These gay men latched onto actresses whose over-the-top performances unintentionally parodied their femininity, like 1940s film star Maria Montez, “The Queen of Technicolor.” She was worshipped by director John Vaccaro, Harry Koutoukas, Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel, and, of course, Warhol film star Mario Montez. “You could walk through sections of slummy areas and do a shoot, if you just minded your own business and you did your thing.” Playwright Ronald Tavel, who went on to write scenarios for Andy Warhol’s mid-1960s films, also worked on Flaming Creatures-dropping bits of plaster from a ladder onto the actors during the earthquake scene, among other tasks.Ĭritics of mass media have often denounced popular culture for rendering their audiences passive and inert, but it is hard to view these downtowners as anything but active, knowing, and quite subversive. “Jack also shot some of the scenes in Prospect Park, which wasn’t as peopled or cleaned up during those years,” Machado said. If my friends like La Monte could see me now, I would be so embarrassed, because this is like the weirdest shit. Something very weird is going on here, Conrad thought as he and others began cross-dressing.
It took three hours for everyone to apply makeup and costumes, all while the drug intake spiked.
He’d just set up and say, like, ‘Oh, you’re walking through the swamp, and there’s a mysterious creature that’s going to do this, that, and the other.’ ” At first Tony Conrad didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he helped Smith set up one Saturday to film Flaming Creatures on the roof of the defunct Windsor Theater, a tiny movie house on the Lower East Side. You were in another dimension when you were with him because he didn’t have a storyboard. Jack talked about going to the Middle East to shoot, but since he couldn’t afford to, he created that location in tenements or various places where he could create an illusion of that faraway place.
“Jack was a pure genius,” said Jack Smith’s friend Agosto Machado, “a visionary artist who had the strength and determination to carry out his vision with almost no money. In so doing, he created a template for the queer, trashy camp styles that took root downtown and eventually permeated pop culture.įrom Chapter 10 of The Downtown Pop Underground - order online, or from a local independent bookstore By channeling his love of obsolete Hollywood celebrities like Maria Montez and other tacky consumer culture detritus, Smith charged them with new symbolic meaning. As one of Smith’s characters applies lipstick, a faux ad in the background poses the question, “Is there lipstick that doesn’t come off when you suck cocks?” This gleeful assault on mainstream American values resulted in police raids and United States Supreme Court–backed censorship (the high court declined to hear an appeal, upholding the previous obscenity ruling). Smith loved trashy 1930s and 1940s Hollywood films, and his underground film’s opening sequence appropriated the soundtrack of the 1944 Maria Montez film Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. With its “disorienting framing and close-ups and lacking any real narrative continuity,” art historian Branden Joseph noted, “ Flaming Creatures was a concatenation of seemingly poor technical choices that added up to a hallucinatory new aesthetic vision.” Flaming Creatures erupted with sexually ambiguous images of gay and trans performers, with quick cutaways to penises and breasts-all of which was less prurient than surreal. Jack Smith’s highly influential underground film Flaming Creatures was shot on shoplifted black-and-white film stock, often overexposed to create a hazy white sheen.