Paul Morrissey, Warhol Collaborator Behind Cult Classics, Dies at 86

Paul Morrissey, the director of several Andy Warhol film collaborations that earned the scorn of critics and the admiration of audiences around the world, died in New York on Monday after being hospitalized with pneumonia. He was 86, according to the New York Times, which first reported the news.

Morrissey is most famous for the vulgar, rough-hewn features he produced during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Many flirted with the conventions of Hollywood films, appropriating the trappings of Westerns and horror movies only to upend those genres with explicitly queer themes that big-shot producers shut out of the mainstream.

Warhol and Morrissey worked closely during that period, crafting cult classics as Flesh (1968), Lonesome Cowboys (1968), and Flesh for Frankenstein (1973). Morrissey would later claim that Warhol played virtually no role in his productions, with Morrissey claiming that it was he who helped make Warhol famous. Having cut ties with Warhol not long after Frankenstein, Morrissey set off on his own and made several features solo.

But it is those features made with Warhol that have come to define Morrissey’s legacy. Lonesome Cowboys—a gender-flipped play on Romeo and Juliet in which the male protagonist, named Julian-Juliet, was a gay man wooed by a madam—exuded a transgressive quality that could be found both on set and in the final product. Shot on a Wild West simulacrum used for Westerns aired on television, the film included a range of non-professionals in Warhol’s entourage, including the model Viva, who was sexually assaulted during the shoot. The commotion raised during the shoot aroused the suspicion of local law enforcement and the FBI, who opened a file on Warhol afterward.

Morrissey’s approach seemed to design to offend. One magazine writer described the film as “a mélange of homosexual sex, conversation, rape, conversation, transvestitism, conversation, homosexual incest, conversation, masturbation, conversation, heterosexual seduction, talk, talk, talk, and an orgy.”

The film has been credited with pushing Warhol’s oeuvre in a new direction. Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik has called the film “more explicitly queeny and camp than anything else Warhol had released” before it.

Paul Morrissey was born in 1938 in Manhattan and was raised Catholic in Yonkers. He attended Fordham University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English, and quickly turned his attention to filmmaking thereafter, falling in with the underground scene during the 1960s. He appeared in Brian De Palma’s 1960 short Icarus, about the Greek god Pan arriving in modern-day New York.

Through Gerard Malanga, Morrissey met Warhol in 1965, and the two began producing movies together. Warhol’s approach to filmmaking was notably lax, often creating situations for his performers, letting the camera run, and presenting the unedited final results to the public. Morrissey claimed he helped give Warhol’s work some structure.

“My films derive from Andy’s, but his were being made without direction, without preparation, with total improvisation,” he once told the New York Times. “I use a lot of this technique but add direction, story and a little more selection.”

Ironically, the two ended up working within the system for some of their final efforts together. Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974) were produced by Carlo Ponti, whose past efforts included Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and the Best Picture–nominated Doctor Zhivago (1965). Frankenstein and Dracula gave Morrissey and Warhol actual budgets to play with. Neither was much loved by critics; both were surprise successes at the box office.

Dracula was the final film Morrissey produced with Warhol. But Morrissey hardly quit filmmaking after that. His 1982 film Forty-Deuce, for example, starred Kevin Bacon as a male hustler trying to profit from the death of a 12-year-old boy.

Morrissey always bristled at the notion that Warhol had helped seal his own career.

In 2012, Morrissey told the Miami New Times, “I’m supposed to live with the idea that he contributed to my movies because I let him present them because I was his manager, and I had to think of things to do to get his name out there, and he couldn’t do anything, so he presented my movies and what does the scum media, filth, commie, pieces of shit do? Type up this crap. I made his movies.”