My Hustler - 16MM + Paul Morrissey Screen Test and Additional Fire Island Footage | Directed by Paul Morrissey

Interview and Roxy Cinema present:

Filmed over the Labor Day holidays of 1965, My Hustler belongs to a period of transition for the Andy Warhol Cinematic Universe. Collaborators such as Chuck Wein (credited here with “written direction”) and Paul Morrissey (behind the increasingly mobile, sync-sound 16mm camera) were moving the Factory production away from single-take, silent films and into more complex arrangements featuring actors, dialogue, and feints at narrative situations.

My Hustler consists of two extended conversations, first as a Fire Island host (the outrageously camp Ed Hood) contemplates the recumbent figure of the beach Adonis (Paul America) he has hired for the weekend, and then as the newcomer learns a few tricks of the trade from an older colleague “Joe” a/k/a Sugar Plum Fairy. A hit in its midnight engagement at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, My Hustler became one of the first Warhol films to escape the downtown orbit and open at a commercial theater in midtown, where it was reliably panned as “sordid, vicious and contemptuous” by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times. – Dave Kehr, MoMA

Screens with:

Paul Morrissey [ST226], 1965

16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16 frames per second

And:

[Fire Island, Long Island, NY, September 1965], 1965

16mm film, black-and-white and color, silent, 9 minutes

With Paul America, Joseph Campbell, Genevieve Charbin, Dorothy Dean, Ed Hood, Billy Name (Linich), John D. MacDermott, Gerard Malanga, Stephen Shore, Andy Warhol, Chuck Wein, Danny Williams

Introduction by Greg Pierce, Director of Film and Video, The Andy Warhol Museum

Special thanks to The Andy Warhol Museum