# Trash (1970 film)

Trash is a 1970 American drama film directed by Paul Morrissey and starring Warhol superstars Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn and Jane Forth. The film features graphic scenes of intravenous drug use, sex, and frontal nudity.
Jo Dallesandro had previously starred in several other Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey films: The Loves of Ondine, Lonesome Cowboys, San Diego Surf, and Flesh. Holly Woodlawn, a transgender actress, made her screen debut in this film. Director George Cukor praised her performance and suggested she should be nominated for an Oscar award, but Gregory Peck said the Academy was undecided over whether to nominate her for Best Actress or Best Actor. Jane Forth, a teenaged model, also made her film debut.

## Plot

Joe Smith, a heroin addict, is on a quest to score more drugs. Joe has a problematic relationship with his on-off, sexually frustrated girlfriend, Holly Sandiago.
During the course of the day, Joe overdoses in front of an upper-class couple, attempts to fool welfare into approving his methadone treatment by having Holly fake a pregnancy, and frustrates the women in his life with his drug-induced impotence.

## Cast

* Joe Dallesandro as Joe
* Holly Woodlawn as Holly
* Jane Forth as Jane
* Michael Sklar as Welfare Investigator
* Geri Miller as Go-Go Dancer
* Andrea Feldman as Rich Girl
* Johnny Putnam as Boy From Yonkers
* Bruce Pecheur as Jane's Husband
* Diane Podlewski as Holly's Sister
* Sissy Spacek as 'a girl who sits at the bar' (uncredited, but edited out of the final film)

## Production

The film was shot in the basement of director Paul Morrissey in New York City in October 1969. Warhol's boyfriend Jed Johnson, who was the film's editor and sound engineer, told After Dark in 1970 that they did not meet Holly Woodlawn until the day her scenes were shot. "Someone had told Paul about her and Paul told that person to have Holly come up some Saturday afternoon. He met her and we began filming immediately. The fact that it all came out as well as it did was because everyone involved with our films is so creative. No one could write lines like that," he said.
Although Paul Morrissey is credited as the writer, 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," said Johnson.

## Release

Trash opened at Cinema II in New York City on October 5, 1970. The film was shown at the London Film Festival in November 1971.

## Reception

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that it was "aware of its own ludicrousness ... The humor grows out of the incongruity of the actors, the situation, the movie, the audience. 'Trash' passes right through pornography and emerges on the other side."
Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "true-blue movie-making, almost epic, funny and vivid, though a bit rotten at the core," concluding, "'Trash' is alive, but like the people in it, it continually parodies itself, and thus it represents a kind of dead end in filmmaking."
Variety wrote that the film was "the most comprehensible, least annoying and possibly most commercial of a long line of quasi-porno features from 'Chelsea Girls' to 'Lonesome Cowboys.'
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three stars out of four and wrote, "The Warhol-Morrissey world is a strange one, but in many ways, especially if taken in infrequent doses, a far more real world than the formula Hollywood drama or comedy. The actors are solidly in touch with their madness and can improvise with wit."
Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe slammed the film as "worthless excess of an amateur rank beneath consideration."
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "What Morrissey did in his first film 'Flesh' and now in this sometimes uproariously funny, sometimes desperately sad new work is to draw upon the far-out scene of the Warhol superstars and utilize the same basic setups of extended dialogs between two or three people."
Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote, "Trash is disgusting, not for what it is on screen but for what it is in the minds of the people who made it".
Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 80% from 35 reviews with the consensus: "Diving into the lives of societal outcasts with an intent to shock, this export from the Warhol Factory will reek of trash for some but is a treasure for audiences who have a taste for outré fare."