THEY’RE known simply as the
Flesh Trilogy. Three epochal art films directed by the experimental film-maker Paul Morrissey, starring the androgynous Pop Art icon Joe Dellasandro, and celebrating Andy Warhol’s hedonistic coterie of cross dressers, narcissists and . . . “Let me stop you right there!” interrupts the alert Morrissey, a 67-year-old native New Yorker, in fighting form today. “Andy never met one of those people before I cast them. They were not his coterie, and they were not hanging out at his gallery. These were selections of mine! I’ve had this all my life! The horror of it! His celebrityhood, which is an invention of the media, dominating my films!”
Morrissey is here to set the record straight — and not just about the films either. The director, who worked as Warhol’s personal manager from 1965 to 1974, who founded and edited Warhol’s Interview Magazine, who organised Warhol’s weekly celebrity appearances, and who managed the rise of Warhol’s Velvet Underground rock’n’roll project, is still seething at his ongoing exclusion from the established Warholian mythos. “The BBC keep calling me, so does French TV — everyone’s doing documentaries about Andy. And I give interviews, and say what I’m saying now, but they cut it all out! They don’t want to hear it!”
What “they” don’t want to hear is that Morrissey was more than just a key player in Warhol’s “Factory” (as mentioned in the definitive memoir Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close-up, by Bob Colacello, Warhol acolyte and later Interview editor). They certainly don’t want to hear, as suggested by Morrissey himself, that he WAS the Factory! “I really have to explain who Andy was,” says Morrissey. “He was a disabled man who was autistic, and dyslexic to a degree that he couldn’t read one word ’s syndrome. He was frightened and timid, had no artistic instincts, and no interest in anything other than making money. Someone once asked me: ‘What did it mean to be Andy’s manager?’ I said: ‘I had to think of things that he might do, I had to do them, and then I had to pretend that he was involved!’ ” Or, in the words of Morrissey’s biographer, Maurice Yacowar: “Morrissey was largely responsible for the three things for which Warhol became most known to the general public: the rock group, the magazine — and especially the films.”
And it’s with these films, especially, that Morrissey’s greatest grievance lies. For although he proved himself to be a natural manager, Morrissey was a film-maker by trade. Introduced to Warhol at a makeshift nickelodeon on the Lower East Side, the fledgeling director was flattered by Warhol’s interest in his abstract short films (Like Sleep features two drug addicts falling asleep). Morrissey immediately joined forces with Warhol and soon began writing, producing, directing, shooting, editing and distributing his own material under the “Andy Warhol Presents” banner. Films such as the western parody Lonesome Cowboys or the scattershot anti-feminist satire Women in Revolt were monumentally singular works. “It’s ironic,” says Morrissey, “that in the history of motion pictures I’ve never heard of a film being made entirely by one person. Yet my films were made exactly like that, and still everybody said that they were Andy’s!”
The Flesh Trilogy in particular (Flesh, 1968; Trash, 1970; and Heat, 1972), are irrevocably Morrissey’s movies. Shot mostly in static frames, on strict location in New York and L A, and with little regard for narrative pacing, they feature instead a kitsch roll-call of photogenic hustlers, transvestites and screen-chewing extras all revolving noisily around the quietly charismatic Dellasandro — who progresses through the trilogy via the perils of, respectively, sex, drugs and stardom. And though the films remain prescient examples of cutting-edge cinema (and certainly they prefigure the formal experimentation of the Danish Dogme movies or the sexual provocations of films such as 9 Songs) it is in the movies’ thematic concerns that Morrissey fully emerges. Here, out of the tension generated between his affectionate celebration of camp figures such as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn and an instinctive disgust at the entire milieu, comes the full force of Morrissey.
“Everyone wanted to glorify the Sixties,” he says, sneering, “and talk about Ho Chi Min and being against the war, and having sex, and isn’t it great? They wanted to make it look like a movement of well-meaning people, when in fact it was just a movement of irresponsible selfish children!”
Rolling Stone described Heat as “terrific”, while the renowned Hollywood director George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story) announced that he was “lost in admiration” for the films. Nonetheless, Morrissey made just two more movies for Warhol (the horror spoofs Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula) before leaving to direct intermittently successful urban indies such as Spike of Bensonhurst and to bemoan forever the fact that “people would keep introducing me as, ‘He made Andy Warhol’s movies!’ I mean, how can you make somebody else’s movies?”
Yet thanks to the ongoing interrogation of the Warhol legend (from writers such as Colacello and Yacowar), and as the newly released DVD box-set of the Flesh Trilogy will attest, Morrissey’s rightful place at the top of the Factory firmament is gradually being reclaimed. And still, one nagging, niggling question remains — if Morrissey was so central to the Factory promotional machine, why did he actively participate in a process (making movies) that would help to efface his own role in that same machine?
“I loved doing it,” says Morrissey, softly. “I always knew that what I did was peculiar, that I was in a category of my own. And even though I didn’t get any credit for it, I was always thankful for it, and for being able to do it. Because I loved doing it.” He pauses, regroups, and then adds furiously, fighting fit once more, “And I put up with this INDIGNITY, to put it mildly, because of that!”
The Paul Morrissey Box Set is out now
