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DIRECTED BY: Josh Johnson, Grayson Tyler Johnson
FEATURING: Hope Stansbury, Gerald Jacuzzo, John Borske, Jimmy McDonough, Alex DiSanto, Stephen Thrower
PLOT: The Degenerate recounts the life and film career of “gutter auteur” Andy Milligan through the reminiscences of his collaborators and friends, and insights from film historians.
COMMENTS: The Degenerate aims to answer the question: how did a man with a promising career as a television actor in the 1950s, who then played a pivotal role in New York’s Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, end up directing low budget exploitation and horror films for the rest of his life? The short answer seems to be a lack of business acumen and a difficult personality, but the long answer provides a genuinely fascinating and entertaining dive into Andy Milligan‘s uniquely nihilistic world.
Milligan has been dubbed “the Fassbinder of 42nd Street.” This documentary explores just how he earned that dubious distinction. Born in 1929, Milligan’s life spanned all the major innovations in the American media landscape of the 20th century. He acted in live television in the early ’50s when the medium was brand new, appearing in Kraft Theater and Armstrong Circle Theater productions that also featured Leslie Nielsen and James Dean. He was an instrumental part of the theater community centered around the off-Broadway institutions Caffe Cino and La Mama, writing, directing, and acting in plays, as well as designing stage sets, lighting, and costuming. He would make at least twenty-nine low-budget feature-length films until his death in 1991.
His creative life changed in the mid-1960s, when he bought a portable Auricon motion picture camera, a model mostly used by news reporters, which records poor quality sound. But Milligan was determined to try his hand at filmmaking, even with second rate equipment. His second film, Vapors, directed in 1965 and originally written as a stage play by friend and fellow Caffe Cino member Hope Stansbury, remains a groundbreaking work of queer cinema.
Though Vapors portrays the gay bathhouse culture of New York in a sympathetic light, given the subject matter (and a very brief shot of full-frontal male nudity) it also became Milligan’s first exploitation film, playing in the burgeoning grindhouses of NYC and LA. Since most of these theaters were open all night, they were desperate for films to fill the hours and would screen anything considered even remotely racy. This debut was both Milligan’s triumph and tragedy. He would go on to make grindhouse fare for the next twenty years.
The Degenerate provides a mostly positive view of Milligan’s determination, his creativity, and his sheer chutzpah, while never shying away from the difficulties he faced—many arising from his own surly personality. He developed a method of cranking out elaborate films quickly and on the cheap. With an average budget of ten thousand dollars, Milligan often performed the bulk of the work himself. He could be his own lighting director, set designer, or costume designer as needed, as well as handling all the (minimal) special effects and the final edits.
A voiceover from an interview conducted with Milligan in 1975 plays throughout the documentary, allowing his own words to supplement the talking heads. The majority of interviewees were close friends and frequent collaborators of Milligan, and while they may be biased in his favor, their direct memories of the film productions provide intimate insight into what acting in an Andy Milligan film was like. Not surprisingly, the experience sounds just as chaotic as the finished films.
Milligan made the transition from sexploitation to horror movies when hardcore porn took over the exploitation industry. His producer preferred not to risk any censorship battles and, since Herschell Gordon Lewis had already paved the way for extreme violence in cinema, horror was, ironically, a safer business bet. Milligan’s horror movies from the 1970s, strangely colorful pageants of cruelty and violence, often revolve around Gothic tropes like deep, dark family secrets and conniving relatives trying to cheat each other out of an inheritance. Combining garish period costumes with hysterical acting and laughably bad gore, they come across as cheaply made and slightly skewed versions of Hammer horror films, of which Milligan was a fan.
Recent years have yielded rediscoveries of his earlier black and white 1960s exploitationers, many previously assumed to be lost. This first phase of his career deepens and complicates Milligan’s cinematic legacy. It reveals how many of his typical themes, and his preoccupation with disturbingly dysfunctional families, were present from the beginning, along with the dark current of interpersonal violence (apparently a legacy of his own troubled childhood).
While The Degenerate doesn’t go into full detail on every film, it makes for a solid introduction for anyone unfamiliar with Milligan’s work, and may be more enjoyable than any of his actual movies (though your mileage may vary). It’s also a compelling companion to Jimmy McDonough’s exhaustively researched biography “The Ghastly One,” and Rob Craig’s filmography “Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan,” both recommended to anyone who wants to learn more about this impresario of trash cinema.
Milligan hasn’t seen much action on this site, though most everyone who dares to take the plunge into his feature films describes them as pretty weird. With his body of work now becoming easier to see (and to hear—his films were notorious for their sound issues), readers will be able to weigh in on Milligan’s weird credentials.
This documentary is included in the box set “Gutter Auteur: The Lost Legacy of Andy Milligan” and is not currently available separately. The set includes 2 newly-uncovered Milligan exploitation films previously thought lost: The Degenerates (1967) and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me! (1968).
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Gutter Auteur: The Lost Legacy of Andy Milligan
- Andy Milligan clawed his way from the depths of ’60s independent cinema straight to the abyss of grindhouse infamy like no other filmmaker in history.
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