Taylor Mead
Ranked #7,972 in Books, Poetry & Writing, #283,657 overall
Taylor Mead
Taylor Mead (born December 31, 1924 in Grosse Pointe, Michigan) is a writer and performer who starred as Tarzan in Andy Warhol's Tarzan, and in Ron Rice's beat classic The Flower Thief, in which he "traipses with an elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafes..."
Biography
Film critic P. Adams Sitney called The Flower Thief "the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema." Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman called Mead "the first underground movie star." In the mid 1970s, Gary Weis made some short films of Mead talking to his cat in the kitchen of his Ludlow Street apartment on the Lower East Side called "Taylor Mead's Cat."One film of Mead extemporizing on the virtues of constant television watching aired during the second season of Saturday Night Live.
Mead lives in New York City, and continues to regularly perform and read poetry at The Bowery Poetry Club. His latest book of poems is called A Simple Country Girl. He was the subject of a documentary called Excavating Taylor Mead, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005.
The film shows him engaging in his nightly habit of feeding stray cats in an East Village cemetery after bar-hopping, and features a cameo by Jim Jarmusch, in which Jarmusch explains that once, when Mead went to Europe, he enlisted Jarmusch's brother to feed the cemetery cats in Mead's absence. Mead appeared in the final segment of Jarmusch's 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes. He has been "a beloved icon of the downtown New York art scene since the 60s."
Filmography
- The Flower Thief directed by Ron Rice (1960)
- Lemon Hearts directed by Vernon Zimmerman (1962)
- Too Young, Too Immoral directed by Raymond Phelan (1962)
- Hallelujah the Hills directed by Adolfas Mekas (1963)
- Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man directed by Ron Rice (1963)
- Tarzan and Jane Regained...Sort Of directed by Andy Warhol (1963)
- Couch directed by Andy Warhol (1964)
- Taylor Mead's Ass directed by Andy Warhol (1964)
- The Illiac Passion directed by Gregory Markopoulos (1967)
- Imitation Of Christ directed by Andy Warhol (1967-69)
- The Nude Restaurant directed by Andy Warhol (1967-68)
- Lonesome Cowboys directed by Andy Warhol (1967-68)
- The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez directed by John Chamberlain (1969)
- Brand X directed by Win Chamberlain (1970)
- C'est vrai! (One Hour) directed by Robert Frank (1990)
- Last Supper directed by Robert Frank (1992)
- "Taylor Mead Unleashed" (1996) directed by Sebastian Piras
- Ecstasy In Entropy directed by Nick Zedd (1999)
- Coffee and Cigarettes directed by Jim Jarmusch (2003)
- Excavating Taylor Mead directed by William A. Kirkley (2005)
- Electra Elf: The Beginning directed by Nick Zedd (2005)
- Man Under Wire directed by Josh Bishop (2006)
Further Reading
Books by Taylor Mead
Taylor Mead, A Simple Country Girl (Bowery Poetry)
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Books By Taylor Mead
Related Reading
Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties
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DVDs
Andy Warhol's Women in Revolt
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Spotlight!
13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests
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Release Date: 04/07/2009
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Links
- Taylor Mead: Warhol's first movie star talks about acting ...
- Taylor Mead: Warhol's first movie star talks about acting, sleeping with Montgomery Clift, and how he could have warned Andy if only he read his mail from ...
- DC's: Taylor Mead Day
- yells Taylor Mead. "Manager! The paparazzi are killing me!" In fact, there's only one photographer snapping pictures, and by now the staff of the Pink Pony, ...
- Factory Workers Warholites Remember: Taylor Mead - Interview Magazine
- Writer and actor Taylor Mead's turns in Ron Rice's seminal experimental film classic, The Flower Thief (1960), and, later, as Tarzan in Andy Warhol's Tarzan ...
- Taylor Mead:A Clown Under... | Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
- If he had decided to live in Paris instead of New York, they'd have built several monuments to Taylor Mead a long time ago. -Gary Indiana ...
- Internet Archive: Details: Taylor Mead and Tom Hompertz ...
- Taylor Mead and Tom Hompertz interviewed by Claire Clouzot, 1968. Cast members discuss Andy Warhol's film Lonesome Cowboys. Also present were Bruce Haines ...
- Taylor Mead and Andy Warhol
- Taylor Mead was born December 31, 1924 (VVM) in Chicago, Illinois (imdb).He was "one of the first underground film stars, starting out in North Beach in San ...
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