By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: actor, musician, and prolific outsider experimental writer and director Giuseppe Andrews, who has helmed over seventy films, including Touch Me In The Morning, In Our Garden and Trailer Town.
Many creatives featured in the Unsung Auteurs column exist, or did exist, well and truly outside the cinematic mainstream. Some have toiled far, far away from the filmmaking hubs of their respective nations, while others have created content for non -traditional release platforms, like drive-ins or the home entertainment market.
None, however, have been further outside the mainstream than Giuseppe Andrews. While some have positioned Andrews alongside Outsider Artists like Henry Darger or Daniel Johnston, this actor, writer, director, musician (and a lot more…this guy has more credits on his films than Vincent Gallo does) is too aware of film history and the movie business to be considered “naïve” in any way. Yes, Giuseppe Andrews is certainly an outsider, but he’s not really an Outsider Artist per se. By popular definition, Outsider Art is produced outside the mainstream of modern art by self-taught, untrained visionaries, spiritualists, recluses, folk artists, psychiatric patients, prisoners and others beyond the imposed margins of society and the art market. The savvy and self-aware Giuseppe Andrews does not quite fit within that framework.
Andrews’ work, however, is well and truly his own. Most frequently compared to the output of provocative cult figures like Harmony Korine and John Waters, Andrews’ no-budget video and DV projects are cast pretty much solely not just with non-professionals, but with those who live on the fringes: the homeless, the addicted, the lonely, the deranged, the broken, the lost, and the desperate. Unlike Korine and Waters, however, Andrews doesn’t just observe or depict this community…he is a part of it.
Giuseppe Andrews’ story is a singularly fascinating one. Born Joey Murcia Jr. in 1979 in Florida, Andrews’ father was Joey Murcia Sr., a Miami-based guitarist and session musician who played at one time in the backing band for The Bee Gees. Giuseppe Andrews grew up watching the outré cinema of Bunuel and Fassbinder, and made his entry into the film business when he booked some work and scored an agent via his father when he was shooting an infomercial. After dropping out of the music business, Murcia Sr. had largely raised his son in a variety of trailer parks and temporary-style housing. Young Joey Andrews (who took on his stage moniker later because he felt his birth name made him sound too young) began auditioning and going out for roles, and soon scored minor parts in films like Unstrung Heroes (1995), Independence Day (1996), American History X (1998), Pleasantville (1998) and Never Been Kissed (1999).
Giuseppe Andrews’ biggest role, however, came in 1999’s Detroit Rock City, a raunchy, ribald, wildly entertaining and cruelly underrated coming-of-age comedy built around the 1970s super-stardom of the rock band Kiss. While still appearing in mainstream films (2002’s Cabin Fever, 2007’s Homo Erectus) and TV series (Look, CSI), Andrews began writing, directing, shooting, editing, scoring and starring in his own films. He made his debut in 1999 with Touch Me In The Morning, in which he played Coney Island, a troubled young man dealing with the return of his gigolo father from prison. Coarse, profane, eclectic and weirdly poetic, Touch Me In The Morning was filmed in the trailer park where Andrews lived, and was cast with his curious collection of neighbours, many of them dealing with serious mental health and addiction issues. The film was picked up for distribution by notorious exploitation house Troma Films, whose famously iconoclastic boss, Lloyd Kaufman, became a champion of Giuseppe Andrews, releasing many of his subsequent shorts and features on DVD.
On budgets generously described as miniscule and with cheap props bought from novelty stores, Giuseppe Andrews has since made over seventy shorts and features, all boasting freaky, scatological dialogue that would make Kevin Smith blush, absurdist humour, endearingly amateurish acting by total non-professionals often wearing bizarre wigs and costumes, and a curious sense of warped humanity. In films like In Our Garden, Trailer Town, Who Flung Poo?, Okie Dokie, Period Piece, and many, many more, Giuseppe Andrews never takes an “anthropologist’s view” of his cast members; he’s right in the mix with them, and they are his actors, not his subjects.
Giuseppe Andrews’ bizarre and singular approach to filmmaking is beautifully captured by director Adam Rifkin (who directed the young actor in Detroit Rock City and Homo Erectus) in his extraordinary 2014 film Giuseppe Makes A Movie, a behind-the-scenes movie-making documentary to rival 1999’s American Movie and 1991’s Hearts Of Darkness. The shaggy-haired, rail-thin, tattooed Andrews might look like an alternative rock star, but he’s no predatory hipster looking to make a buck by putting the lives of the destitute and desperate up on screen. We see him in the trailer park where he lives, and these unusual characters are his friends and neighbours, and he wants to involve them in his creative world…he wants them to be a part of something.
Possessed of a frenetic, joyous energy and desperation to create, Rifkin captures Andrews in his quest to shoot his film Garbanzo Gas in just two days, while also taking a deep dive into the young director’s creative process. Andrews doesn’t rehearse his actors, often gives them direct line readings, and doesn’t even look at his handwritten scripts until shooting starts. “Shit could fall apart,” Andrews says in the doco. “Day to day, you never know what could happen with the cast.” Working a creative high-wire, Andrews pushes forever forward in his creative pursuits, even at one point getting hands-on by cleaning up a cast member who has literally shit himself. Something tells us you wouldn’t see, say, Martin Scorsese or Christopher Nolan doing that for their art.
“I know a lot of people wouldn’t watch these films, but they mean a lot to me…not the storylines so much, but working together, and just getting the whole experience…we have a lot of fun with it,” says Tiffany, a sweet-faced, down-on-her-luck stripper who appears in Andrews’ films and is interviewed in Giuseppe Makes A Movie. “This is a very unique individual and I love him. He’s like family to me.” Adds Miles Dougal, Andrews’ co-star from Detroit Rock City, and one of his most “normal” frequent actors. “Giuseppe makes these movies, for some reason. There’s almost a desperation to making them.”
In Giuseppe Makes A Movie, we see a filmmaker who relishes the building of a community and the simple creation of art. “It is a truly unbelievable feeling that you can get from these things,” Andrews says. “And what they mean in the general scope of things, fuck all that. They can cause beautiful, beautiful things to happen to a person’s life. They really can help people get through their life. That’s what’s so amazing about movies. So I make a film to keep being creative and hopefully make another one.”
Sadly, and of great concern, Giuseppe Andrews has completely disappeared from the filmmaking scene. Movieweb reported earlier this year that in 2015, Andrews and his girlfriend Mary (who is featured in Giuseppe Makes A Movie) completely left social media, destroyed all of his remaining films, and shut down his website. On top of that, the trailer that Andrews owned was gifted to one of his recurring actors. There has been only one alleged sighting of him years after his disappearance, with a Twitter user claiming to have seen him in New York, where he seemed panicked and was asking for people to reach out to director Adam Rifkin for help.
FilmInk doesn’t wish to speculate any further, but we just hope that Giuseppe Andrews – a singular, deeply human and wholly inclusive filmmaking talent who makes movies like nobody else – is out there somewhere, doing okay, and continuing to create in his own highly individualised way. “Stories have always engulfed my head,” Giuseppe Andrews once said. “I feel every day I wake up, there is something on me that I must make film, otherwise I need to jump off a building. It’s the only thing I am good for on this earth.”
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
