Not unlike a band on a Back from the Grave compilation that had one great first single and then stumbled off into lesser stabs later, Milligan’s filmography started with a powerful, influential little nugget.
But there is little doubt after finishing this detailed, salacious, surprisingly emotional page-turner that Andy Milligan’s life was really, truly fucked up. There’s a great line in the book: “If Broadway was the symphony, Caffe Cino was garage rock.” It points to feelings that sometimes crop up in back of any mid-century trash culture vulture’s head – that maybe much of our interest in lost, forgotten lowbrow art from the ‘60s is not just the end-product, but often the accidentally wild production, the stories around the fly-by-night characters involved, and a kind of self-created world that might not have been as crazy as we’d like to imagine.
Andy was a dime-store double of the classic 1940s Hollywood conveyor-belt directors who were loath to go off on lofty cinematic theorizing, but nonetheless held a deep love for the form. Then (circa 1961-67), he became the main and most insane playwright/director at Caffe Cino, a wild, groundbreaking, taboo-smashing dive theater in Greenwich Village that has been somewhat overlooked in our ever-expanding tales of “cool bad old New York.” Soon Milligan went uptown, a bit, to make unfathomably cheap films during the spiraling years of America’s sleaziest neighborhood, 42 nd Street, as those surrounding blocks developed into the two-bit bacchanal of myth. The implied abuse and subsequent ghastly personality that fuels Milligan throughout his crazy career constantly clashes within his merciless work ethic and gay lifestyle among the most grimy, hidden, mid-century New York City corners.Īfter getting out of the Navy, Milligan tried his hand at clothes designing and rag-shop shepherding, while engrossing himself in the S&M underground of Manhattan. Eric Davidson spoke with McDonough for PKMĪndy Milligan was a mean, crazy son of a bitch.Īs biographer Jimmy McDonough describes him throughout the beautifully expanded reprint of his incredible book, The Ghastly One, Milligan really hated his alcoholic mother. An expanded reissue of The Ghastly One has just been published.
Jimmy McDonough is best-known for his exhaustive bios of Neil Young ( Shakey), Tammy Wynette ( Tragic Country Queen) and Russ Meyer ( Big Bosoms and Square Jaws), but his first published book, The Ghastly One, about Andy Milligan, the disturbed auteur of some of the grungiest exploitation films ever made, may his finest work, championed by John Waters and called “a masterpiece” by Time magazine’s Richard Corliss.
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