My Hustler

Starring the eruditely genteel Harvard grad student Ed Hood (also from Chelsea Girls, Bike Boy, and Screen Test #25) and other Factory regulars: Paul America, Joe “Sugar Plum Fairy” Campbell, Genevieve Charbin, and Dorothy Dean. From mid-January to April of 1966, due to popular demand, the film screened every night at midnight at New York’s Filmmakers’ Cinematheque. And it ran, almost continuously, from one New York cinema to another until late 1968. It opened to reviews almost uniformly negative: "It is sordid, vicious, and contemptuous. The only thing engaging about it is a certain quality and tone of degradation that is almost too candid and ruthless to be believed." Such reviews only further fueled the film’s popularity, marking, at least respective to his own work, Warhol’s near-total obliteration of the critical mechanism. On-screen and off-screen, a high water mark of self-reflexive comedy. (C.W. Winter)

Film print courtesy of MOMA