“It ain’t easy being a sex symbol.”
Neil Flanagan (billed as Lynn Flanagan) as Cherry Lane in Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973)
It’s hard times for sex symbols indeed in underground writer-director Andy Milligan’s lost 1973 exploitation classic. This cautionary tale of a streetwalker who robs every man she runs into until she meets Mr. Right is only slightly less dramatic than the life of its creator. It also offers a fascinating look at life on New York’s 42nd St. before it became Disney-fied.
Fleshpot on 42nd Street was the last of 11 films Milligan made for grindhouse producer William Mishkin. It follows the exploits of Dusty Cole (porn star Laura Cannon, billed as Diana Lewis), a street hustler who has been living with a man in exchange for sex. When he demands she clean up the place and get a job, she steals anything she can carry and hits the streets. There she runs into Cherry Lane (Flanagan), a cross-dressing hooker who invites her to live with her. While hanging out at a bar that caters to hookers and drag queens, she meets Bob (porn star Harry Reems, billed as Bob Walters), an innocent young man who offers her a life of suburban bliss in Staten Island. But can Dusty escape her past to build a new life?
Milligan was a playwright and director who pioneered in the development of off-off-Broadway with productions at Caffe Cino and Café La Mama. In 1963, he filmed Caffe Cino stalwart Hope Stansbury’s short play “Vapors,” about a night at a gay bath house, with a cast of actors he had met working in theater. In 1967, he started his long association with Mishkin, who had become a leading distributor of sexploitation films by using salacious titles and ads to publicize relatively tame European imports. Starting with The Naked Witch (1967), Milligan made a series of sex films that, now considered lost, were reputed to contain quirky scenes and strong performances. To take advantage of the popularity of Herschel Gordon Lewis’ ultra-violent horror films like Blood Feast (1963), Milligan started making his own horror films in 1968 with The Ghastly Ones. Mishkin soon joined him in the horror field, producing Milligan’s Torture Dungeon and Bloodthirsty Butchers (both 1970), among others.
By 1972, the market for horror was waning. Feeling Andy Warhol’s experimental films like Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970) had been inspired by their earlier sex films, Milligan and Mishkin decided to produce their own sex-art film. The result was Fleshpot on 42nd Street. Milligan shot without permits on real 42nd Street locations (in one scene, you can spot two people in the background who run off after realizing they’re being filmed) and at his home in Staten Island. Among those he enlisted from his theater contacts were Flanagan, an award-winning actor who had originated the title role of the drag queen in Lanford Wilson’s groundbreaking “The Madness of Lady Bright” at the Caffe Cino, Earle Edgerton and Dorin McGough.
Mishkin marketed the film with taglines like “Wilder than you can imagine!” and “Explicit beyond belief!” With more time devoted to scenes of the Times Square demi-monde than to sex scenes, the film may have been a disappointment to hardcore fans, particularly with the rise of “porno chic,” slickly produced porn films following in the wake of Deep Throat (1972). Fleshpot on 42nd Street was released in both X and R-rated versions, with the main change being in the aspect ratio. The R-rated version is shown in wide-screen format, 1.85:1, which crops out the more salacious portions of the sex scenes. It also has the unfortunate effect of throwing off the framing in the dramatic scenes so that people frequently fall out of frame when they sit down. The X-rated version was printed in 1.37:1, which shows much more of the naughty bits during the sex scenes, which also have had some footage restored.
Fleshpot on 42nd Street is pure Milligan in that the stock music often doesn’t quite match the action and the characters are very much at the service of the plot. It’s also somewhat self-referential. At one point, Cherry suggests taking in a horror double bill of Milligan’s Torture Dungeon and Bloodthirsty Butchers. The bar at which Cherry and Dusty hang out is decorated with posters from La Mama, where Milligan had worked as director and playwright. The film reflects his bleak worldview. In Milligan’s films, families — even chosen families like Dusty and her friends — are dysfunctional to an extreme, and sex is a commodity, a fact that dooms women to inescapable roles as either victims or con artists. That and the energy of his actors, particularly Flanagan and Cannon, have made this film a favorite among Milligan’s fans.
Biographers have pointed out that Andy Milligan’s themes are deeply personal. He was raised by an Army officer father who moved the family around constantly and an alcoholic mother who abused her children physically and emotionally. After Navy service, Milligan settled in New York, where he ran a dress shop by day and acted at night. Eventually he moved into directing and playwriting, which led him to filmmaking. Although he was gay, Milligan married Candy Hammond, who had acted in some of his films. Whether the marriage was a joke or a cover to make it easier to raise production money, they divorced a year later. Over time, Milligan became increasingly abusive to those working with him and began exhibiting other signs of instability. When his last New York theatre company closed in 1985, he moved to Los Angeles, where he made his last three films. Milligan was already in poor health when his lover died from HIV complications in 1989. He tried to keep his condition secret, for fear it would keep him from raising money for further film and theatrical projects, but eventually opened up to long-time collaborator John Miranda, who became one of his care givers and supported him financially. Milligan died in 1991 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Interest in Milligan’s career was revived when his friend Jimmy McDonough published The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan in 2001, followed by Rob Craig’s Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan 10 years later. Something Weird and the American Genre Film Archive released a clean print of Fleshpot on 42nd Street in 2018 that introduced the film to a new generation of fans. After years of being derided as one of the worst filmmakers of all time, Milligan is developing a devoted cult drawn by his bleak but consistent worldview and his ability to get strong performances from actors in genres whose casts are usually among the worst of the worst.
by Frank Miller
Producer: William Mishkin
Director-Writer: Andy Milligan
Cinematography: Andy Milligan
Cast: Laura Cannon (Dusty Cole), Neil Flanagan (Cherry Lane), Harry Reems (Bob), Paul Matthews (Jimmie), Earle Edgerton (Sammy), M.A. Whiteside (Susie Simmons), Dorin McGough (Sally Simmons).
