By the time Paul Morrissey made
Flesh, he had already made a dozen short, silent films in the early 1960s and several films alongside
Andy Warhol, including
My Hustler (1965) and
Chelsea Girls (1966).
Flesh marked his feature film debut. Warhol and Morrissey conceived
Flesh while Warhol was convalescing following an
attempt on his life by
Valerie Solanas.
John Schlesinger was filming
Midnight Cowboy (1969), which featured a party scene with several members of Warhol's entourage, including
Viva and
Ultra Violet who, with Morrissey, shot a separate scene. Warhol initially approved their participation but later resented what he perceived as a dilution of his own engagement with New York's underground scene. "They were spending three million dollars of
United Artists' money to make a story of a
hustler, and it didn't seem realistic," Morrissey later recalled. When Morrissey reported that Factory people had been used mostly as extras in
Midnight Cowboy, Warhol proposed a challenge: "Why don't you go out and make a movie like that, and we could have it out before theirs? And you could use all the kids that they didn't bother to use." This resulted in
Flesh, which was based on Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro's experience as a male hustler. Morrissey used a
16mm Auricon camera favored by Warhol for his earlier films. This camera permitted the recording of sound directly onto the film and had a maximum run time of 33 minutes. This allowed for long improvised scenes. Morrissey often included the camera's flash frames and pops, which occur when starting and stopping the camera, as an aesthetic choice. In a 1973 interview with
Fusion magazine, Morrissey said of
Flesh: "In
Flesh, the man at the end talks about the wound he’s got on his arm, that his flesh is scarred, and he’s going to pot and getting fat by not going to the gym. One girl wants an abortion- wants her flesh removed. Everyone is in a predicament relating to their flesh. Joe’s predicament is that his flesh is attractive. It was all very deliberate."Assisting Morrisey on
Flesh was
Jed Johnson, who had recently begun working at the Factory and would become Warhol's longtime partner. Despite Morrissey being credited as the writer for the film, Johnson told
After Dark in 1970 that the dialogue was improvised. "A lot of people ask if we have a working script on our movies because the dialogue is so clever … what happens, as usual, is that Paul Morrissey gives a sentence to the actors and has them improvising on a topic while the camera is rolling," he said. == Release ==