SATURDAY RUBRICS: 11/2/24*

R.I.P. PAUL MORRISSEY and TERI GARR

SOME JOY

(Above: Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, and Tim Buckley at Max’s Kansas City. NYC. 1968. Photograph by Elliott Landy.)

(Above: (1) Teri Garr with Andy Warhol photographed by Joan Quinn. (2) Garr with some of the cast members of Young Frankenstein at The Daisy in 1974. Madeline Kahn, Gene Wilder, directer Mel Brooks, Teri, Kenneth Mars, and Marty Feldman. (3) Garr with Amy Irving and Carrie Fisher at Lorna Luft’s 25th birthday party in 1977.)

(Above: Morrissey after being awarded for his lifetime of work at Filmball Vienna in 2017.)

An excerpt from Paul Morrissey’s obituary written by William Grimes in The New York Times:

Paul Morrissey whose loose cinéma-vérité films made with Andy Warhol in the late 1960s and early ’70s captured New York’s demimonde of drug addicts, drag queens and hipsters and turned an unlikely stable of amateur actors into underground stars, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86.

The death, in a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, said Michael Chaiken, his archivist.

In films like “Flesh,” “Trash,” “Heat” and “Women in Revolt,” all made on budgets of less than $10,000, Mr. Morrissey brought movement, character and something resembling a story line to the Warhol film aesthetic, which had consisted of pointing a camera at an actor or a building and letting it run for several hours. (Warhol’s “Empire” was a continuous shot of the Empire State Building that lasted eight hours and five minutes.)

Relying on a shifting collective of amateur actors, like Joe Dallesandro and Viva; transgender performers, like Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling; and marginal downtown characters, Mr. Morrissey concocted a distinctive blend of squalor and melodramatic farce that captivated many critics and even, in some instances, translated into box-office success.

The scripts, such as they were, were almost entirely ad-libbed. The stars simply portrayed themselves. And the plots defied synopsis.

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Here is an excerpt from Teri Garr’s The New York Times obituary written by Anita Gates:

Teri Garr, the alternately shy and sassy blond actress whose little-girl voice, deadpan comic timing, expressive eyes and cinematic bravery in the face of seemingly crazy male characters made her a star of 1970s and ’80s movies and earned her an Oscar nomination for her role in “Tootsie,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 79.

Her publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, said the cause was complications of multiple sclerosis.

Ms. Garr received that diagnosis in 1999, after 16 years of symptoms and medical research; she made her condition public in 2002. In late 2006, she had a ruptured brain aneurysm and was in a coma for a week, but she was eventually able to regain the ability to walk and talk.

Onscreen, Ms. Garr’s outstanding features were her eyes, which could seem simultaneously pained, baffled, sympathetic, vulnerable, intrigued and determined, whether she was registering a grand new discovery or holding back tears. If her best-known roles had a common thread, it was the erratic behavior of the men in her characters’ lives.

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