Andy Milligan
Encyclopedia
Andy Milligan was an American
playwright
, screenwriter
, cinematographer
, actor
, film editor
, producer
, and director
, whose work includes 27 films made between 1965 and 1988.
. Milligan was a self-taught filmmaker and was responsible for much of the creative activity on his films (including cinematography
and costume design
). Milligan was an 'army brat'. His father, Andrew Milligan, Sr. (1895-1985) was a captain in the U.S. Army and moved the family around the country a lot. His mother, Marie Gladys Hull (1903-1953), was an overweight, neurotic, alcoholic which served as the basis for scores of her son's characters when he began making films. Milligan's parents met and married in 1926. Milligan was close to his father, whom affectionatly called him "Junior", but had a very troubled relationship with his mother whom was both physically and mentaly abusive towards all her children as well as her husband. Milligan had an older half-brother named Harley LeRoy Hull (1924-1996), and a younger sister named Louise Milligan (1931-). In 1962, nine years after his mother's death, Milligan's father re-married a middle-aged Japanese woman, named Taka Katayama, whom he met while he was stationed in Japan and adopted Taka's teenage daughter, Kyoko, both of whom moved to Saint Paul to live in Milligan Sr. in 1964 and they remained married until his death.
After finishing grade school in 1947, Milligan enlisted in the U.S. Navy where he served for four years. After his honorable discharge in 1951, he settled in New York City where he dabbled in acting on stage and opened a dress shop.
theater movement, mounting productions of plays by Lord Dunsany and Jean Genet
at the Caffe Cino a small Greenwich Village coffeehouse that served as a hothouse for rising theater talent like Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen and John Guare. Milligan also became involved with directing theater productions at Cafe La Mama La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
. During the same period, he operated and designed for a clothing boutique named Ad Lib and used his dressmaking skills to costume many theatrical productions.
During the early 1960s, Milligan turned to filmmaking as a change of pace for his life. He met some of the actors for his early films at Caffe Cino. His first released film was a 30-minute black and white 16 mm short drama entitled Vapors (1965). The film, set during one Friday evening in the St. Mark's Baths, a gay bathhouse
for men, portrays an emotionally awkward and unconsummated meeting between two strangers. Milligan was later employed by producers of exploitation film
s, particularly William Mishkin, to direct soft-core sexploitation
and horror features, many featuring actors known from the off-off Broadway theater community.
Most of his early exploitation films play like bizarre morality tales where sleazy and amoral characters get violently paid back for their excesses. All of his films often dwell on the topics of transgression and punishment, dysfunctional family relationships, repressed sexuality, homosexuality, and physical deformity and include such titles as Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973), The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1973), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970), Gutter Trash (1969), The Ghastly Ones (1968), Depraved! (1967), and The Naked Witch (1964). Most of Milligan's early works are currently considered lost film
s.
Milligan set up his residence in a Victorian-era mansion located in northern Staten Island, within walking distance of the Staten Island Ferry
and his own house. The house soon became which he dubbed as "Hollywood central," where he filmed several of his movies. Milligan was a one-man army—he wrote, directed, built sets and sewed costumes for nearly all of his films. His usual "stock company" was often supplemented by Staten Island locals who were dragged into performing.
Milligan's first movies were shot with a single hand-held 16-millimeter Auricon
sound on film news camera. This technique was inspired by Andy Warhol
and allowed Milligan to move the camera around at will, at times punctuating violent scenes with his 'swirl camera' technique through which he would spin the camera and point it to the ground. Often working with budgets under $10,000, his movies feature very tight framing that helped cover up his very low budgets, particularly in the case of the period pieces that were most of his horror movies. His ability to make movies with such low budgets is why Mishkin often hired him and Mishkin's power on the 42nd Street
grindhouse
circuit meant that Milligan's pictures played there often.
In 1968, Milligan began to make horror movies featuring gore effects with The Ghastly Ones produced by JER and titled by Sam Sherman. In 1969 he made his next horror movie, Torture Dungeon, after which he moved to London
to make movies there after having made a deal with producer Leslie Elliot. After directing Nightbirds in London, his partnership with Elliot collapsed as he was working on The Body Beneath. William Mishkin produced three more British pictures shot in 1969 before Milligan's return to Staten Island
in 1970.
On his return to New York, Milligan directed another medieval period piece titled Guru the Mad Monk, shot for the first time with a 35-millimeter camera and filmed entirely inside a Chelsea
, Manhattan
church. This movie was released on a double feature with The Body Beneath. Through the next years, Mishkin released Milligan's British-made pictures, some with additional scenes shot in New York. The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! was Mishkin's title for one of those movies in which Mishkin had Milligan insert new killer rat scenes shot in New York.
After 1972's Fleshpot on 42nd Street, Milligan's released output was only mostly gory horror movies as he moved to the southern tip of Staten Island, then to 39th Street in Manhattan where he ran a theater until he left New York City for good in 1985. He moved to Los Angeles, California
where he shot three more horror movies as he ran another theater there.
In his non-fiction book about the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King
gives a short assessment of one of Milligan's films: "The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras." Milligan developed a reputation as a maker of bad horror movies, as a purveyor of Herschell Gordon Lewis
-type gore, as one of the worst directors of all time. The rediscovery of Fleshpot on 42nd Street in the 1990s and the release of his biography in 2001 has made more widely known his theatrical background and the context to his work. Despite his modern day recognition, most of Milligan's exploitation movies that he directed during the 1960s remain unseen for all of the film prints became lost over time and remain so to this day.
Andy Milligan was heavily into S&M and had very few serious relationships (all with men). The few friends he did have were as emotionally troubled as he was. One such friend was a Vietnam veteran named Dennis Malvasi, who once drifted into Andy's troupe, whom made news headlines in March 2001 when he and his wife were arrested for aiding the flight of fugitive James Kopp, the suspected murderer of a New York abortion doctor. One of Milligan's lovers was "human toothpick" B. "Bobby" Wayne Keeton (so-named for his gaunt physical build), whom was a good-natured Louisiana hustler who worked as a slate man and even appeared in a small part in one of Milligan's last movies that he filmed in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Keeton died from AIDS on June 20, 1989.
on the early morning hours of June 3, 1991 at the Queen of Angeles medical center in Los Angeles at the age of 62. He was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Los Angeles as he was broke at the time of his death and no one who knew him could afford a burial stone or even have a cremation for his body.
* Director only
** First and last reels of the work print and hacked-up Seeds of Sin version)
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
, screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
, cinematographer
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...
, actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
, film editor
Film editing
Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...
, producer
Film producer
A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...
, and director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
, whose work includes 27 films made between 1965 and 1988.
Biography
Andrew Jackson Milligan, Jr. was born on February 12, 1929 in Saint Paul, MinnesotaSaint Paul, Minnesota
Saint Paul is the capital and second-most populous city of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The city lies mostly on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the area surrounding its point of confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Minneapolis, the state's largest city...
. Milligan was a self-taught filmmaker and was responsible for much of the creative activity on his films (including cinematography
Cinematography
Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
and costume design
Costume design
Costume design is the fabrication of apparel for the overall appearance of a character or performer. This usually involves researching, designing and building the actual items from conception. Costumes may be for a theater or cinema performance but may not be limited to such...
). Milligan was an 'army brat'. His father, Andrew Milligan, Sr. (1895-1985) was a captain in the U.S. Army and moved the family around the country a lot. His mother, Marie Gladys Hull (1903-1953), was an overweight, neurotic, alcoholic which served as the basis for scores of her son's characters when he began making films. Milligan's parents met and married in 1926. Milligan was close to his father, whom affectionatly called him "Junior", but had a very troubled relationship with his mother whom was both physically and mentaly abusive towards all her children as well as her husband. Milligan had an older half-brother named Harley LeRoy Hull (1924-1996), and a younger sister named Louise Milligan (1931-). In 1962, nine years after his mother's death, Milligan's father re-married a middle-aged Japanese woman, named Taka Katayama, whom he met while he was stationed in Japan and adopted Taka's teenage daughter, Kyoko, both of whom moved to Saint Paul to live in Milligan Sr. in 1964 and they remained married until his death.
After finishing grade school in 1947, Milligan enlisted in the U.S. Navy where he served for four years. After his honorable discharge in 1951, he settled in New York City where he dabbled in acting on stage and opened a dress shop.
Career
During the 1950s, Milligan became involved in the nascent off-off-BroadwayOff-Off-Broadway
Off-Off-Broadway theatrical productions in New York City are those in theatres that are smaller than Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres. Off-Off-Broadway theaters are often defined as theaters that have fewer than 100 seats, though the term can be used for any show in the New York City area that...
theater movement, mounting productions of plays by Lord Dunsany and Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
at the Caffe Cino a small Greenwich Village coffeehouse that served as a hothouse for rising theater talent like Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen and John Guare. Milligan also became involved with directing theater productions at Cafe La Mama La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is an off-off Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, and named in reference to her. Located on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the theatre grew out of Stewart's tiny basement boutique for her fashion designs; the boutique's space acted as a theatre for...
. During the same period, he operated and designed for a clothing boutique named Ad Lib and used his dressmaking skills to costume many theatrical productions.
During the early 1960s, Milligan turned to filmmaking as a change of pace for his life. He met some of the actors for his early films at Caffe Cino. His first released film was a 30-minute black and white 16 mm short drama entitled Vapors (1965). The film, set during one Friday evening in the St. Mark's Baths, a gay bathhouse
Gay bathhouse
Gay bathhouses, also known as gay saunas or steam baths, are commercial bathhouses for men to have sex with other men. In gay slang in some regions these venues are also known colloquially as "the baths" or "the tubs," and should not be confused with public bathing.Not all men who visit gay...
for men, portrays an emotionally awkward and unconsummated meeting between two strangers. Milligan was later employed by producers of exploitation film
Exploitation film
Exploitation film is a type of film that is promoted by "exploiting" often lurid subject matter. The term "exploitation" is common in film marketing, used for all types of films to mean promotion or advertising. These films then need something to exploit, such as a big star, special effects, sex,...
s, particularly William Mishkin, to direct soft-core sexploitation
Sexploitation
Sexploitation, or "sex-exploitation", describes a class of independently produced, low-budget feature films generally associated with the 1960s and serving largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and gratuitous nudity. The genre is a subgenre of exploitation films...
and horror features, many featuring actors known from the off-off Broadway theater community.
Most of his early exploitation films play like bizarre morality tales where sleazy and amoral characters get violently paid back for their excesses. All of his films often dwell on the topics of transgression and punishment, dysfunctional family relationships, repressed sexuality, homosexuality, and physical deformity and include such titles as Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973), The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1973), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970), Gutter Trash (1969), The Ghastly Ones (1968), Depraved! (1967), and The Naked Witch (1964). Most of Milligan's early works are currently considered lost film
Lost film
A lost film is a feature film or short film that is no longer known to exist in studio archives, private collections or public archives such as the Library of Congress, where at least one copy of all American films are deposited and catalogued for copyright reasons...
s.
Milligan set up his residence in a Victorian-era mansion located in northern Staten Island, within walking distance of the Staten Island Ferry
Staten Island Ferry
The Staten Island Ferry is a passenger ferry service operated by the New York City Department of Transportation that runs between the boroughs of Manhattan and Staten Island.-Overview:...
and his own house. The house soon became which he dubbed as "Hollywood central," where he filmed several of his movies. Milligan was a one-man army—he wrote, directed, built sets and sewed costumes for nearly all of his films. His usual "stock company" was often supplemented by Staten Island locals who were dragged into performing.
Milligan's first movies were shot with a single hand-held 16-millimeter Auricon
Auricon
Auricon cameras are 16 mm film Single system sound-on-film motion picture cameras. Designed to be portable, the camera preceded ENG video cameras as the main AV tool of television news gathering...
sound on film news camera. This technique was inspired by Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
and allowed Milligan to move the camera around at will, at times punctuating violent scenes with his 'swirl camera' technique through which he would spin the camera and point it to the ground. Often working with budgets under $10,000, his movies feature very tight framing that helped cover up his very low budgets, particularly in the case of the period pieces that were most of his horror movies. His ability to make movies with such low budgets is why Mishkin often hired him and Mishkin's power on the 42nd Street
42nd Street
42nd Street may refer to:*42nd Street *42nd Street **"Forty-Second Street", title song from the film*42nd Street -New York City Subway:...
grindhouse
Grindhouse
A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.- History :...
circuit meant that Milligan's pictures played there often.
In 1968, Milligan began to make horror movies featuring gore effects with The Ghastly Ones produced by JER and titled by Sam Sherman. In 1969 he made his next horror movie, Torture Dungeon, after which he moved to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
to make movies there after having made a deal with producer Leslie Elliot. After directing Nightbirds in London, his partnership with Elliot collapsed as he was working on The Body Beneath. William Mishkin produced three more British pictures shot in 1969 before Milligan's return to Staten Island
Staten Island
Staten Island is a borough of New York City, New York, United States, located in the southwest part of the city. Staten Island is separated from New Jersey by the Arthur Kill and the Kill Van Kull, and from the rest of New York by New York Bay...
in 1970.
On his return to New York, Milligan directed another medieval period piece titled Guru the Mad Monk, shot for the first time with a 35-millimeter camera and filmed entirely inside a Chelsea
Chelsea, Manhattan
Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The district's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, 30th Street to the north, the western boundary of the Ladies' Mile Historic District – which lies between the Avenue of the Americas and...
, Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
church. This movie was released on a double feature with The Body Beneath. Through the next years, Mishkin released Milligan's British-made pictures, some with additional scenes shot in New York. The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! was Mishkin's title for one of those movies in which Mishkin had Milligan insert new killer rat scenes shot in New York.
After 1972's Fleshpot on 42nd Street, Milligan's released output was only mostly gory horror movies as he moved to the southern tip of Staten Island, then to 39th Street in Manhattan where he ran a theater until he left New York City for good in 1985. He moved to Los Angeles, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
where he shot three more horror movies as he ran another theater there.
In his non-fiction book about the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
gives a short assessment of one of Milligan's films: "The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras." Milligan developed a reputation as a maker of bad horror movies, as a purveyor of Herschell Gordon Lewis
Herschell Gordon Lewis
Herschell Gordon Lewis is an American filmmaker, best known for creating the "splatter film" subgenre of horror...
-type gore, as one of the worst directors of all time. The rediscovery of Fleshpot on 42nd Street in the 1990s and the release of his biography in 2001 has made more widely known his theatrical background and the context to his work. Despite his modern day recognition, most of Milligan's exploitation movies that he directed during the 1960s remain unseen for all of the film prints became lost over time and remain so to this day.
Personal life
Apart from his unhappy childhood and adolescence, Milligan had a very troubled personal life that he often avoided talking about. In 1968, Milligan married actress Candy Hammond, a North Carolina stage actress and former erotic dancer, who starred in a few of his films. The wedding service took place on February 24, 1968 at his Staten Island house, which was still decorated for a movie shoot and attended by most of the crew people working on the film as well as his father and Japanese stepmother. Almost no one took the wedding seriously because Milligan was unabashedly homosexual and an avowed misogynist. That night, Milligan was said to have cruised gay bars in New York City to celebrate. Candy Hammoned divorced Milligan the following year, apparently due to neglect as he was more focused on his filmmaking career, she and returned to her North Carolina hometown.Andy Milligan was heavily into S&M and had very few serious relationships (all with men). The few friends he did have were as emotionally troubled as he was. One such friend was a Vietnam veteran named Dennis Malvasi, who once drifted into Andy's troupe, whom made news headlines in March 2001 when he and his wife were arrested for aiding the flight of fugitive James Kopp, the suspected murderer of a New York abortion doctor. One of Milligan's lovers was "human toothpick" B. "Bobby" Wayne Keeton (so-named for his gaunt physical build), whom was a good-natured Louisiana hustler who worked as a slate man and even appeared in a small part in one of Milligan's last movies that he filmed in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Keeton died from AIDS on June 20, 1989.
Death
In poor health since late 1989, Andy Milligan died of AIDSAIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
on the early morning hours of June 3, 1991 at the Queen of Angeles medical center in Los Angeles at the age of 62. He was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Los Angeles as he was broke at the time of his death and no one who knew him could afford a burial stone or even have a cremation for his body.
Actor
- Armstrong Circle TheatreArmstrong Circle TheatreArmstrong Circle Theatre is an American anthology drama television series which ran from 1950 to 1957 on NBC, and then until 1963 on CBS. It alternated weekly with The U.S. Steel Hour.-Synopsis:...
(3 episodes, 1951–1952) - Kraft Television TheatreKraft Television TheatreKraft Television Theatre is an American drama/anthology television series that began May 7, 1947 on NBC, airing at 7:30pm on Wednesday evenings until December of that year. In January 1948, it moved to 9pm on Wednesdays, continuing in that timeslot until 1958. Initially produced by the J...
(1 episode, 1953) - The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (Uncredited, 1972)
- Legacy of Blood (1978)
Director and writer
- Vapors (1963)
- The Naked Witch (also known as The Naked Temptress) (1964, lost)
- The Gay Life (1967, documentary; credited as Gerald Jackson)
* - Compass Rose (1967, unfinished, unreleased, lost)
- The Degenerates (also known as Sex For Kicks; working title) (1967, lost)
- The Promiscuous Sex (also known as Liz; working title) (1967, lost)
- Depraved! (also known as Sin Sisters 2000 AD; working title) (1967, lost)
- Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me! (1968, lost)
- The Ghastly Ones (also known as Blood RitesBlood RitesBlood Rites is a 1968 horror film directed by Andy Milligan.-Plot:Three sisters, Veronica, Victoria and Elizabeth, receive letters from their late father's lawyer informing them of their father's wish that they spend three nights in his house on an isolated island before his will can be read...
) (1968) - Tricks of the Trade (1968, lost)
- The Filthy Five (1968, lost)
- Seeds (also known as Seeds of Sin) (1968)
** - Gutter Trash (1968, lost)
- The Bitch (also known as The Mongrel) (1968, unfinished, lost)
- The Weirdo (original version) (1969, unreleased, lost)
- Nightbirds (1969, barely released, but a print exists)
- Torture Dungeon (1969)
- Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)
- The Body Beneath (1970)
- Guru, the Mad Monk (1970)
- Dragula (1971, lost)
- The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972) (also known as Curse of the Full Moon; working title)
- The Man with Two Heads (1972)
- Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972)
- Supercool (1973, unfinished, unlreleased, lost)
- Blood (1974)
- Legacy of Blood (1978) (remake of The Ghastly Ones)
- House of Seven Belles (1979, unfinished, lost)
- Carnage (1983)
- Adventures of Red Rooster (1984) (Unreleased TV Sitcom; six half-hour episodes)
- Monstrosity (1987)
- The Weirdo (1988)
- Surgikill (1988) (also known as Screwball Hospital Central)