The First Underground Movie Star: Taylor Mead at 100

The First Underground Movie Star: Taylor Mead at 100

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.

Program compiled by Bernardo Rondeau.

Ticket Price: $10 (in-person event only).

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Host or Publisher The Philosophical Research Society