Something engaging to listen to, something erotic to look at
My Hustler, 1965
By: Andy Warhol and Paul Morrisey
With: Paul America, Joseph Campbell
My Hustler is by now viewed as one of the most canonical and accessible of Andy Warhol’s films alongside Sleep (1963), Empire (1964), Blow Job (1964), and Chelsea Girls (1966). Beyond Warhol, My Hustler is central to both the history of gay cinema (pre-dating by some years the gay cinema of the 1970s liberation era) and the American underground cinema. In this article I hope to reassert the film’s significance while shedding some new light on its avant-garde credentials with reference to an under-examined area of Warhol’s cinema: the screen performance.
Andy Warhol was the most famous and influential artist of the 20th century, his reputation cemented in relation to Pop Art and several iconic works produced in the early half of the 1960s. He was of course many other things too: a commercial artist since the mid-1950s; a photographer; a filmmaker; music producer and band manager; book and magazine publisher; an author. Warhol also worked across different media. Not just painting, but also sculpture, sound recording, video, and ultimately himself as a living performance. Warhol’s influence is almost immeasurable and it is hard to think of any aspect of contemporary culture, art, and media that is not touched by his legacy. However, Warhol’s “framing” is often in the context of popular culture, celebrity, and the accessibility of Pop itself which is on the surface easy to get. But, Warhol’s filmmaking couldn’t be further from associations of easiness, accessibility, or Pop. For it remains one of the most experimental, audacious, avant-garde, and illusive bodies of work by any filmmaker. Much of Warhol’s reputation as a filmmaker is also, and mistakenly, rendered by myth and hyperbole in relation to durational aspects (the eight-hour single-shot static Empire (1964)) and boring aspects (the six-hour Sleep (1963)) none of which captures the complexity and scope of Warhol’s filmmaking.
Warhol first began filmmaking in the summer of 1963 up to the summer of 1968 when he was shot by Valerie Solanas (who appears briefly in the film I, A Man (1967)) at which point Paul Morrissey took over. Although Warhol continued to make videos (initially as video art in 1965 and up to the Factory Diaries of the 1970s), in other words, he didn’t stop making films; he only stopped using celluloid in favour of magnetic tape. During those filmmaking years Warhol produced over 4000 reels of film. He is unique in that his filmmaking defies being ordered into an easy filmography as films were re-shot (Poor Little Rich Girl, (1965)), unfinished (Batman Dracula, 1964), duplicated (Nude Restaurant (1967)), and serialised (Kiss (1963-4)). Numerous reels are also combined into different films. Bike Boy (1967-8) is a single film, but its reels also make part of the multi-screen twenty-four hour **** (1967). The length, structure, and sound of Warhol’s films are usually determined by the choice of film reel (100-minutes silent reel for the three minutes Screen Tests and Kiss or the thirty-three minute reels for Chelsea Girls – those are the two units of Warhol’s filmmaking). Warhol never edited in post-production, with the exception of Sleep, which is not, despite persistent accounts, a continuous night of filming John Giorno sleeping. Apart from Sleep Warhol did not edit. Instead the camera wanders away from subjects, it deliberately tilts, pans, and goes out of focus, and the closest he comes to editing is his in camera edit strobe cuts (switching the camera off and the on again which creates a jarring white flash and sound bloop), foregrounded in Bufferin (1966), Bike Boy, and Tub Girls (1967). The sheer scale of Warhol’s film output makes it an enormous endeavour if one wishes to examine it seriously. And we, as Warhol film scholars, are still finding new, revelatory, and contradictory aspects to grapple with year after year as more films emerge from the archives.
1965, My Hustler: Warhol’s third year of filmmaking marks a notable shift away from the minimalist, serial, and durational early works (Empire, Sleep, Eat, Kiss, Blow Job) towards an investigation of concepts and conventions more typical of popular cinema, though given an avant-garde treatment. For example, he introduced scripts through his collaboration with Ronald Tavel (Harlot (1964), More Milk Yvette (1965), explored genre in the Western Horse (1965), adaptation in Vinyl (1965) based on the book A Clockwork Orange, biopics in the JFK assassination film Since (1966) and Edie Sedgwick as Mexican film star Lupe Velez in the double-screen projection Lupe (1965). Stardom was properly introduced through Sedgwick, Mario Montez, Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet and others.
My Hustler is interesting, as it was not shot at the Factory but instead on location on Fire Island during the Labor Day weekend of 1965. In terms of film style there is some zooming and panning in the first thirty-three-minute reel and two early strobe cuts. The film also introduces a male superstar in Paul America, is decidedly playful with off-screen/on-screen sound/image relations, and explores possibilities in screen performance and acting. The two-reel first version of My Hustler was premiered on January 12th 1966 at the Film-makers’ Cinematheque in New York. The first reel depicts Paul America on the beach sunbathing, filmed mostly in long to medium shot, while Ed Hood holds court in a beach-facing cabin nearby with another hustler (Joe Campbell) and “fag hag” neighbour La Genevieve (Charbon). The improvised conversation, bitchy repartee (”get your lascivious eyes of that beautiful body”), salacious insinuation (”do you like them big and fat or long and tall”), and put-downs (”at least I’m queen of THAT and I don’t want any tired princesses muscling in on it”) about the fictitious dial-a-hustler service and Paul America (”absolutely beautiful, god-like”) is constantly heard even when the characters are not on screen. At first, we only see Paul America while we hear Hood and Charbon’s voices which sound as if they are non-diegetic, existing outside the world of the film, until a pan to the left reveals otherwise. The second reel and other half of the film, camera fixed and static on the tripod, no editing, takes place in the cramped space of a bathroom as both Paul America and Joe Campbell primp and preen in front of the mirror while the latter shares his hustling knowledge with the bleached-blonde ingénue. In My Hustler there is no plot to speak of, instead Warhol presents two situations with improvised dialogue which are coached along by our uninhibited access to gay culture, hustling, and Paul America’s body; we have something engaging to listen to and something erotic to look at.
For a film that appears simple in its execution, My Hustler has nonetheless been one of the most analysed of Warhol’s films, in part because it has probably been the most accessible and widely exhibited. My Hustler was screened on British Television in 1989, was one of the first films to be preserved by the Whitney-MoMA Andy Warhol Film Project, it exists on bootleg video and DVD coming out of Italy, and is easily hired in 16mm at minimal cost from MoMA’s international circulating library. Most of the scholarship on the film follows Richard Dyer’s identification of the film as a key text in gay underground cinema, and other scholars follow suit in exploring similar themes. [1] For example, Thomas Waugh argues that My Hustler is significant for its exploration of the “queen” and “trade” character types and the ways in which on-screen and off-screen sound are mapped onto this queer dynamic [2]. R. Bruce Brassell has suggested that My Hustler offers an example of gay spectatorship though the construction of cruising (though I argue otherwise in Wuxia 1-2 (2015)) [3].
Rather than continue to champion My Hustler in relation to its status in the gay film canon I instead want to address an overlooked aspect in the commentary and analysis of the film, and in relation to Warhol’s filmmaking more generally, that is, performance and acting, especially its relation to the Warholian notion of “just being yourself”. A question might be the following: Is “just being yourself” an overt naturalism or a more strategic and disruptive avant-garde performance mode? What I’ve been trying to think about in My Hustler, is developing a framework for screen performance and acting in underground cinema in relation to categories like “just being yourself”, “not-acting,” minimalism, “bad acting”, and performance art [4]. This is, in part, to contradict uncritical assumptions that Warhol anticipates celebrity culture, reality television, and the famous-for-being famous ethos, thus eschewing any notion that those strategies were avant-garde in their attempt to disrupt and challenge the very limits of what constitutes performance.
Performance is well-documented in avant-garde theatre but not in avant-garde cinema, and definitely not in Warhol’s cinema, despite some obvious and collaborative overlap between theatre, performance, and film in the 1960s. Similarly, the work on screen performance in film studies doesn’t address the types of acting we see in underground and experimental cinema. Although it is useful for telling us what these performances are not, it doesn’t help us explain the thirty-three minutes Nico spends trimming her bangs with the tiniest of scissors in Chelsea Girls’ first reel. Therefore, in apparently not doing very much, specifically Paul America’s performance in My Hustler, and his performance opposite the talky Joe Campbell, may get us to think about what might constitute screen performance or acting in an avant-garde context, and why My Hustler is worth championing as an intervention in screen performance. One should also remember that My Hustler is already coming off the back of a decade in American cinema dominated by a major transformations in screen performance through the introduction of method acting via Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift; both Brando and Dean also subjects in Warhol’s fine art.
Of course Warhol was a living performance and blurred the distinction, like his superstars, between performing and being. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol he writes: "I can only understand really amateur performers or really bad performers, because whatever they do never really comes off, so therefore it can't be phoney. But I can never really understand really good, professional performers." [5] Warhol was acutely aware of the art or work of performance both in others and in himself. The range of people in the performing arts that collaborated with Warhol is also indicative of his awareness of performance. Some of the earliest films from 1963, Dance Movie and Jill and Freddy Dancing include performers and dancers. The idea of what a performance or acting is, was being routinely tested in the 1960s and the category “performance artist” was itself just emerging alongside the blurring of theatre and dance as once distinct categories. How to make sense of performance in Warhol’s films is something that comes to the fore in reviews of Chelsea Girls released the same year as My Hustler. The genius of the Chelsea Girls is in creating a “performance dialectic” through the dual screen projection experiment in which Warhol’s “beauties” (Nico, International Velvet) are juxtaposed in contiguous screens with the “talkers” (Brigid Berlin, Ondine). Jonas Mekas reviewing Chelsea Girls in a 1966 Village Voice piece writes “and one of the amazing things about this film is that the people in it are not really actors; or if they are acting, their acting becomes unimportant, it becomes of their personalities, and there they are, totally real, with their transformed, intensified selves.” [6] This distinction between the fictional and the real in performance is also part of the critical reception of My Hustler upon the second version release in 1967 [7]. In James Stoller’s review of My Hustler in Westside News he writes that “one is not told how much of this is acting, how much real”, “whether it is life or theatre” going on to say that “the camera’s placement enables you to feel and gauge the performances more meaningfully” [8]. Another reviewer, Lee Beaupree in Variety, refers to My Hustler as “surprisingly well acted” and that “Paul America (no kidding) he may well become Warhol’s inverted answer to Monica Vitti’ [9]. Warhol would have loved the reference to Italian Art Cinema but of course would have feigned that he had never heard of Antonioni.
What did the superstars think? In the 1967 documentary Superartist Edie Sedgwick is asked, “how does it feel to act in a Warhol movie” to which she replies “oh it’s so true life and it’s not even acting”. I mean it’s just so candid and like the camera isn’t even there”. Paul America and Edie Sedgwick share a similar performance mode, she was supposed to be in My Hustler, and both might at first seemingly just appear to be themselves. I don’t think they “just appear”. Edie has learned quickly how to exploit the Warhol put-on in that quote, and that is not likely how Paul Johnson thought about his acting in My Hustler. There was labour involved, he reacts to Joe Campbell, and because of the profitable 1967 My Hustler re-release, Johnson started writing threatening letters to Warhol for unpaid acting dues. Genevieve Charbon, the only woman in the film, joined Johnson in asking for a settlement through an attorney in October of 1967 for $1750. Warhol paid Johnson an instalment of $500 and another of $2500 at the end of November and Charbon received two lesser instalments of $250. Johnson’s case against Warhol was even covered by The New York Times in December of 1967 in an article titled “How to Becomes a Superstar – And Get Paid Too”, where Johnson is described as a “young actor with a drug problem”.
I mention these legal wrangles as Johnson must have assumed that he was acting and in that sense doing a job, and his performance in My Hustler is, to give him credit, very different from his flirtatious beaming in his Screen Test (1965). But what kind of acting is Paul Johnson’s in My Hustler? Is it as Warhol says in PoPism “I only wanted to find great people and let them be themselves and talk about what they usually talked about and I'd film them for a certain length of time and that would be the movie” [10].
This idea of performers being themselves, or non-acting or under-acting, suggests that some types of screen performance in Warhol’s cinema attempt to capture a reality rather than a crafted performance. Such non-acting performance modes seem to engage with acting in ways that provoke distinctions between good acting and bad acting, pretense and naturalism, acting and being – the overacting of queenly Ed Hood and the under-acting of passive stud Paul America. In that sense they speak to a rebellious avant-garde performance sensibility in testing the limits of what is meant by acting on an imaginary scale, on the one hand of being too much (Ed Hood) and, on the other, of being too little (Paul America). It would be too easy to assume Johnson is “just being himself” in My Hustler - he is performing Paul America, performing the fantasy of the hustler, the underground Adonis. Johnson is working in My Hustler (a film that is about sex work) even though that work is a performance in which it seems there is seemingly no work at all; lying on the beach, getting ready in front of the mirror, just being handsome, pretending to be naive in relation to hustling. How I am suggesting to define Paul Johnson’s screen performance along with that of Edie Sedgwick, and we could add Nico, is through the concept of minimalism; a movement in sculpture and music that comes after Pop.
The general idea of minimalism is the elimination of content in order to focus on the structure of the work of art. In the context of My Hustler and Warhol’s cinema one might rephrase this as a strategy to eliminate acting in order to focus on performance. Given that My Hustler exhibits some minimalist qualities in form, with only two unedited reels, more or less fixed camera, cramped performance space, then it is no leap to see that minimalism might allow us to make sense of what it means to also perform without acting, to perform Paul America to the extent that many have assumed that he was simply “just being himself”. The genius of Warhol is to take something as complex and modernist as minimalism and to fool us all in to thinking its merely people “just being themselves”.
Notes
[1] Richard Dyer (1990), Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, London and New York: Routledge.
[2] Thomas Waugh (1996), "Cockteaser", in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
[3] R. Bruce Brassell, "My Hustler: Gay Spectatorship as Cruising", Wide Angle, Vol 14 No 2 (April), pp.54-64.
[4] Gary Needham, Factory Girl, Factory Films, New York: Bloomsbury (forthcoming).
[5] Andy Warhol (1975 [2007]), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, New York: Penguin Books, p.82.
[6] September 29th 1966
On print in Wuxia 3-4, 2015