Taylor Mead

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

“After seeing Taylor Mead’s diaries I can’t look around myself anymore. There is so much to see! So now I sit with my back to nature, like Gertrude Stein.” – Julian Beck, The Living Theatre, Paris.

“The film flickers through a millennium of culture as it would appear to a tourist. It is an intense film, yet there is an incredible wealth of information surprisingly accessible. Aside from the exciting experience itself, the breakneck history lesson is a reminder that the mind can move in lightning steps: The plodding way information is typically presented is an insult to mental capability.” - Bartlett Naylor

"My home movies which weigh 2 pounds so far began in Mexico City where I got bored and bought a 50-ft. Keystone at National Pawn Shop-I was immediately turned on-to the City, to Mexico-it really makes a difference-and in 16mm-but I wanted to shoot in color and it costs about 10 dollars/50 ft. in Mexico so I had to push single frame button much of the time-oh me, but its lovely anyway-I kept pushing once I crossed border into U.S. and N.Y. and Malibu" - T.M.

"N.B. Sound On Cassette. Sync beginning of sound with image before man in a red sweater. Generally, start cassette while film leader is seen" - Filmmakers Coop description