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Andy MilliganAndy Milligan was a director of exploitation films during the 1960s and 1970s. Milligan was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA either on January 31 or February 1 in 1929. He was known as an "army brat." His father was a colonel in the U.S. Army and moved the family around the country a lot. But he was also an abusive, alcoholic, tyrant of the household while his wife, Marie Gladys, was an overweight, neurotic alcoholic, which served as the basis for scores of her son's characters that he wrote for his films. After finishing high school, Milligan joined the U.S. Navy and eventually settled in New York in the early 1950s where he dabbled in acting on stage and opened a dress shop. During the early 1960s, Milligan turned to film making as a change of pace for his life. He met some of the actors for his early films at Caffe Cino; a small Greenwich Village coffeehouse for men that served as a hothouse for rising theater talent like Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, and John Guare. In 1963, Milligan brought that feeling to his first movie, the gay short Vapors. Set in the notorious St. Mark's Baths, it was written by Hope Stansbury, the raven-tressed beauty who would star in his later films. Milligan then hooked up with famed sexploitation producer William Mishkin and made 11 features, all shot with a 16-mm Auricon camera on short ends (unused snippets of film from regular shoots). Some of those include Depraved! (1967), Seeds ("Sown in Incest! Harvested in Hate!"), and Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973). Many of these early works play like bizarre moral tales where sleazy characters get violently paid back for their excesses. The director also traveled to London in the late '60s to shoot exploitation horror flicks like Torture Dungeon, The Body Beneath, and the riotously titled The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! Fittingly, Milligan set up shop in a Victorian mansion located on Staten Island within walking distance of the ferry and his own house. The House soon became "Hollywood Central," where he filmed most of his movies with budgets ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. Milligan was a one-man army, with writing, directing, building sets, and sewing costumes for splatter epics like The Ghastly Ones (1968). His usual stock company (Stansbury, Neil Flanagan, Hal Borske) was often joined by Staten Island locals who were dragged into performing. Milligan was briefly married one of his actresses, Candy Hammond, who starred as Pussy Johnson in Gutter Trash (1969). But almost no one took the wedding seriously because Milligan was unambiguously gay and an avowed misogynist. The service took place at the Staten Island house, which was still decorated for a movie shoot. Afterwards, Milligan cruised gay bars that night to celebrate. By the late 1970s, Milligan relocated to Los Angeles to continue his film making while he also made a living with running a handful of theater and production groups. Andy Milligan was heavily into S&M and had very few serious relationships (all with men). The friends he did have were as emtionally troubled as he was. A Vietnam veteran named Dennis Malvasi, who once drifted into Andy's troupe, made headlines in March 2001 when he and his wife were arrested for aiding the flight of fugitive James Kopp, the suspected murderer of a New York abortion doctor. One boyfriend, Wayne "Human Toothpick" Keeton (so-named for his gaunt physical build), was a good-natured Louisiana hustler who starred in Monstrosity in 1988. Keeton's death from AIDS in 1989 hit Milligan hard, and he soon began having his own health problems when Milligan learned shortly afterwards that he too had contracted AIDS, apparently from Keeton. With no insurance, little money, and the era of exploitation films long over, Milligan went into a reclusive decline until his death on June 3, 1991 at age 62.
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