felt they would hold up, Paul Morrissey said, yes. He said they left a record of a specific time and place.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
MORRISSEY: The way people thought, and the way they didn't give a damn, and the way they thought they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it, and all the time they're doing that, they're making their lives more miserable as they go along. I don't think that's a story that dates so much, so I rather enjoy them.
ULABY: Neda Ulaby, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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