Taylor Mead

Former Warhol Superstar and creator of the seminal sexual politics performance spectacular Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, Penny Arcade, washed up on the shores of the Lower East Side of New York as a teenager in 1967. After decades in the Downtown art world, Penny’s personal relationships with dozens of outrageous characters, from the world famous to the fascinatingly obscure, led to the creation of the Lower East Side Biography Project, an oral history of New York’s Bohemian culture from the 1950s to the present. These half-hour biographies have broadcast weekly on Time Warner Manhattan Cable Television for 20 years. Beyond Queer is a feature documentary compiled from these television interviews.

Describing herself as a 'street queen,' Johnson was a legendary fixture in New York City’s gay ghetto and a tireless voice for LGBT pride since the days of Stonewall, who along with fellow trans icon Sylvia Rivera, founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a trans activist group based in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village. Her death in 1992 was declared a suicide by the NYPD, but friends never accepted that version of events. Structured as a whodunit, with activist Victoria Cruz cast as detective and audience surrogate, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson celebrates the lasting political legacy of Johnson, while seeking to finally solve the mystery of her unexplained death.

A documentary about Anton Perich, brilliant Croatian artist, naturalized New Yorker. He worked as photographer at Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine and has been active member of the Factory since early seventies.

An alligator terrorizes residents in a New York City apartment building, attacking them in their bathrooms.

Warhol Superstar Ultra Violet (Isabelle Colin Dufresne) and Lower East Side Icon Taylor Mead (Poet/Actor/Artist) share their stories of Manhattan in the 1960s.

James Rasin's documentary “Beautiful Darling” honors American Transgender actress and best-known Warhol Superstar, Candy Darling, and her all-too-brief life and career, with a combination of current and vintage interview material, rarely seen archival photos and footage, and extracts from Darling's movies.

An astonishing journey of the images taken by William John Kennedy in the early 60's of Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol with their iconic works.

An anthology of eleven vignettes featuring star-studded casts of extremely unique individuals who all share the common activities of conversing while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

A horrific explosion creates a dimensional portal between Tromaville and its dimensional mirror image, Amortville. While the Toxie is trapped in the mirror dimension, Tromaville comes under the control of his evil doppelganger, the Noxious Offender.

Documentary about the gender-bending San Francisco performance group who became a pop culture phenomenon in the early 1970s.

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

Andy Warhol described Jackie Curtis as “A pioneer without a frontier.” In this biographical documentary, Curtis’s co-workers and friends speak of her work and her influence, along with clips from Curtis’s Warhol films as well as never-before-seen footage from her stage shows.

Takes an in-depth look at the lives and times of the people who hung out with Andy Warhol and "worked" at the Silver Factory during the Sixties, making it all click as a new counter-culture arose and began to exert its influence throughout the arts.

Documentary about American artist and former Warhol superstar, Brigid Berlin.

The film explores the memory and the legacy of the 60s counterculture through interviews with NY political activists, artists and people on the street. The mosaic of voices heard in the documentary creates a public site for memories, reflections and hopes for the future to be shared beyond the confines of one's community. An inter-generational exploration on what is left of the 60s in people's memory and consciousness.

In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.

Icon of pop art, Andy Warhol has marked the 20th century. This film pays tribute to him with the exceptional participation of Ultraviolet, never-before-seen images of the "private" Warhol and archival documents from the Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Truman Capote.

The film icon/Andy Warhol darling is interviewed is his legendary cluttered apartment.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas follows the surrealist artist around the streets of New York documenting staged public art events.

Iconic American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol is the subject of this documentary, which looks at both his life and his influence on pop culture. The film provides details about Warhol's upbringing in Pittsburgh and follows his move to New York City, where he found massive success turning pop imagery into art and eventually founded "The Factory," his famed studio and party venue. Among the many notables interviewed are Dennis Hopper, David Hockney, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

A group of unemployed theater actors survive by working as illegal money collectors. The loan shark they are working for owns an Off-Broadway theater. As he decided to play "American Buffalo" there, a bloody battle for the favorite roles begin.

A young woman who is obsessed with Buster Keaton stays in the sanatorium where the actor was once a patient.

Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.

Paul Mills is a miserable, lonely man leading a meaningless existence in a nameless city and has visions of the Spirit of Death waiting to collect him while having encounters with various people while seeking solace for his short life knowing it will end soon. Shadows in the City was the last major work of New York’s 1980s No Wave film scene. Shot over seven years in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, painter-performer Ari Roussimoff’s only fiction feature captures the urban desolation of the city in the decade before gentrification.

One of the longest handheld tracking shots in film history, It’s Real documents an hour in the street life of downtown Manhattan. Not only is it a unique record of a particular time and place—July 26, 1990, from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m. in the Lower East Side near Robert Frank’s studio (we note in a Daily News headline that after some 20 years the Zodiac killer still hasn’t been identified)—it’s also an experiment in fragmentary language, gesture, and life caught unawares. Snippets of dialogue captured in passing at phone booths and crosswalks, in alleyways, subways, and diners—chance encounters, only presumably, with people going about their day—have something of the aleatory cut-up technique of the Dadaists in the 1920s and William Burroughs and Byron Gysin in the 1950s, an effort to divine new and deeper meanings in ordinary life. — Museum of Modern Art

The Sunset Blvd. of underground cinema, and a suitably ambivalent retrospect on the star-game casualties of New York's upper depths, with Patti Astor statuesquely hysterical as a 20-year-old Norma Desmond, made up to recall Edie Sedgwick and surrounded by Warhol's lost children. We've been here before, but without the hindsight: a camera cruise along a hustler's meat-rack, kitchen-talk over cold canned spaghetti, Taylor Mead grimacing in a spastic dance, the silent stud a sullenly passive observer. Mitchell's ear for campy native wit and eye for figures in a loft-scape happily keep at bay the otherwise contagious NY ennui.

Alice ends up in the derelict houses of Coney Island and Times Square. She sinks into a wonderland of decadence and despair, into the no-mans-land of lost souls, charlatans, broken dreams and cheap perversions.

“New York plays itself, as Taylor Mead and Winifred Bryan regale in pas de deux among the trashcans and the towers. The Studiedly Goofy and the Monumentally Grand are joined in masterly pas de don’t [...] The awed couple do battle with the status quo and teach the world to dance on the head of a bin. Rice detects real dignity in Bryan and amazing grace in Mead as they essay solitary promenades through the parks, subways and streets of a wintery New York landscape. Photographed and directed by Ron Rice, edited and scored by Taylor Mead.” –Edward Leffingwell

A 1950s accountant with a restless wife grows paranoid after hiding a milk thief's corpse next door.

Set in the future, this tells of an Earth run by a conglomerate called the LaFont Corporation, which uses machines to rule its subjects. "Troublemakers" and malcontents are exiled to an artificial planet called Terra Nova. Problems arise when Terra Nova suddenly shifts its orbit and threatens to crash into Earth.

Documentary on Andy Warhol's cinema of the sixties, made for Channel 4 in association with The Factory, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art and in collaboration with Simon Field.

Tally Brown, New York is a 1979 documentary film directed, written and produced by Rosa von Praunheim. The film is about the singing and acting career of Tally Brown, a classically trained opera and blues singer who was a star of underground films in New York City and a denizen of its underworld in the late 1960s. In this documentary, Praunheim relies on extensive interviews with Brown, as she recounts her collaboration with Andy Warhol, Taylor Mead and others, as well as her friendships with Holly Woodlawn, and Divine. Brown opens the film with a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” and concludes with “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” The film captures not only Tally Brown’s career but also a particular New York milieu in the 1970s.

A gang of thieves are robbing luxury apartments in Rome, but after emptying the villa of the wealthy Mr. Douglas, the thieves are beginning to die.

Daddy kicks Candy out of the house because she’s been promiscuous and threw a big party.

In 1969, Taylor Mead complained to his friend artist Wynn Chamberlain that Andy Warhol had never paid him for any of the work he had done for him and Wynn said he would make a film especially for Taylor. Inspired by the banality of 1960's television, Chamberlain wrote and directed Brand X, an 87 minute series of faux television shows spoofing the politics and mass media of the day, complete with commercials for Sex, Sweat, Computer Dating and Peanut Butter. BRAND X follows Taylor Mead through a day in a wacky television studio as he portrays an exercise guru, a talk show host, a veteran returning from the American Civil War, a hospital patient in a soap opera, the President of the United States and a televangelist giving the Nightly Sermon. BRAND X satirizes President Nixon, the Vietnam War, sex, drugs, computers, money and race relations.

Taylor plays Carlo, a famous Italian film producer, and Cyrinda Fox plays his wife Sophia, a famous Italian movie star. Sophia, who has fired his driver Ninno, has to re-hire the driver in order to keep Carlo sexually excited so he can impregnate Sophia.

Cleopatra situates itself in the same relationship to Hollywood as the Warhol/Morrisey films of the period. It corresponds to Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton which Auder's cast watched and used as the starting point for scene by scene improvisation Auder drew his cast from Warhol's ensemble – including not only Viva and Louis Waldon, but also Taylor Mead, Ondine, Andrea Feldman, Gerard Melanga and others.

Taylor Mead plays an aging rock star who is going broke when all of his wives suddenly appear. Starring Taylor Mead, Candy Darling, Darsea D’Wilde, Susan Blond, and Nancy North. NYC 1973.

Silent movie where Taylor seduces Candy and Tiger.

A series of short clips from Max's Kansas City by Anton Perich. This is the edited version of the video in the Max's Kansas City exhibition held at the Steven Kasher Gallery from September 15, 2010-October 9, 2010.

Michel Auder’s Jesus – in which underground NY artists and Warhol superstars openly discuss their beliefs. Jesus – which premiered as a screening at The Kitchen in 1980 – mixes documentary elements such as footage of evangelical TV programs, books, cartoons, paintings, and other Jesus related imagery – with performances including Taylor Mead as a priest in the West Village and Florence Lambert playing a crucified Jesus. Also, intercut throughout are surprisingly candid interviews with Auder’s friends, family, and people he approaches on New York City streets about their faith and relationship to the world’s most famous person. Among those interviewed are Diego Cortez, Jackie Curtis, Gerard Malanga, Alice Neel (Andrew Neel’s grandmother), Larry Rivers, and Viva.

Joe Buck is a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy New York City women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida.

Produced over several years between 1962 and 1967, Grimaces shows the faces of over a hundred artists, gallery owners and critics grimacing to the camera.

The president of the United Status, who, when he isn’t at the White House— a dilapidated Victorian— conducts his top-secret affairs on a deserted beach.

Shot during Warhol's cross-county trip to Los Angeles during his second exhibition at the Ferus - the same trip during which he filmed the footage for Elvis at Ferus. Locations included Hollywood, Malibu, Venice, Pasadena, Topanga Canyon, the Santa Monica pier and the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.

Warhol's Factory visits Los Angeles.

Jack and Leo vie for the affections of Vera – who appears a little differently to each man – over the course of a series of energetic sketches, flashbacks and homages.

Based on Jerome Hill's unpublished novel, Peacock Feathers, this ensemble piece focuses on the relationship between two aging sisters.

The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.

Viva and Taylor Mead are a married couple renting an extra beach-house to a group of surfers sent to them by a Mr. Morrissey of La Jolla Realty. Their daughter, Ingrid Superstar, is pregnant and on the hunt for a husband. Mr. Mead, who is gay, tries to pawn her off to one of the surfers. Meanwhile, Viva wants a divorce from her boy-crazy hubby, who wants a surfer of his own. Tom, a surfer, is inveigled by Mr. Mead to urinate on him. In a close-up, Mr. Mead receives Tom's offering ecstatically, after which he comments, "I'm a real surfer now."

The couch at Andy Warhol's Factory was as famous in its own right as any of his Superstars. In Couch, visitors to the Factory were invited to "perform" on camera, seated on the old couch. Their many acts-both lascivious and mundane-are documented in a film that has come to be regarded as one of the most notorious of Warhol's early works. Across the course of the film we encounter such figures as poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, the writer Jack Kerouac, and perennial New York figure Taylor Mead.

At a New York City restaurant, the patrons are men, nude but for a G-string, waited on by one woman, also clad in a G-string and a G-bestringed waiter.

Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.

"Desire Caught by the Tail" - Described as surrealistic, absurd, and weird. The narrative is nonlinear and the meaning nearly impossible to decipher, the work has been praised despite, and sometimes for, its lack of message.

"The story of a shipwrecked baby reared by a kindly animal. See Tarzam, the beast-man, invent the art of painting. He meets his first human. His scene deepens from innocence to corruption and to final violence. Taylor is sublime, as always. The text is his, of course." – Edwin Denby *Contains a scene where "Tarzam" (played by Mead) gets sick from eating berries and is cured when a missionary doctor, played by Edwin Denby, administers an enema.

"Consisting of a poetic stream of razor-sharp images, the overt content of SENSELESS portrays ecstatic travelers going to pot over the fantasies and pleasures of a trip to Mexico... highly effective cutting subtly interweaves the contrapuntal developement of themes of love and hate, peace and violence, beauty and destruction."-- David Brooks.

Taylor Mead humorously bares his ass for Andy Warhol.

A man recalls the sad, short life of his narcotics-addicted brother.