Andy Warhol on Paul Morrissey

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Andy Warhol (via Pat Hackett in Popism):

“Paul had been around the underground movie scene for years. He lived downtown in an old storefront on East 4th Street and he and Donald Lyons had gone to Fordham University in the Bronx together... Donald had gone on to graduate school in classics at Harvard and Paul stayed in New York, working first at an insurance company and then for the Department of Social Services.” (POP117)

Paul Morrissey had already made some of his own films - some of which are described in Popism. They included Dreams and Daydreams, an 8 mm film of Donald portraying a priest giving Communion to an alter boy and then shoving him off a cliff. Another of Paul's films portrayed "a fifties hustler-type kid with slicked-back hair and close-set eyes reading a comic book slowly, slowly, so he looked semiliterate.” Another one was “a black and white one shot on machine gun surplus film, the kind they use when planes take movies of enemy territory. It showed a couple of his social work cases, a black boy and girl shooting heroin and getting their rushes, and with that one Paul put on a reel-to-reel tape of Dione Warwick singing Walk On By and You’ll Never Get to Heaven If You Break My Heart." (POP117)

According to Warhol, Paul Morrissey, like Ondine, was a “nonstop talker... But with Paul it was a much more subtle thing because he wasn’t exactly performing, he was just naturally very outspoken and witty.” (POP118)

Unlike Ondine, Paul “didn’t take drugs - in fact, he was against every single drug, right ddown to aspirin. He had a unique theory that the reason kids were taking so many drugs all of a sudden was because they were bored with having good health, that since medical science by now had eradicated most childhood diseases, they wanted to compensate for having missed out on being sick. ‘Why do they call it experimenting with drugs?’ he’d demand. ‘It’s just experimenting with ill health.’” (ibid)

Paul Morrissey was not paid a salary by Andy, but took 50% of any film profits. (BC35)

back to GERARD MALANGA brought PAUL MORRISSEY to see VINYL