WET Magazine

September/October 1980

TRASH, HEAT, FLESH, LONESOME COWBOY, WOMEN IN REVOLT, FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA AND COMING SOON, TRASH PT. II…

The address was Crescent Heights Blvd,  a tiara toss from Schwab's drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, in an 1920s hi-rise landmark building.

A deferential gentleman of indeterminate age with sandy blond curls, a button-down pale blue shirt, khaki trousers and collegiate loafers opened the door. I asked for Paul Morrissey. “Yes,” he responded. Could this be the director who had dignified New York City’s demimonde on film, the filmmaker who had documented without judgment the city’s refuse: transvestites, hookers, addicts, bums and losers in Chelsea Girls, Heat, Trash, Flesh, Lonesome Cowboys, L’Amour, Dracula, Frankenstein?

The home spun living room that I stepped into might have been that of one's grandmother's. I wondered momentarily whether I was in the right apartment with the right man.

Morrissey's films, chastised by one critic for their "unprecedented exploitation of the male sex object," are now seen and debated in the country's most august museums and universities. Some say he paved the way for films like Midnight Cowboy and the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog.

After a fruitless search for an ashtray, he apologetically offers me a tea saucer as a surrogate. Morrissey doesn't smoke. "Never did," he says politely. It occurs to me that perhaps Morrissey is a Mormon.

In fact, Morrissey is Irish Catholic and from the Bronx, one of three brothers. He is now 40. When the ROTC snatched him out of Fordham University, he served in an Army that was killing time between Korea and Vietnam. After a series of odd jobs around Manhattan (selling insurance was one), he was introduced to Pop artist Andy Warhol by poet and scenemaker Gerard Malanga. "I think Gerard's job," recalls Morrissey, "was to introduce people to Andy."  Warhol acted as uber-producer to Morrissey's films.

It's been three years since Morrissey tried his hand at Hollywood filmmaking. One result has been The Hound of the Baskervilles with wise guys Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, which has been released abroad, with a Fall release for the U.S. It’s a funny film, but Morrissey is not entirely pleased with it. “It’s simple-minded idiot humor; let’s call it an experience of sorts."  

Presently, he is concerned with finishing two projects: Madame Wong's, which he declines to elaborate upon, and Trash, Part II, which needs no elaboration.

ALB: Would you say your friendship with Andy Warhol the most criticall one?

PAUL MORRISSEY: I think as far as a career thing it was.

How long did you work together? Ten years?

No, no. Andy stopped making films in 1968, so really '66, '67 and '68.

How did you get involved with him?

I just simply understood Andy's impulse in movies and really wanted to help him achieve what he wanted to do.

Some people call you the man who made Andy Warhol.

Andy was pretty unusual to begin with. He's been the same ever since I met him.

You don't think he's changed much?

No. I just made the movies, that's all.

Was the concept of "camp" important to you?

No. Andy once made a movie that he called CAMP, but it was the only legitimate use of the word. The word actually comes from English theater when an actor goes on stage and he winks at the audience and tells them: "I'm just performing. I'm not trying to really act, I'm just doing a star turn." So Andy made a sort of vaudeville movie where he got people who said they could sing or dance, and one after another they sang and danced, and that was called CAMP. I don't know if it was ever shown, but I know it existed.

Would you want to work with Warhol again?

It's a question of what you mean by "working with." There was a time when Andy would buy film and have the camera, and he'd tell you to go make a film. Now he doesn't do that anymore, he just does people's portraits.

Don't you think he's become a parody of himself?

Yeah, he doesn't seem to really want to bother anybody anymore, I don't know. He's very busy and he's traveling all the time. As far as I know, he's busy every minute meeting people and painting their pictures.

And he's become quite lazy artistically?

He maybe has a right to be because he certainly was more energetic than anybody else. He put himself out on limbs and took chances and did things to make a fool of himself that other people wouldn't have done. And so maybe he has the right to be. I don't think there are many people in America in any capacity that remain interested in anything. I mean I really can't think of many.

Who do you think are the interesting filmmakers?

I don't like to say.

Any that you find particularly interesting to watch?

Oh, yeah, but you can't pick favorites, I don't know of anybody. I can only think about films I like. I find I like all Italian films. I think all the great directors are Italian...in the last 15 or 20 years. DeSica, Sergio Leone. I wouldn't say Bertolucci. Yeah, Pasolini was great and Visconti.

What about Bertolucci?

I think Bertolucci is the least interesting director in the history of Italian cinema. Because I think none of these directors ever really make bad movies, and I think he's made bad movies. I think Last Tango in Paris is one of the worst movies in this bad, bad, bad sense. Last Tango especially is unforgivable garbage. Bertolucci is like a French intellectual disguised as an Italian.

And then you find ludicrous crap like 1900, communist propaganda made by somebody outside of the Iron Curtain. You don't know how to deal with that. Intellectually, how do you deal with that? Why doesn't he move to Russia? I mean the hypocrisy, the lame-brained simple-mindedness of it. And all the capitalist money spent on the costumes, and the year in the making, and that lighting, and the capitalist extravaganza lavished on communist catechism crap! He gives Italian directors a bad name.

Are you apolitical?

I'm very political, but I don't think it belongs in film because all politics change with the wind, and it's silly to put politics in movies.

Why are you here in Los Angeles now?

Oh, probably making a big mistake. I just like it out here.

And you want to make films here?

Yeah.

Are you trying to play ball with the studios?

Sort of. It's difficult.

What was your biggest American commercial success? Frankenstein. Frankenstein was really a big success. Somebody told me worldwide gross, box office....it maybe did $30 million. It did about $15 million in America. All stolen by Carlo Ponti, the producer, a criminal.

Carlo Ponti produced it?

Yeah, and kept all the money. It's been in litigation for years. Depressing, I'll tell you.

Your work seems obsessed with the macabre, the demimonde?

I think it's an obsession with strong characters. When you're working with a very small amount of money you're limited to certain types of characters and you tend toward certain subject matter.

That's close at hand?

Yeah. . .basically subject matter that's not dealt with by the multi-million dollar films. But if I was working in multi-million dollar epics I'd still be looking for characters. I think it's so sad when you see these big epics, with all the money, and there's not a human being there that you care one second about, that you like, that you get a laugh out of, that you're interested in, that's mysterious, that's curious. It's almost like you have to see a cheap movie to see a good character. Like the movie with George Burns and Brooke Shields, Just You And Me Kid — everybody was a good character. A TV writer directed it. I'm sure he was held in contempt by everybody because he was an older man who'd been in television for 35 years, so obviously he couldn't be a great auteur. It was really enjoyable and very inexpensive. Needless to say, nobody paid any attention to it. They didn't see the screaming and hollering and the method manners garbage, which I really hate.

You tend in your films to use non-actors.

I think I use the best actors in the world, but they're not considered...they're not from acting schools.

Many of them didn't even consider themselves actors before they were in your films.

That might be, but if a person gives a good performance in front of a camera, he's an actor.

You were the first filmmaker to deal with homosexuality and transvestes on the screen.

People have the idea there's a lot of sex in my movies. That's an image people have. It's presumed there's lots of it but I don't think there is that much. Anyway, it's not there just for the sake of being there. It's always, always, always there to be funny. So all this material, which to some people was a political cause, to me was there for humor. There has never been one scene in any movie I made where someone kisses another person and says, "I really love you." To me that's heavyhanded, soap opera garbage. I think if somebody kisses someone else and says, "Oh, I forgot to clean my ears today" or something, you immediately bring it into a human framework and not a kind of cliché.

One could say that the transvestites and outcasts are Paul Morrissey's world. Does this cut you off from mainstream America?

One of the classic things movies have dealt with has always been a sexual "something." If you remember the career of Greta Garbo, she only played seductresses. Here first big film was The Temptress, and she always…Anna Karenina was a whore, Anna Christie was a whore, Camille was a whore. No matter who she played, she was a whore. In every film Marlene Dietrich made, she was a whore. Clark Gable was a man everybody fell in love with. There's a category of films that deals with people that are sexually alluring. If you're going to tell that story in a modern context, you have to tell it against a certain background to make it different from Anna Christie.

You accepted homosexuality as a given. You made it discussable.

I think the critics hated me so much because I didn't make it discussable. I made it silly. And they want to discuss everything. They don't want to be entertained. Those people are not the only people in the movies I make.

You strike me as Midwestern.

I am provincial, but I'm a New Yorker. I was born in the Bronx and went to school in the Bronx for sixteen years. Both parents and my grandparents have all been in the Bronx going way back.

Are they still there?

No. Everybody has gone to Jersey

Are you close to your family?

Yeah, I still see everybody a lot, sure. I think it's funny that a person like myself, who's basically kind of square, should be the only one who really left a record of a kind of strange world during a certain period of time that nobody else dealt with.

You're the documentarian of the demimonde, no?

I did it by being theatrical and not documentary. The idea of actually documenting something that's real on film has always appalled me. That's why I've gone for theatrical situations and humor and all that. Basically, it's a simple concept in any kind of artistic endeavor: To get to one point you have to go through other points; you can't go directly to the end point. You can't hit the nail on the head.

How would you describe your films? What genre or category?

That's a good question. I think it's a little bit of a "sui generis," a Latin legal term meaning "of its own kind." I think they are "of their own kind." I don't think they're too much like anything else.