Paul Morrissey, Icon of NY Underground Cinema Behind ‘Trash,’ ‘Flesh’ and More Andy Warhol Films, Dies at 86
variety.comJ. Kim Murphy Paul Morrissey, a fixture of New York’s cinema scene whose collaborations with Andy Warhol in the ’60s and ’70s reinvented the American underground and made local legends of amateur actors and transgender performers, died Monday at a hospital in Manhattan.
He was 86. Morrissey’s death was confirmed by archivist Michael Chaiken to the New York Times, which reported that the cause was pneumonia.
Warhol and Morrissey were first introduced in 1965, when the former had begun to tinker with experimental films in his infamous loft hub, dubbed The Factory.
Working on budgets of under $10,000, the pair completed a series of features, reaching the most commercial success with a trilogy starring Warhol fixture and gay sex symbol Joe Dallesandro that consisted of “Flesh,” “Trash” and “Heat.” Warhol served as producer, while Morrissey’s cinéma vérité direction and largely ad-libbed scripts provided his leads, such as Dallesandro, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Viva, a melodramatic apparatus to flex big personalities and affirm their star power.
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