Andy Warhol films and Joe Dallesandro, from My Hustler to Flesh, Trash and Heat

In 1969 police in Atlanta stopped a Warhol western, seized the print and photographed the audience to find out who was gay. Between the underground and gay porn stood the Factory's films, and Joe Dallesandro, the hustler they undressed.

Atlanta, 5 August 1969. At the Ansley Mall Mini Cinema, a small screen in a shopping centre in Midtown, about seventy people are watching Lonesome Cowboys, one of the Andy Warhol films, a parody western in which a gang of cowboys court one another as much as the one woman in town. One of the cowboys is Joe Dallesandro, twenty years old. During the screening police, acting on the orders of the Fulton County solicitor Hinson McAuliffe and under a state obscenity law passed the year before, seize the print and arrest the manager and the projectionist. They photograph the audience and take down names, to find out, as the authorities later confirmed, whether any of them were "known homosexuals"¹.

The raid shows where Warhol's films stood at the end of the 1960s: too strange for Hollywood, too public for the underground, and close enough to the gay audience that the police knew whom to look for. This page follows the films of Warhol's Factory from the silent experiments of 1963 to the features of Paul Morrissey, and the actor who became their face and, very often, their naked body.

A camera in the Factory

Between 1963 and 1968 Warhol made hundreds of films in his studio, the Factory, paying for them with the money from his paintings. The first ones hardly moved. Sleep (1963) watches a man asleep for more than five hours; there were silent portraits called screen tests, a series of couples kissing, and a 1964 short with the title Blow Job².

They played in the venues of the New York underground, such as the Film-Makers' Cinematheque run by Jonas Mekas, to audiences of artists, students and many gay men. At the Factory homosexuality was neither hidden nor treated as a problem, and the films show it².

Historians of gay pornography see these films as a bridge. Years before hardcore, they put male bodies and men's desire for men on public screens, and the art houses that showed Warhol were among the first to show gay sex films³.

A hustler on Fire Island

My Hustler was shot over the Labor Day weekend of 1965 on Fire Island, directed by Warhol with Chuck Wein. Paul Morrissey, a young filmmaker who had just joined the Factory, worked the camera and the sound, and for the first time a Warhol camera moved³.

Paul America plays a blond young man lying on the beach, hired through a "Dial-A-Hustler" service by an older man, played by Ed Hood, while his neighbours bet that they can lure the boy away. The second reel is set in a cramped bathroom, where an older hustler, played by Joe Campbell, gives the newcomer advice about the trade while they wash and shave.

It played at the Cinematheque from 1966 and in 1967 at the Hudson Theatre, a commercial cinema near Times Square, where it took tens of thousands of dollars in a few weeks. By most accounts it was the first Warhol film to make money, and the first to put the young man for sale at the centre³.

Cowboys in the desert

In January 1968 Warhol took his company to Arizona. Lonesome Cowboys was shot at Old Tucson, a film set used by Hollywood westerns, and at a dude ranch in Oracle, on a budget of about 3,000 dollars. Viva, Taylor Mead, Eric Emerson, Louis Waldon and Joe Dallesandro improvised a loose version of Romeo and Juliet, with frequent nudity and a great deal of talk⁴.

Local residents complained about the filming. The film premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival in November 1968 and opened in New York on 5 May 1969, at the Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre on Bleecker Street⁴.

In Atlanta the raid had consequences nobody had planned. One of the people in the audience later called it the spark for the city's homosexual population. A Georgia Gay Liberation Front was formed, and in 1971 it organised Atlanta's first Pride march, with about 125 people, after being refused a permit¹.

Shots on Union Square

By then the Factory had moved to the sixth floor of the Decker Building, at 33 Union Square West. At about 4.30 in the afternoon of 3 June 1968, the writer Valerie Solanas walked in and shot Warhol at close range, and wounded the art critic Mario Amaya. Warhol was declared clinically dead, revived on the operating table at Columbus Hospital, and did not go home until 28 July⁴.

Dallesandro, who had been taken on as a kind of doorman and bodyguard, arrived after it was over. "They'd just taken the last person away in the ambulance," he remembered in 2024, and he assumed he had lost his job⁵.

He had not. While Warhol recovered, Paul Morrissey took over the filmmaking. Morrissey, born in 1938 and a conservative Catholic, wanted what Warhol's films had avoided: characters, a story and an audience beyond the underground. He directed the features that followed, while Warhol's name stayed above the titles.

Flesh, a day on the street

Flesh was shot over a few weekends that summer for about 4,000 dollars. Morrissey later said it began as a reply to Midnight Cowboy, then being made by United Artists for millions: if a big studio was making a film about a hustler, the Factory could make a truer one for almost nothing.

The plot fits in one line. Joe's wife sends him out on the street to raise 200 dollars for her girlfriend's abortion, and the film follows his clients through one day: among them an elderly artist who sketches him posed like a classical statue, and, in one scene, Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis in their first film roles. Dallesandro is frequently naked, filmed in long, still takes, and the camera treats his body as calmly as it treats the furniture.

Flesh opened on 26 September 1968 at the Garrick Theatre and became a commercial success with almost no publicity. It made a young man from Queens the face of the Factory's films⁴.

Blue Movie in the dock

Warhol returned behind the camera that autumn. In October 1968, in the apartment of the critic David Bourdon, he filmed Viva and Louis Waldon spending an afternoon together: they talk about the Vietnam War and everyday trifles, and they have sex. Blue Movie is often described as the first feature shown in American cinemas to show intercourse.

It opened at the Garrick on 21 July 1969. Three police officers saw it on 29 July, and two days later a judge of the New York Criminal Court watched it, declared it obscene and signed warrants. The film was seized and the manager, Saul Heller, the projectionist and the ticket taker were arrested. In September a panel of three judges ruled it hard-core pornography, and Heller was fined 250 dollars⁶.

On 25 June 1973, in Heller v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled by five votes to four that the seizure had been lawful, because a judge had seen the film first, and sent the case back to be judged under the new Miller test for obscenity⁶.

Selling Little Joe

Trash opened on 5 October 1970 at Cinema II on Third Avenue, without an MPAA rating, under the credit "Andy Warhol Presents". Joe is now a heroin addict on the Lower East Side, living with Holly, played by Holly Woodlawn. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote that his physique was "so magnificently shaped that men as well as women become disconnected at the sight of him"⁷.

That sentence sums up how the films were sold. Warhol's name brought in the art crowd and the curious; Dallesandro's body was the other attraction, admired, as Canby noted, by men and women alike. In April 1971 he was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Heat (1972) moved the character to Los Angeles, as a former child actor who hustles a faded film star, played by Sylvia Miles, in a parody of Sunset Boulevard. It was shown at the Venice festival that summer.

Dallesandro has always talked about the nudity without drama. In 1998 he told Index magazine, "I was the first male to be completely, freely nude in a non-pornographic way on film." In the same interview he said of his gay fans, "I think it's wonderful to have an audience that loves me"⁸. In 2024 he added that he never looked forward to undressing: it was in the script, so he did it⁵.

His image kept working long after the films. He said he was the model for the photograph of a man's jeans on the cover of the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers (1971), a claim the cover's designer disputes⁹. A still of him from Flesh, bare-chested, was used in 1984 on the cover of the first album by the Smiths.

Little Joe on the radio

Lou Reed had come out of the Factory too: in 1966 and 1967 Warhol managed his band, the Velvet Underground. In 1972 Reed released Transformer, produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, and its single Walk on the Wild Side reached the top ten in Britain and number 16 in the United States¹⁰.

Each verse is a portrait of someone from Warhol's circle: Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Joe Campbell of My Hustler as the "Sugar Plum Fairy", and Dallesandro under his Factory nickname, Little Joe. His verse describes a young hustler who never gave anything away for free, which matched the character of Flesh rather than the man¹⁰.

Rome, Paris and the long way back

Morrissey's last two films with Dallesandro were made in Italy with the producer Carlo Ponti: Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), released as "Andy Warhol's". Dallesandro stayed in Europe. He told Bruce LaBruce that he had wanted to stop making art films there, but was told that audiences expected them of him⁵.

He worked with Louis Malle in Black Moon (1975), with Serge Gainsbourg opposite Jane Birkin in Je t'aime moi non plus (1976), with Walerian Borowczyk opposite Sylvia Kristel in La Marge (1976) and with Jacques Rivette in Merry-Go-Round, shot in 1977, as well as in Italian crime films such as The Climber (1975). He worked there on the strength of his reputation as a cult figure⁹.

By the end of the decade his career had stalled. He returned to the United States in 1979, settled in Los Angeles and came back as Lucky Luciano in The Cotton Club (1984), then in John Waters's Cry-Baby (1990) and Steven Soderbergh's The Limey (1999). In 2009 the Berlin festival gave him a special Teddy Award for his contribution to the acceptance of LGBT people and culture⁹.

Warhol himself had moved on long before. Around 1970 he stopped distributing his earlier films, and for years they were hard to see; from 1984 the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum began to preserve and show them again. By then the hustler of My Hustler and Flesh had found a second home in gay adult cinema, which took his frankness and dropped the irony. The wider story of those years is told in the chapter on Out on the screen.