Maas was born in
Lindsay, California, and graduated from
State Teachers College at San Jose. He came to New York in the 1930s and continued his education at Long Island College and
Columbia University. He was the husband of filmmaker
Marie Menken. The couple, married in 1937, achieved some renown in New York City's
modern art world from the 1940s through the 1960s, both for their
experimental films and for their salons, which brought together artists, writers, filmmakers and intellectuals. Maas had extramarital homosexual relations, but Menken apparently did not resent them; their shouting matches were instead a kind of "exercise". According to their associate
Andy Warhol, "Willard and Marie were the last of the great bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank—their friends called them 'scholarly drunks'—and were involved with all the modern poets." Maas died in
Brooklyn Heights on January 2, 1971, four days after Menken had died of an alcohol-related illness. He was cremated. The Maas/Menken materials and letters are at the
University of Texas at Austin. A selection of them is on deposit/loan (in Trust) at the
Anthology Film Archives in New York. The Willard Maas Papers—a collection of about 500 letters, manuscripts, page proofs, photographs, drawings, play scripts, and film scripts from 1931 to 1967—is housed at
Brown University. ==Films==