Paul Morrissey
Paul Morrissey ( born February 23, 1938 in New York) is an American film director who was known in the 1960s and early 1970s by film productions for Andy Warhol end. Morrissey is considered, along with Gerard Malanga, as the discoverer of the musical group The Velvet Underground, also, he discovered and promoted the young actor Joe Dallesandro. Morrissey sparked Malanga after its discrepancies with Warhol in the late 1960s as the " right hand" of the pop-art artist from.
Life and work
Morrissey was born into a strict Catholic family from Yonkers, New York. He received an education at the Jesuit- dominated Fordham University in the Bronx. After graduating Morrissey worked briefly with an insurance company, then as a social worker at New York City 's Department of Social Services in Spanish Harlem.
Morrissey met Andy Warhol on the former factory employees know Gerard Malanga, who had invited him in the summer of 1965 to a presentation of Warhol films vinyl and Poor Little Rich Girl in the Astor Place Playhouse. Morrissey had already tried himself at this time as a filmmaker, deals with the underground film and moves in the circles of alternative filmmakers from New York. However, his own films were more in the tradition of narrative cinema: they did not follow the propagated by Jonas Mekas avant-garde film and were considered more as " regressive " as recounted by biographer David Bourdon Warhol.
In the following years, Morrissey joined the Factory entourage and was quickly because of his business acumen for Warhol an indispensable employee, which should replace the existing "factory Majordomo " Gerard Malanga as the right hand Warhol. Morrissey had an open contempt for rock music and drugs and made sure that the factory was no longer place for junkies and loitering partygoers who contributed anything productive.
Although Andy Warhol from circa 1968 - about the same time as the assassination of Valerie Solanas - had retired from the film industry, Morrissey was responsible for several more years for Warhol film productions.