IN CONVERSATION WITH GRAYSON TYLER JOHNSON & JOSH JOHNSON
After directing a number of documentaries about outsider artists, filmmaker Grayson Tyler Johnson has now collaborated with his friend Josh Johnson, (director of VHS documentary REWIND THIS), to co-direct THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN. Examining the life and work of the B-movie auteur who gave us such blood splattered classics as GURU THE MAD MONK, THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! as well as transgressive works such as VAPORS, an ‘ahead of its time’ look at the gay bathroom scene in New York. Unapologetic for his lifestyle and his singular films, Milligan’s life was first chronicled in the seminal biography THE GHASTLY ONE by Jimmy McDonough. GORE IN THE STORE discusses with Grayson and Josh how they became aware of this cult cinema legend, the appeal of his works and how Jimmy McDonough came to be involved with their documentary and his own complex feelings of his friend.
GORE IN THE STORE - Andy Milligan is such an interesting figure. So I was just wondering, how did you guys first encounter Andy's work, and what were your first impressions of it?
JOSH JOHNSON - I probably heard about Andy first through mutual friends, or maybe even some sort of casual reading about various exploitation films. But he really sort of ignited inside of my mind when I went to a screening of FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET, probably about 15 years ago. I had sort of had it a little bit set up for me with what to expect, but not really enough to properly be prepared for what that kind of caustic, shrieking, kind of filmmaking style was going to be. And immediately following that, on the recommendation of a friend, I read the first edition of Jimmy McDonough's biography, THE GHASTLY ONE. This was well before the new kind of larger edition came out. So that was my initial exposure, seeing that particular film and then starting to read more about why the films were the way they were.
GRAYSON TYLER JOHNSON - Josh and I worked on a couple short documentaries together before, and I had not heard of Andy. Josh gave me a copy of THE GHASTLY ONE and didn't tell me anything about it. He just said, read this and tell me if you want to work on a documentary. And I read it, and I was like, hell yeah! I mean, it's one of the best books ever, Jimmy is just an incredible writer. So I was hooked after that.
How did Jimmy become involved with the documentary? Was he reluctant at all? Did he feel like he had said enough about Andy, or was he fully willing to collaborate with you on this?
GTJ - He was quite reluctant at first, and to be honest, I'm still not entirely sure what convinced him to change his mind. I know that when I initially reached out, he did say that he felt that he had said a lot about this, that it was a topic that was very well covered and his take on it was out there. I think ultimately, if I were to guess what changed his mind, I think he probably began to understand that this could be a way for new people to find his book, and that by putting his best foot forward and sort of putting himself out there as the sort of definitive expert, the person who knows Andy's life better than anybody, that it would actually be beneficial to these other ways that he's communicated about it before, rather than sort of canceling them out or taking away from them. So he was reluctant, and he wasn't entirely forthcoming about what changed his mind. I'm just glad that he did.
One of the things that is really surprising, just to talk about Jimmy a little bit more, is seeing him share his own misgivings about his own viewpoints on Andy's films, how he says he wishes he saw the films then for what they truly are now. How did that feel, capturing that confession on film?
GTJ - Well, it felt very important to be honest, because one of the things that really changed from our initial conception of the project as we started filming interviews and working on it, was the way in which people remembered Andy, even if the details in the book were the same, their feelings about him and their emotional state when they shared about him, was not anywhere near as dark or troubling as the book. So without Jimmy opening up about how he was maybe a bit unfair or slightly misrepresented certain things in the book, I think it would have been more confusing as to why the people in the documentary speak about him so differently than it comes across in the book. There's the obvious difference between just text on a page versus people talking and their emotions coming through, but even specific details were slightly different, so it felt really good to have Jimmy do that. I'm sure it was painful for him, but it was really necessary for the film to work.
Aside from Jimmy's book, how much research did you find yourselves doing for this?
JJ - I mean, Grayson will probably have his own take on this. But the research ended up kind of being an ongoing thing where there are things that we are still finding out now that the film is already done, that are of interest to this story. So the research sort of never really stopped at any point along the way.
What was the thing that surprised you most in your research?
GTJ - I didn't know anything about the Caffe Cino or all that stuff, before reading Jimmy's book. And then, going there with Gerry (Gerald Jacuzzo), and going down memory lane with all that, and then going to La MaMa. It's such a big chapter of history, and we just covered it in such a tiny sliver of this movie. It could be its own movie, which was sort of a challenge in the edit. I think that was probably the biggest surprise for me. Was just this huge world that we barely touched on that we uncovered in the documentary.
One of the most striking features in the documentary is the use of Andy's own voice from an audio interview. Could you tell us a bit more about this interview that runs throughout the film, and how you came across it yourselves?
JJ - Well, somebody else actually found it and made us aware of it. It's a French journalists recording from a cassette tape that he made of a phone conversation at the close of the 70s. And when that was found, it was shipped to LA and digitized. There was some damage to it, as you can hear in the film. But as far as we know, other than the recordings Jimmy made for his book, which he decided to keep for himself, it's the only existing audio, or video, for that matter, the only interview of any kind in existence of Andy. And it was a last minute thing that came after we already had a first cut of the film, and really kind of transformed the whole thing and reorganized the whole way in which we told the story once Andy's actual voice could be a part of driving it.
Was there anybody that you reached out to that was reluctant or didn't want any part of the documentary at all?
GTJ - Well, I won't say names, but there were a few people that absolutely did not want to be involved. There were a few people that wanted to be involved, but only under circumstances that were never going to be possible. And there, more than anything, were people that we wanted to interview and could not find, and in some instances, still have not found any trace of whether they're alive or dead.
Why do you think that filmmakers such as Milligan fascinate people in such a way that more mainstream figures just don't?
JJ - I think when you watch his films, it's sort of a mystery. You don't know why it is the way it is. I think there's a lot of people that are looking for that when they watch a film. They're not really looking for entertainment, like whatever's on at the theater. They're looking for some curiosity that is something to unlock. And I think Andy might be the ultimate version of that, because even if we look at the documentary, there's so many unanswered questions, and it's sort of impossible to know why the films are the way they are.
GTJ - And yet they're too intentional. You can tell that they're made the way they are, on purpose, but the methodology still kind of eludes you.
After working on separate yet similar projects, what brought you both together to collaborate on this?
JJ - We had collaborated on some other shorter things in the past, and had been looking for a bigger sort of thing to do together. And when this was presented to me, I immediately thought of Grayson as a collaborator on it, because we both have a mutual love of eccentric outsiders who are sincere about what they're doing. That's something that we both made our own work about, separately and together, and I just know that it's a subject that interests us both. So Grayson sprung to mind immediately as soon as, I had the idea in mind for this project, or as soon as it was presented to me.
Do you have a favorite Andy Milligan film and/or moment?
GTJ - My favorite is probably FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET, because that’s the first one I saw, but I have an affinity for the later ones, which I know Milligan-ites will lambast me for that, but they sort of remind me of the films that I grew up loving were like that. Like the weird box at the video store you rent to see what the Hell it is type of movie, like CARNAGE and MONSTROSITY and THE WEIRDO. Those feel like those weird movies of my youth to me, so I have a certain affinity for the later ones. I think there's a little more humor. I think maybe my favorite moment is maybe in CARNAGE, where there's a woman that's walking up to the front door to knock, and it's so long and drawn out, and there's an axe that's going to come chop her head off, and it takes so long, and the camera just keeps cutting back and forth to the axe, and when it finally cuts her head off, is like the funniest moment in cinema to me. So unintentionally, maybe intentionally, well timed, I don't know. But that's my answer. I like the later Annie Milligans. Fight me.
JJ - I don't know if I have a favorite moment, but I would probably say overall, my favorite film is FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET, not just because I think it's probably the best work that he did overall, but mostly because it doesn't have the same separation that a lot of the films have from the lived experience of Milligan himself. It's a contemporary film set in a milieu that he understands. So it feels like it's easier to sort of overlay his real life fixations onto the film while you're watching it, it feels more personal than the others, just because it offers you, possibly, by accident, more points of intersection with the real world. So when I think about Milligan, that's the film that most closely kind of exemplifies his existence to me.
How are you finding this festival run, and how the film's been received so far?
JJ - Well, it's only been shown at Tribeca, so FrightFest is going to be the second screening anywhere. But the screenings went really wonderfully in New York. The premiere had a lot of the Milligan folks, pretty much everybody who's in the film was there, and that was a really nice part of it, and we got to see the general audience react over the course of like, further screenings down the week. But I'm curious to see how it will play somewhere else in the world into a very different crowd that's expecting something different than people were expecting at Tribeca. I will say the response was a little bit dry but that's to be expected. It's a very different kind of environment, but I am excited to see it with the people at FrightFest, who are a little bit more primed for this kind of thing before they even sit down and see how they react.
Iain MacLeod
