#Andy Warhol’s Trash

[gotankgo]

Andy Warhol’s Trash (1970)

[twixnmix]

Paul Morrissey, Jane Forth, Andy Warhol and Joe Dallesandro at the premiere of the film "Trash" in Munich, February 1971.

[cultreslut]

trash (1970) dir. paul morrissey on archive.org

"The movie follows Joe, a heroin addict, throughout his quest to score more drugs. The episodic plot occurs over a single day and centers on Joe’s problematic relationship with his on-off, sexually frustrated girlfriend. During the course of the day, Joe overdoses in front of an upper-class couple, attempts to fool Welfare into approving his methadone treatment by having Holly fake a pregnancy, and frustrates the women in his life with his drug-induced impotence." synopsis via tmdb

[eucanthos]

Andy Warhol  (US, 1928 - 1987)

Trash cans, 1986. 4 gelatin silver print photographs, on paper and thread support: 69 x 54 cm

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition

https://artblart.com/tag/andy-warhol-venus-in-shell/

[sntg]

my favorite mugs from andy warhol and paul morrissey’s hustler trilogy

[rabidhiss]

First of all, Paul Morrissey is a fucking brutally honest hero that should live forever. Second, he didn’t like Andy Warhol yet had to go through decades of Warhol’s name plastered in front of his movies as if it was Warhol who made them; when in truth, “Andy had nothing going on in his head, could barely speak, wore a stupid wig, was an autistic albino, and only occasionally dropped by during editing.” His words. But you get the idea of whom Paul Morrissey is. Fiercely independent, hands on, workaholic, all around awesome artist in a time where sex was rampant and on display and music carried with it a superior religion and statement. None of the actors in Flesh for Frankenstein were professional- on purpose. They looked good in front of the camera or they had personalities that Paul liked. In this raw sense, F4F is a masterpiece. That every last detail was written, directed, edited by Morrissey is amazing. That the film delivered buckets of blood, practical effects, nudity, sex, AND was hilarious at the same time, transcends art. Is it mocking the source material? I don’t think so. I think of it as a skilled musician taking a sample of someone else’s music and manipulating it into something entirely different. I could write about my first experience with F4F all day, and still not even make it to how great of a job they did with the 3D- (it’s now my favorite 3D movie). If you are a trash, cult, grindhouse aficionado, if you own more than four John Waters films and you appreciate the unplanned and even experimental, just buy the Vinegar Syndrome edition. You’re going to love it on every level. 5/5

[schlock-luster-video]

On March 17, 2000, Trash was re-released in the United States.

Here's some new Joe Dallesandro art!

[moratoirenoir]

[peturnagy]

Joe Dallesandro / Artist: Miki Földi (digital painting) 

[gone2soon]

Andrea Feldman 1 April 1948 - 8 August 1972

Some would describe true star quality as when the audience can’t tell when you’re acting. That’s what Penny Arcade artist and friend said of Andrea Feldman, “A lot of people in the Warhol scene pretended to be crazy, but Andrea really was.”

She was a rich girl, with a long list of inpatient stays at state hospitals. After a nervous breakdown in the interim of the release of Andy Warhol produced Heat, the third film in the Paul Morrissey directed Trash trilogy, (where she had a co-starring role, as a psychotic, masochistic, lesbian) Penny remembers Andrea’s nervous breakdown, her physician adamantly telling her parents that, that all Andrea needed to stop the hysterics was a real job. To which Andrea told Penny, “What am I supposed to do? Be a waitress?!” She believed she was destined for stardom and after starring in Heat, not just any old star, but a Superstar. Andrea would commit suicide shortly before the film’s release.

Before Heat, Andrea had had a co-starring role in Trash. Where she plays an ex-debutante Rich Girl looking to score some acid from her heroin-addicted conquest Joe Dallesandro, “Is it acid? Is it acid?! Is it acid?!?!” she asks him while he shoots up, in a high-pitched affected upper east-side / British drawl. She rattles on about how she’s never done drugs, was a virgin before her marriage to her husband and has never seen anyone shoot up. She invites Joe to rape her, in a cuckolding of her husband, but he’s impotent. An immovable and disengaged force, an unapologetic junkie. A total counter to the Rich Girl’s fast-talking neuroticism. Feldman’s character is indicative of a housewife looking for some excitement. Asking if this is all there is, why can’t I have more? 

Andy Warhol never attended the filming of Heat instead he kept in contact with the cast and crew via telephone. All the actors provided were members of Warhol’s Factory and the principal shooting took place in Los Angeles for two weeks in July 1971. This distance allowed Warhol to stir the pot. Bob Colacello, writer and editor of Interview magazine and Warhol’s right-hand man said: “...Andy barraged Sylvia [Mills], Andrea, and Pat [Ast] with late-night calls from New York, stirring things up long distance.” He made Sylvia jealous of Pat’s high fashion (she wore expensive muumuus designed by Halston), Pat jealous of Sylvia’s star-billing, “and... it didn’t take much to drive poor Andrea crazy.”

Andrea was a native New Yorker who attended Quintano’s a well-known, private performing arts high school in mid-town New York, that groomed its students for a career in the spotlight. Some well-known alumni included Mary Weiss from the heartbreak girl group the Shangri-Las and queen of the stage and screen Bernadette Peters. But the education provided there was subject to criticism, a letter from New York’s Division for School Regulation and Supervision observed pointedly, “there is no science laboratory, no library, and no gymnasium.” 

From the mid-1960s onwards, Quintano’s was the school of choice for rich kids who had faced expulsion or flunked out of their previous schools for non-attendance or anti-social behaviour. One previous attendee described the mix of students as “...the students who were there because they had real careers and you had the fuck ups.” It seemed, especially during the drug-fuelled days of the 1960s, that as long as the incredibly expensive tuition fees were paid, drug use and dealing were ignored by the faculty.

Andrea pioneered a performance called “Showtime”, where she performed a striptease on a round table in the centre of Max’s Kansas City, and received her nickname “Whips”, after a dance she did with them for Warhol’s multimedia art event The Exploding Plastic Inevitable between 1966 and 1967. The event included music from The Velvet Underground & Nico who Warhol promoted as “The Pop Girl of ‘66″. Andrea craved Andy’s attention referring to herself as “Ms. Warhol”. Warhol was known for the flitting of his affections based on whose persona he found interesting at the time. Nico’s unaffected, stoic-german, coolness stood in stark contrast to Andrea who was known as “Crazy Andy” amongst her friends.

Leee Black Childers, photographer at the Factory and Andrea’s boyfriend before her untimely death remembers an incident in which after a short absence documenting Andy Warhol’s Pork at the Roundhouse in London. “...She stood up on a chair and held a picture of Marilyn Monroe over her head... After a long time of just standing there, she said, ‘Marilyn died; love me while you can!’” Her suicide note would read “I’m headed for the big time. I’m on my way up there with James Dean and Marilyn Monroe”. She jumped to her death from the fourteenth-floor window of her uncle’s apartment, a few days after the tenth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death at the age of 24. Perhaps Andrea identified with Monroe as like her she would later allege mistreatment by directors, depression, and the inability to be taken seriously as an actress.

On the 8th of July 1972, Andrea made dates with all her ex-boyfriends so that they would be on the sidewalk below when she jumped. Geraldine Smith who had written Andrea’s Village Voice obituary sympathetically excluded this detail, and detailed how Andrea’s final message to her friends was one of love. According to Bob Colacello, and his connections at The Factory, Smith made no mention of the more scathing portions of Andrea’s suicide note, where she cursed Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, claiming abuse. She had conducted an interview in July 1972 with George Ford for Interview magazine, which never made it to print. “They just throw you in front of a camera - they don’t care what you look like. They just use you, and abuse you, and step on you, and they don’t pay you anything... I’m a damn good actress and I’ve been brought down by Warhol and I’ve been mistreated by them.”

She died three weeks before the release of Heat, holding either “a rosary and a can of coke” or “a bible and a crucifix” on her descent. Judith Crist of the New Yorker described her performance in the film as “in large part non-performance, comes from the late Andrea Feldman, as the flat voiced, freaked-out daughter, a mass of psychotic confusion, infantile and heart-breaking.”

[sequincowgirl]

“Trash“ (1970)

By Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol

Starring Joe Dallesandro and Holly Woodlawn

[gotankgo]

Trash and Putney Swope playing at the cinema

[omgthatdress]

Andy Warhol had a fascination with drag queens, and frequently made them the subjects of his work. If you're interested, check out Warhol's Queens, edited by Henriette Dedichen, which combines his portraits of actual royalty with his portraits of drag queens and trans women.

(It's important to note that in this time, the trans identity that we know today had yet to fully coalesce and settle on one correct term, so many of the people we'd call trans women today identified themselves as "drag queens" or "transvestites")

Warhol was so fascinated with drag that he made three trans women into his celebrated "superstars" who appeared in his films and art.

Candy Darling was an actress and indie it girl whose career was on the upswing until her untimely death from Lymphoma in 1974. Actress Hari Nef is set to play her in an upcoming biopic. You can watch a documentary about her here.

Holly Woodlawn made her screen debut in the movie Trash. Her performance was so good that none less than George Cukor himself instigated a write-in campaign to have her nominated for a best actress Academy Award, but as she was a first-time actress in a controversial low-budget indie, nothing came of it.

Jackie Curtis was a drag queen, cabaret performer, poet and playwright who was an inspiration to many of the glitter and glam rock artists of the 1970s.

[memecucker]

Thinking about this time in college when I went to a start of year party at the dorm of my friend who also happened to become my neighbor that year and she had a roommate who I kinda like immediately clicked with like we shared similar interests and we kept returning to having conversations bc it felt like we were both interested in talking to the other and when I mentioned that I had a student membership at the Art Institute of Chicago and would study in the lounge she thought that was really cool and would like it if I could show her around it later on after she’s settled in. And I was thinking oh cool I got a date with a cool neighbor girl neat plus I’m friends with her roommate. So the next week my roommates and my friend and her roommates minus the one I was interested went out and I asked about her and my friend said she was busy and same thing next week and eventually my friend picked up that I liked her roommate and she got out that the girl I liked was trying to not sound rude and actually didn’t like going to clubs and holy shit neither did I I only came because I thought she would. So my friend said that next weekend the girl is gonna be out of town but after that she’ll try one more time to get her to come and if not she’ll throw a room party so the two of us can chat again and I can ask her out. Sweet

Anyway one of the ppl she invited was an old high school guy friend that showed up a day early (while the girl I was interested in was still out of town) to stay over and also this guy was a coke fiend that brought a lot of cocaine to share and he bragged about all the cocaine and he was bad enough of a coke fiend that he was picking it out of the carpet when the lines were finished which I thought it was funny bc it was pretty fucking shitty cocaine compared to what my ex-raver roommate had and also this guy was the son of the mayor of a Chicago suburb so he obviously has never faced consequences before type and also liked heavily quoting rap lyrics with the n word and also once left me in a room with my unconscious friend and closed the door behind him as if he was expecting me to do something and was giving a courtesy. Also got the vibe he may have invited himself over.

Anyway the next day at some point around noon the girl I was interested in came back and saw someone trashed in their living room and also broke into her room and trashed it and stole basically all the valuables and yes it was the scummy rich white boy coke fiend that somehow has coke that felt like it was cut with table salt son of Chicago suburb mayor that stole her stuff and somehow thought he’d get away with it which didn’t happen because his dad has no influence over Chicago PD or the girls family who happened to be lawyers.

So obviously she changed dorms and partially blames my friend for what happened for inviting or at least not kicking out/watching that guy and they then absolutely hated each other I won’t go into all the details.

Anyway that’s the story of how I accidentally influenced a chain of events that caused the the girl I was gonna ask out to get her room burglarized and incinerating the chances of actually getting a date bc what was I gonna say “hey remember me I’m the friend of the roommate that brought over a guy that robbed you? Wanna see the Andy Warhol exhibit?”

[kafkaguy]

why did head (1968) flop so badly, you may ask?

the short answer is: terrible promotion. why the promotion was so terrible is another question entirely. there are two schools of thought: 1) bob rafelson and jack nicholson were being deliberately avant garde and obtuse (maybe to attract a certain psychedelic audience) or 2) deliberate malicious intent from columbia pictures to get rid of the monkees (by November 1968, when the movie premiered, the monkees TV show had been cancelled for 2 months).

(LA Times, 2008)

what exactly was the ad campaign? Well, it was originally supposed to be Bob Rafelson's head displayed for a few seconds smiling at the camera--according to Wikipedia this was a spoof on Andy Warhol's short film Blowjob (1964). but in the end it was John Brockman, even more unknown, and he was just the guy who was supposed to be filming the clip.

from Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees Day-by-day Story (page 210). explains more about why they did this. Micky also says he thinks it was a way to get back at the monkees for striking on the first day of filming when they found out they would get no creative credit for the film and had been "getting ripped off pretty badly" basically for years.

another factor was the critics reviews. obviously Head is not your average film, and loads of reviews looked down on it as psychedelic garbled trash. they didn't get it. there were positive reviews of course, but most people just didnt get it (and you cant really blame them - its at its most enjoyable when you are a) a bit of a freak, b) a total anti-capitalist, or c) substantially aware of the horrors the monkees were going through at this point. no film critic at the time ticked all 3 of these boxes). i think at this point bob rafelson panicked, because he wanted the film to do well, he just wanted it to do well independent of the monkees (hubris). there's a funny story about the night before the movie premiered in new york, he and jack nicholson got arrested for putting up stickers promoting head, after jack tried to put one on a police officer's helmet. and it makes me wonder why he then didn't fight harder for the film to do well.

it's funny (re: sad) how so many things came together to bring about the doom of the film: bob rafelson and jack nicholson's own cockiness about how well the film would do, their complete disregard of the what the monkees themselves wanted, the studio being tired of the monkees/already having cancelled the show, the whole phenomenon dying out a little since record sales had gone down (the last album they put out was in february 1968 - by this point it was november, and the Head album wouldn't be released until December)...

another peter quote because I trust him the most (again from the day-by-day story, page 210)

Mike over the years has said different things, at one point calling Head an assisted suicide (pertaining to his own desires to kill the monkees phenomenon and be seen as a serious musician), at other points calling it a murder (which i think is how peter continued to see it throughout most of his life, while simultaneously recognising its artistic and cinematic merit, and also saying the soundtrack was the record he was proudest of besides headquarters 1967). but here's something Mike said in the Head commentary (some time in the early 2000s) which i find simultaneously funny and devestating:

so yeah. the main conclusion is that nothing was in Head's favour for it to do well. there were conflicting visions, conflicting motivations, a total lack of interest from Columbia pictures, and no one was on the Monkees' side, not even really the monkees themselves. the world just wasn't ready for the crazy anti-monkees monkee movie. their swag was too different. everybody wanted to kill them. but they didnt have to cos they killed themselves it happens right at the start of the movie and again at the end. WATCH HEAD.

[pop-art-sixties-seventies]

Douglas Kirkland - Andy Warhol, ‘Trash’, 1970.