In memoriam: Paul Morrissey (Telegraph 05/11/24)

Paul Morrissey, who has died aged 86, was an eccentric, sometimes testy writer-director whose input gave Andy Warhol’s initially static experiments in film a new, dynamic, sensational shape; the process began with a trio of censor-baiting provocations – Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) – and culminated in the 3D-enhanced Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), which replaced the earlier films’ skin with offal, gleefully tossed in the audience’s lap.

The pair met in 1965 at a screening of Morrissey’s early shorts at the Astor Peace Playhouse, where Warhol was impressed enough to offer the younger man the position of cinematographer on the artist’s Screen Tests. Within a year, they were collaborating on a classic of the New York underground: Chelsea Girls (1966), a 210-minute portrait of the varyingly dishevelled dreamers who inhabited the city’s notorious Hotel Chelsea flophouse, directed by Warhol, shot by Morrissey.

Whether courted or not, scandal soon followed. Chelsea Girls, which sparked obscenity charges in the US, was banned by the British Board of Film Censors; with its drug use and full-frontal nudity, Trash caused a similar consternation, and only received its X certificate after the Board screened it to a room of middle-aged housewives who deemed it fit for exhibition. The critic Pauline Kael observed that “Morrissey’s films seem to be made by a dirty-minded altar boy.”

Nevertheless, Morrissey brought entrepreneurial smarts to the chaotic environment of Warhol’s Factory. He discovered Flesh’s thrusting young star Joe Dallesandro and added the singer Nico to The Velvet Underground’s line-up; he was pioneering in casting the transgender performer Holly Woodlawn in Trash; and he was crucial to the Warhol-backed, long-running magazine Interview, launched in 1970.

Yet the pair parted ways in 1975, after Warhol returned his attention to painting and other business interests, provoking Morrissey’s ire whenever his former collaborator came up in conversation; he felt his own contributions had been overshadowed. In 2012, he turned on an interviewer who’d lumped him in with an emergent indie movement: “I was not part of a movement, I. Made. My. Own. Films. They. Were. Not. Part. Of. Any. Movement. You’re incapable of understanding that, aren’t you?”

Paul Joseph Morrissey was born in Manhattan on February 23, 1938 to Irish-Catholic lawyer Joseph Morrissey and his wife Eleanor. He attended Fordham Preparatory School in The Bronx and studied literature at Fordham University; after graduation, he completed military service and worked in insurance and social care. In 1960, he opened the Exit Gallery on East 4th Street in New York, where he began programming underground films; the following year, he himself began directing.

In the wake of the Warhol years, Morrissey came to the UK to make The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), a sniggering Conan Doyle spoof co-written with stars Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, although reviews were little short of disastrous: Time Out dubbed it “truly one of the crummiest movies ever made”, and even Morrissey confessed “It’s the only film I’m connected with that I don’t think was very good”.

Thereafter he retreated to the American margins. Madame Wang’s (1981) satirised the L.A. punk rock scene; Forty Deuce (1982), from Alan Bowne’s play about Times Square hustlers, starred a pre-Footloose Kevin Bacon; Mixed Blood (a.k.a. Cocaine, 1984) was a ripe, Reagan-era drug war thriller. He went to Vienna for Beethoven’s Nephew (1985), a period piece that took up arms against the composer, decried by Morrissey as “a very pathetic person who happened to write very good music”.

The aptly scrappy Spike of Bensonhurst (1988), centred on a teenage boxer, found passing favour with Roger Ebert, who labelled it “not the best comedy ever made”, but noted “it has energy and local colour and a charismatic lead performance”. Funding dried up thereafter, although both Veruschka (2005), a documentary profile of the aristocratic model Veruschka von Lehndorff, and his final directorial credit, the migrant drama News from Nowhere (2010), screened at the Venice festival.

A conservative Republican Catholic, Morrissey became known as a firebrand and contrarian, insisting “I think censorship is very good”, and that the Velvet Underground “were stupid and didn’t know what they were doing”. His most splenetic outbursts, though, were reserved for Warhol, whom Morrissey dismissed as “incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic, Asperger’s — he 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.”

Yet Morrissey’s early work endured as an alternative to an increasingly colourless and corporatised culture. In 1984, indie band Felt repurposed imagery from the Chelsea Girls poster for the sleeve of their second album The Splendour of Fear, while The Smiths used a still of a shirtless Dallesandro from Flesh on their self-titled debut LP. The horror films were revived amid the 1980s 3D revival and after the success of the similarly stereoscopic Avatar (2009), and Morrissey-shot footage added texture to Todd Haynes’ streaming-era doc The Velvet Underground (2021).

While dismissive of modern moviemaking trends, Morrissey occasionally betrayed a fondness for these early countercultural endeavours. Speaking in 1975, after the split but before the bitterness set in, he even afforded his former collaborator rare credit: “What Andy hit upon was that characters were vanishing from films, characterisation was disappearing and was being upstaged by a lot of cinematic claptrap. Andy completely eliminated the claptrap. He just turned on the camera and left the room.”

He is survived by a brother, Kenneth.

Paul Morrissey, born February 23, 1938, died October 28, 2024.