Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol’s Cinematic Collaborator, Dies at 86

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.

“Trash,” Mr. Morrissey’s biggest critical and commercial success, followed the trials and tribulations of Mr. Dallesandro playing a heroin-addicted gigolo earnestly, if groggily, trying to support his wife, played by Ms. Woodlawn. “Women in Revolt” took the theme of women’s liberation and grafted it onto a sendup of Hollywood women’s pictures of the 1930s, with Ms. Curtis, Ms. Woodlawn and Ms. Darling striking poses and reflecting on their status in a sexist society.