Filmed over the Labor Day holidays of 1965, My Hustler belongs to a period of transition for the Andy Warhol Cinematic Universe. Collaborators such as Chuck Wein (credited here with “written direction”) and Paul Morrissey (behind the increasingly mobile, sync-sound 16mm camera) were moving the Factory production away from single-take, silent films and into more complex arrangements featuring actors, dialogue, and feints at narrative situations.

My Hustler consists of two extended conversations, first as a Fire Island host (the outrageously camp Ed Hood) contemplates the recumbent figure of the beach Adonis (Paul America) he has hired for the weekend, and then as the newcomer learns a few tricks of the trade from an older colleague (Joe Campbell). A hit in its midnight engagement at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, My Hustler became one of the first Warhol films to escape the downtown orbit and open at a commercial theater in midtown, where it was reliably panned as “sordid, vicious and contemptuous” by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times.