Original subtitles

- Paul Morrissey's a really interesting figure in movies,

I think, because he's almost one of a kind.

He's working in a kind of combination

between improvisation and planning ahead.

When he was working with Andy Warhol,

he developed a method which was essentially to talk

with the actors when the camera wasn't running,

but then when the camera started running,

they basically were left often for the length

of the whole reel, 3O minutes or so,

to essentially direct themselves.

But with guidance, when the camera wasn't running.

The question of who directed the films

that Warhol and Morrissey made together

is a pretty fraught one.

There's often quite a lot of disagreement.

Morrissey had a much more thoroughgoing interest

and desire to play with cinematic form

and to actually involve himself,

directorially, in the end result.

Much more so than Warhol,

who, essentially, really wanted the film to just happen

with the least amount of involvement from him possible.

Morrissey maintains that in a lot of instances,

he was actually the directorial focus

behind a lot of the early films.

(eerie music)

In June, I think the 3rd of June, 1968,

Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas.

And in the immediate aftermath of the shooting,

when Warhol was clinging to life

and was very severely injured and in hospital,

Paul Morrissey shot Flesh, which is the first,

probably, of the uncontested Paul Morrissey titles.

Something you notice as the years go by is that the gaps

between the films being shot and shown get bigger.

When you notice that something like Trash,

you start to understand that the crafting,

the editing process, the decision-making process

about how to construct these films,

is starting to head towards the mainstream.

I think Heat is a very important, pivotal film

in the Morrissey trajectory.

The one further step to go is

into full on narrative genre film,

which is what Flesh for Frankenstein

and Blood for Dracula do.

(sinister music)

So given that Heat had been a big success,

Morrissey was a hot property.

People were coming up to him from outside

of the environs of the factory and the underground.

One of the projects that almost got made

was a version of Sherlock Holmes that was going to be made

from a script by the film critic, Rex Reed.

Rex was going to play Dr. Watson in it.

A really intriguing project that didn't happen was that

a producer called Robert Weiner was angling to get Morrissey

to shoot Cruising, from the novel by Gerald Walker.

And there was talk for a while of Morrissey directing it

with, I think, Timothy Bottoms or Jeff Bridges

lined up or suggested to play the role

that eventually went to Al Pacino.

And I think Jan-Michael Vincent was being lined up

as the serial killer in the film.

That would have been a fascinating and intriguing idea

that Morrissey would've made Cruising,

and had that in the cinemas in '74, '75.

But again, that didn't come to pass.

There was also talk of Morrissey working

with Alberto Grimaldi,

and they were going to work on a project that was meant

to be a sort of transvestite Western made in Italy.

So, a kind of a transvestite Spaghetti Western,

but that didn't come to fruition.

The genesis of Flesh for Frankenstein

actually owes a great deal to Roman Polanski,

who met Morrissey in early 1972.

They got into conversation and Polanski mentioned

that he was in talks to do a 3D movie.

I believe the film that was being lined up

to be a 3D movie for Polanski

was the one that eventually came out as What?

The closer and closer they got to shooting What?,

the more absurd it seemed to make that film in 3D,

there seemed to be no earthly reason to do it in 3D.

He said, "You should do a 3D Frankenstein."

When it came to managing the actual production

of Flesh for Frankenstein, the chief prime movers

in the production side of things were Carlo Ponti.

There was also a producer called Jean-Pierre Rassam

from Paris, from France,

and the film was a French/Italian co-production.

A lot of people think that because it says,

"Andy Warhol's Frankenstein"

as one of the alternative titles for this film,

and the Warhol name was prominently used to sell the movie,

that the film must have been

an American/Italian co-production

with some money coming from Andy Warhol.

But in fact, that wasn't the case.

Although Warhol had financed the previous films,

when it came to Flesh for Frankenstein

and Blood for Dracula, the money actually came entirely

from Carlo Ponti and Jean-Pierre Rassam.

When Carlo Ponti said to Morrissey,

"How much do you think you could make

this Frankenstein movie for?"

Morrissey, without missing a beat,

just pulled the first figure that came into his head

and said $300,000.

Ponti said, "Oh, fantastic, I'll give you $600,000

and why not make two?"

And that's how the Dracula movie came to be.

So really, the kind of money that was being bandied around

for Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula

is a sign of the credibility that Morrissey had managed

to establish by making the earlier, slightly cheaper films.

(light piano music)

Whilst the film was being shot,

Carlo Ponti made his villa available to Morrissey

and his assistant Jed Johnson, and to Pat Hackett.

Pat Hackett is an interesting figure,

because she had more input into things

than is often understood.

She had received a co-writing credit on Popism,

which was a book, a memoir, shall we say,

by Andy Warhol that Was published in --

I think published in 1980.

But it was all about the 1960s period,

the films and the paintings of the 1960s.

Pat Hackett was also the person that helped

to compile Warhol's diaries.

She would call him up every morning,

he would have a conversation with her

about what had happened the previous day,

and she would keep the tapes.

And when the time came to create the famous

Andy Warhol Diaries, it was her recordings that were used

and she was the editor of the diaries as well.

So she had a lot of input into shaping

that vast amount of material into the book.

In terms of actual screen credits,

Pat Hackett is only credited,

I believe, on Andy Warhol's Bad,

the last of the Andy Warhol films,

which was directed by Jed Johnson.

The fact that Pat Hackett was present

with Morrissey and Jed Johnson during the shooting

of Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula,

I think suggests that she might've had some input

into the creation of maybe a few lines of dialogue

or certain situations.

But, yes, the conventional story

as far as Morrissey is concerned,

is that he wrote the script for Flesh for Frankenstein

in the car on the way to the studio every morning.

The interiors for Flesh for Frankenstein,

of which there are many,

were shot at the famous Cinecitta Studios in Rome,

and the exteriors were filmed at a castle

on the outskirts of Rome called the Castello di Passirano.

The shooting period for Flesh for Frankenstein

was about three and a half to four weeks.

Beginning on the 20th of March, I believe,

and running up to Easter that year.

The Easter holiday was kind of the pivotal point

between the end of Flesh for Frankenstein

and the beginning of Blood for Dracula.

And the entire shooting process for the two films altogether

was something like about eight weeks.

(heart beating)

Morrissey then edited the film in the summer of 1974,

and it was actually ready for its first screening,

oddly enough, in Germany, 30th of November, 1973.

Now, this may be because Constantin Films in Germany

had scored a big hit with Trash.

I believe it was the second highest grossing film in Germany

after Easy Rider.

When it came to a United States release for the film,

though,

it wasn't until the 2nd of April, 1974,

that the film premiered,

I think at a film festival in Los Angeles,

to a fairly divided audience who seemed to be

equally divided between people who loved it and hated it.

Ancl then it finally got a cinema release,

I believe, in May of 1974, about a month later,

when it opened at the Trans-Lux East

and the Trans-Lux West cinemas in New York.

The splash that Flesh for Frankenstein made

when it came out was considerable.

Didn't always go down very well.

A lot of people disliked it, certainly because

there was already a great deal of resistance

to the Warhol brand amongst mainstream reviewers.

(Baron screaming) (door slams)

And when you add grizzly, gory violence to the picture,

well, those kind of critics hate being confronted

with horror movies, anyway.

This is what We found when Friday the 13th

was a breakout hit in 1980, '81 .

One of the problems was that it was no longer just playing

to exploitation cinemas and grindhouses and drive-ins,

but it was playing in first run theaters

and had to be reviewed by critics

who normally reviewed mainstream fare,

and they loathed being confronted with this stuff,

which had been playing for years.

(eerie music) (man gurgling)

Flesh for Frankenstein, in a way,

is one of the early examples of that.

To be honest, though,

if you look at the violence in Flesh for Frankenstein,

so much of it is absurd.

So much of it is deliberately ridiculous.

Morrissey has an absurdist take on sex and violence.

That the idea of thrusting a liver in 3D

under the audience's nose on the end of a spike,

it beggars belief that anyone could not see

that that was intended humorously,

that there was a humorous component to the grossness of it.

There's a sequence where Baron Frankenstein

cuts the stitches away from a wound

in order to gain access to the inside of the body.

I think some of the critics picked up on that

and pointed out that audiences

were roaring with laughter throughout the film.

So, it's not as if Morrissey's approach

went whistling over everyone's head,

it definitely found an audience

at the level that he was aiming it at.

The most famous scene, of course,

and the most famous line of dialogue

is when Udo Kier, as Baron Frankenstein,

is mounting the female monster.

This was a line that Morrissey,

I think Morrissey once admitted was a pastiche

or a sort of a lampoon, rather, of the very uber serious

and pretentious dialogue in Last Tango in Paris,

where Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider get together

and Brando has these achingly pretentious monologues

about sort of philosophy

whilst they're having sex with each other.

Morrissey took an extremely dim view

of Last Tango in Paris, he loathed it,

and I think a line like --

- To know death, Otto,

you have to fuck life in the gallbladder.

- [Stephen] -- is like a lampoon of arty,

achingly pretentious dialogue.

As far as the plot of Flesh for Frankenstein is concerned,

it's interesting that there's actually a curious parallel

with a movie by Jess Franco that was made a year earlier.

Erotic Rites of Frankenstein

involves a mesmerist called Cagliostro,

the famous mesmerist, Cagliostro,

creating a male monster and a female monster,

and he wants them to mate, have sex and create a race

of slaves who will carry out Cagliostro's bidding.

Pretty much the same concept behind

Baron Frankenstein's plans in Flesh for Frankenstein.

- What are you waiting for?

She's yours, touch her!

- I'm not suggesting for a moment that Morrissey

had ripped off or borrowed an idea from Jess Franco,

because actually, the Franco movie was shot a year before,

but it screened for the very first time,

I think, about five days

before Flesh for Frankenstein started shooting.

So when Flesh for Frankenstein

was eventually picked up for distribution,

it was handled by a company called Bryanston,

famously run by Joseph and Louis Peraino,

or Butchie Peraino, I think was his nickname.

The Peraino brothers were, as you probably know,

involved with the mafia, they were members of the mafia.

And Bryanston Films was a company which they set up

as part of the mafia's move into filmmaking.

Now, they'd already scored a massive hit

before setting up Bryanston, with Deep Throat.

Deep Throat was extremely lucrative

and I think that was what led

to the creation of Bryanston Films.

However, Lou and Joe Peraino wanted to make regular movies

as well, they didn't just want to make porno movies.

And they bought the rights, the American rights,

distribution rights, to Flesh for Frankenstein, for --

I think it was something in the region of $750,000.

Bryanston had a sizeable hit with Flesh for Frankenstein.

They made quite a bit of money out of it.

And then a few months later, they bought Tobe Hooper's

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which gave them another hit.

So Bryanston were doing pretty well for a short while,

for about an 18-month period,

or maybe a two-year period in the early '70s.

Bryanston looked like becoming one of the mini majors

through, one has to assume,

a pretty good eye for an exploitation pickup.

I think it was Lou Peraino, Butchie Peraino,

was the one that viewed Texas Chain Saw Massacre

and said, "Yes, we'll have that."

So, sure, they were from the mafia,

but look, they had an eye for a movie as well.

(laughing) I suppose that's what I'm saying here, isn't it?

Oddly, though, there was a four-year gap

until Morrissey directed another film.

Which is strange, really,

given that he was riding high, really,

after getting these films into production

and out into the market successfully.

He didn't actually direct again until 1977,

when he finally got his Sherlock Holmes

onto the screen at last, minus Rex Reed.

But this time with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

Joe Dallesandro never worked with Morrissey or Warhol

or any of the Warhol team again.

He stayed in Italy, stayed in Rome,

and made a succession of movies for the Italian market,

and did very well for himself in Italy for many years.

Unlike a lot of the Warhol superstars,

Joe Dallesandro had a successful film career afterwards

and did very well for himself in movie,

after movie, after movie, throughout the '70s.

So yeah, it wasn't the end for him.

(melancholic orchestral music)