Paul Morrissey, cult filmmaker and Andy Warhol collaborator, dies at 86

Paul Morrissey, an early collaborator of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground and the director of cult films such as Flesh, Trash and Women in Revolt, has died at 86.

His archivist, Michael Chaiken told the New York Times that Morrissey died in a New York hospital on Monday after a bout of pneumonia.

Morrissey was an intriguing figure, a lifelong conservative who became a key player in Warhol’s Factory studio, making low-budget films about drug addicts and hustlers, with the coterie of models, socialites, artists, drag queens and transgender actors that came to be known as Warhol’s “superstars”.

His best known works include Trash (1970), a feature about a down-and-out heroin addict and his girlfriend, starring Warhol superstars Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn; Flesh (1968), starring Dallesandro as a hustler working on the streets of New York; and Women in Revolt (1971), a satirical take on the women’s liberation movement, starring Warhol fixtures Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis.

Morrissey also collaborated with Warhol on cult underground films such as Chelsea Girls (1966), which he co-directed, and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), which he wrote. From 1966 to 1967 he managed the Velvet Underground and Nico, and collaborated with Warhol on the film The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound. During this time Morrisey also co-conceived and named Warhol’s multimedia series of “happenings”, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured performances by the band.

Warhol and Morrissey parted ways in 1974. Morrissey later spoke disparagingly of his former collaborator, saying he resented him for taking too much credit for their work together. He told Bright Lights Film Journal in 2012 that Warhol “never did a thing in his entire life. He sort of walked through it as a zombie and that paid off in the long run.”

Born in 1938 in Manhattan, Morrissey was raised Catholic in New York City, and attended Catholic schools and university, before joining the US Army. In 1960 he opened an underground cinema in the East Village, where he showed his own shorts and the early work of Brian De Palma.

In 1965 he was introduced to Warhol, who contracted him to run the publicity and film-making at the Factory. He is generally credited with bringing narrative structure and cinéma vérité direction to the collective’s film-making efforts, though he said the actors were the true stars. “Andy and I really try not to direct a film at all,” he told the New York Times in 1972. “We both feel the stars should be the center of the film.”

After parting ways with Warhol, Morrissey continued making films, including the 1978 Sherlock Holmes spoof The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook; and Forty Deuce, starring Kevin Bacon as a young sex worker, which showed at Cannes film festival in 1982. His final film was 2010’s News From Nowhere.

Morrissey is survived by his brother Kenneth, and his eight nieces and nephews.