Plot
Trash follows Joe (Joe Dallesandro), a heroin addict wandering through New York City over the course of a single day. Living with his dramatic but devoted girlfriend Holly (Holly Woodlawn), Joe moves through a series of loosely connected encounters shaped by his addiction, apathy, and physical unresponsiveness. Their Lower East Side apartment serves as the film's center, where arguments, reconciliations, and improvised schemes—such as Holly's attempt to secure welfare benefits—play out.
Joe drifts from one situation to another, meeting an array of eccentric characters, including a go-go dancer (Geri Miller), a welfare investigator (Michael Sklar), and the frustrated upper-class couple played by Jane Forth and Bruce Pecheur. Each vignette blends absurdity, bleak humor, and moments of tenderness, revealing the instability and codependency at the heart of Joe and Holly's relationship.
By nightfall, Joe and Holly return home, exhausted but still tied to each other, the film ending without resolution—only the quiet continuation of their chaotic routine.
Production
The film was shot in the basement of director Paul Morrissey in New York City in October 1969. [3] [4] 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. [5] "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. [5]
Although Paul Morrissey is credited as the writer, the dialogue was improvised. [5] "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. [5]
Release
Trash premiered at Cinema II in New York City on October 5, 1970. [6] The same day, an advertisement appeared in local newspapers, signed by Donald S. Rugoff, the theater's owner: "A warning about 'Trash.' It is an X-rated film. No one under the age of 17 will be admitted. It is, in my opinion, not an erotic or 'sex film.' I believe 'Trash' is a very good, sometimes great, movie. I know that it is not a film for everyone, that some people will be offended by its strong language and/or strong images." [7]
The film opened at the Luitpold Theater in Munich on February 18, 1971. [8] The film was shown at the London Film Festival in November 1971. [9]
Reception
Director George Cukor praised Holly Woodlawn's 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. [10]
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." [11]
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." [6]
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.' [12]
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." [13]
Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe slammed the film as "worthless excess of an amateur rank beneath consideration." [14]
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." [1]
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". [15]
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." [16]
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