The First Underground Movie Star: Taylor Mead at 100

The Philosophical Research Society and Los Angeles Filmforum present

The First Underground Movie Star: Taylor Mead at 100

Wednesday, December 18, 2024, 7:00 pm

At the Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Blvd., Los Angeles

An uninhibited screen comedian and queer icon, Taylor Mead’s centennial will be celebrated tonight with special screenings. Join us!

Introduced by William Kirkley, director of the documentary Excavating Taylor Mead.

NOTE THE CHANGE IN DAY, TIME, and LOCATION

Tickets: $10 general, free for Filmforum members with code to be emailed separately

At https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-first-underground-movie-star-taylor-mead-at-100-tickets-1075308148619?aff=oddtdtcreator

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

The Philosophical Research Society and Los Angeles Filmforum are proud to celebrate the centennial of poet, actor, filmmaker and traveler, Taylor Mead.  Poet, actor, filmmaker and traveler, Taylor Mead was a fixture of postwar America’s art and counterculture scenes, gleefully bridging the Beat movement and New York’s downtown scene. Born December 31, 1924, to a Michigan family of means, Mead left behind a job as a Merrill Lynch broker in Detroit to hitch-hike across America in the 50s, beginning a journey that would ultimately take him out of the mainstream for good. Hooking up with filmmaker Ron Rice in San Francisco, Mead starred in the instant classic The Flower Thief (1960). Spurred by the improvisational abandon of Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1957), Rice’s free-wheeling picaresque follows the adventures and mishaps of Mead’s feral innocent through the streets of North Beach. Hailed by experimental cinema scholar P. Adams Sitney as “the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema”, Rice’s film led the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman to hail Mead as “the first underground movie star.”

Relocating to New York, Mead won an Obie Award for his performance in Frank O'Hara’s The General Returns from One Place to Another in 1963 and continued acting in film, eventually racking up 130 screen credits. Mead would go on to appear in 11 films for Andy Warhol and also act for other underground luminaries such as Adolfas Mekas, Robert Downey Sr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Gregory Markopoulos and Robert Frank.

An uninhibited screen comedian and queer icon, Mead’s centennial will be celebrated tonight with a screening of The Flower Thief as well as some of his own, rarely screened 16mm “home movies” shot throughout his 60s journeys, plus a few other surprises from across his cinematic wanders.

William A. Kirkley is a Los Angeles native who at a young age developed a deep interest in filmmaking, graphic design, and photography. His formative years were spent making documentaries and music videos in Los Angeles and New York. His commercial and digital work for clients like Amazon, PetCo, Heineken, Reebok, SOS Children’s Villages, and Chevrolet, has a documentary style and a focus on real people.  William is currently in production on “Radical Love”, a feature documentary on the prolific, radical chic legal husband and wife team, Michael and Eleanora Kennedy, who defended The Weather Underground, The Black Panthers, and countless other revolutionaries against the US Government, became targets of the FBI and went on the run.  William's previous documentary feature film Orange Sunshine premiered at SXSW 2016 and won multiple awards, including two Best Documentary awards. Orange Sunshine sold exclusively to Amazon. William’s first feature documentary film, Excavating Taylor Mead on the Andy Warhol Superstar and poet, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005 to critical acclaim. It was named by ArtForum magazine as one of the top 10 films of the year and was included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial.

Program compiled by Bernardo Rondeau.

Special thanks to Robert Schneider of The Film-Makers' Cooperative

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