Acting
Taylor Mead was an American writer, actor and performer. Mead appeared in several of Andy Warhol's underground films filmed at Warhol's Factory, as well as in works by Robert Downey Sr., Adolfas Mekas, and Ron Rice.
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.
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.
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.
A young German Jesus-like figure journeys somewhat aimlessly through the poverty of Glasgow's Gorbals, New York, and Calcutta, encountering eccentrics and misfits as he travels, before reaching some sort of peace in Hawaii.
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.
A beat vagabond traverses San Francisco's deepest nooks and crannies, spreading about a peculiar brand of wisdom and lollygagging.
"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.
“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
An alligator terrorizes residents in a New York City apartment building, attacking them in their bathrooms.
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.
“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
"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.