Nick Zedd, East Village transgressive filmmaker, dies at 63

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Nick Zedd, a leader of the 1980s East Village underground film scene, died in Mexico City on Feb. 27. He was 63. The cause of death was reportedly complications from cirrhosis of the liver, cancer and hepatitis C.

Sporting a constant scowl, a gaunt look and punk style, Zedd was a central figure in the Cinema of Transgression. Others in the movement — whose name he coined — included Richard Kern and David Wojnarowicz.

Like others in the scene, including Lung Leg, Lydia Lunch, Rockets Redglare and Casandra Stark, his name was made-up. He grew up James Harding in suburban Maryland to conservative, middle-class parents.

A Vice article in 2004 by Avi Davis, “Why Cinema of Transgression Director Nick Zedd Stayed Underground,” is considered a good backgrounder on the edgy filmmaker.

According to Davis, “Zedd’s father worked as a mail-classification specialist, and conservative groups often sent him publications they wanted banned from the postal system due to their ‘subversive’ or ‘pornographic’ nature: everything from pinup calendars and mild S&M to weird stuff featuring women on broomsticks.”

Zedd moved to New York in 1976 to study at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. According to Davis, “He found his fellow students boring and repressed. Zedd had wanted to be part of New York’s underground art scene — ‘freaks and outcasts like myself’ — ever since reading about Andy Warhol and the New York Dolls back home in Maryland. He started going to CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and found the punk scene ‘a very positive development.’”

Zedd’s film debut was “They Eat Scum” (1979). Among his more than a dozen others were “Police State” (1987), “War Is Menstrual Envy” (1992) and “Why Do You Exist” (1998). In the 2000s Zedd found a new audience by teaming up with Rev Jen (Jen Miller) and other Downtown artists on “Electra Elf,” a public-access series on Manhattan Neighborhood Network. He also acted in his own and friends’ films. He never achieved mainstream success, which he had mixed feelings about, according to Davis’s article.

Cult filmmaker John Waters and Zedd were fans of each others’ work. The “Pink Flamingos” director reportedly said, ““They Eat Scum” is maybe my favorite title in cinema history.” Both favored a campy style, as opposed to the No Wave movement exemplified by director Jim Jarmusch and others.

Zedd also penned two autobiographies, “Bleed” and “Totem of the Depraved.”

Those who knew him remembered Zedd as someone who always stayed true to who he was and his strongly held beliefs — both in his art and in his personal life.

“Nick lived the life of a Lower East Side renegade,” said documentarian Clayton Patterson. “Very interesting filmmaker. He definitely had his own style. He was a pioneer of punk-style cinéma vérité. There was nothing Hollywood about Nick. That was one of his best points.”

Patterson said in the early ’80s Zedd discovered his actors at places like the Pyramid club or art and film events or just wandering through the neighborhood.

“He could spot a good actor, someone who could work well in his films,” he said.

Patterson said the opening of “Police State,” showing Zedd ambling past graffiti-covered, abandoned buildings in Alphabet City, is an iconic scene that captures the era.

“ “Police State,” the intro is as good as any,” he said. “It looks like “Desolation Alley Lower East Side,” Dresden after the war. The cinematography is brilliant, where he’s walking down the street toward the camera, with the boots, the black overcoat, the hair. He defined the style.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7AHfnA-8WM

In the movie, Zedd gets his penis cut off by a police interrogator played by Rockets Redglare. Shock value was Zedd’s stock-in-trade.

Casandra Stark was just out of her teens and studying film at the School of Visual Arts when she met Zedd, who was eight years older. She eventually acted in “Go to Hell,” which she co-directed with him.

She had left home in Connecticut in search of a more authentic artistic life in New York City. At the time Zedd was living on Fourth Street off of Avenue B in the same building as Madonna. Stark isn’t sure where they met, maybe at one of his film screenings in the neighborhood.

“I started out helping him, just carrying the projector,” she said. “Then it got more involved. We were in each others’ films and Richard Kern’s, too. I wound up dropping out of film school. To be 21 and part of the film world was pretty interesting and fun. … When I met him, he had already made “They Eat Scum” and “Geek Maggot Bingo.””

Describing the film scene back then, she said, “There was a gravity of misfit artists. We were all in each others’ films. I mean, no one was getting paid. … We would sell our films on VHS at our local video store, Kim’s, and through mail order.

“Nick definitely had a strong personality,” she recalled. “He was definitely into shock value. He could be offensive, but it was all part of what he wanted to project to the world. He would drop his guard, but not often. He was definitely a character — he played it to the end. I was always amazed that some people don’t change their aesthetic from their 20s to their 40s and 50s.”

She said Zedd helped her evolve into her own persona of Casandra.

“Just sort of negate the culture you come from,” she said. “In my case, it was Italian-American Catholicism and I needed another persona to break through that.”

She and Zedd were in a relationship for nearly two years but it wasn’t easy.

“He was so moody,” she said. “He’d get angry and banish me to the roof and I’d have to sleep there. On and off…it was pretty volatile.”

Today Stark is a high school English teacher in Florida. Feeling that Zedd influenced her to go too far in the direction of shock value, she has since edited out the raunchy ending of her movie “Wrecked on Cannibal Island.” It originally ended with her boyfriend making up with her after a fight by performing a sex act on her on an East Village rooftop. Both versions can be found on the Internet, though.

Rev Jen also was in a relationship with Zedd, who was 16 years older than her, but it, too, flamed out.

Davis wrote that Miller told him Zedd was “dictatorial” and a “sociopath” to work with, adding, “Their romantic relationship was just as rocky. Jen never trusted Zedd after finding journal entries in which he described making out with Italian horror-flick babe Asia Argento.”

As an outsider artist, Zedd never enjoyed commercial success with his films. Among the various jobs he did to earn cash was driving a cab. Peter LeVasseur, a former East Village squatter, recalled the sight of a wasted-looking Zedd trying to cut it as a hack in the mid-’80s. Like many Downtown creatives back then, Zedd did his share of drugs. As LeVasseur spoke, he frequently burst out into guffaws at the memory.

“There was a taxi garage, Ann Garage, on W. 21st Street that all the East Village radicals, artists, musicians and misfits would go to for work,” he said. “And he stood out as the most disoriented of the whole bunch, with his pallor, sunken cheeks and complete disorientation from drugs, and the multicolored hair — it was faded purple, green, reddish, blended.”

“He would show up for work, obviously shouldn’t have been driving the vehicle. He would come in a few hours early for what they called ‘shape-up,’ when they would figure out what cab you would get — and he was never in shape. You could spend a few hours in shape-up and come off drugs.”

The assumption is that Zedd got hep C from using heroin. Others who dabbled with smack during that period also succumbed to liver cancer, like well-known East Village squatter Michael Shenker. But some, like performance artist Penny Arcade, for one, who have taken a regimen of prescribed treatment, have beaten the disease.

“It had to be from intravenous drug use,” LeVasseur said of Zedd. “He seemed to be on heroin and coke — both were fashionable at the time, the combo. This was when he was at his deepest, worst part. The pallor, his eyes and sunken cheeks. If you got in his car you’d be afraid.”

More insight about Zedd comes from a chapter he wrote about himself in the 2005 book “Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side,” edited by Clayton Patterson, Paul Bartlett and Urania Mylonas.

“The idea that you have to tell a story is nonsense,” Zedd writes. “A movie can be anything you want it to be. It can be a diary. It can be an assault. It can be a prayer. A story can be hidden.

“Much of what we learn has to be unlearned,” he writes at another point. “Absolute certainties crumble with time. Hierarchies try to retain the illusion of certainty. To transgress is to resist, to question and escape the confines of capitalism.

“Film can overthrow the powers that be only by making no concessions to the general public or the dominant ideas of our epoch,” he declares. “This means insurrection. I’m here to berate anyone who needs to be inspired.”

In addition to fighting the powers that be, Zedd was also known to lash out at people in bars.

“A committed group of plotters toe the line in excluding me and others from inclusion in Jack’s existence,” he writes in “Captured.” “They remind me of the drama queens who have blackballed me from showing movies in nightclubs, due to a bottle I threw at the head of a malignant clown begging to be silenced.”

Jack is a reference to Jack Smith, the Lower East Side underground film pioneer.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, given his confrontational, antiauthoritarian nature, Zedd was an ardent COVID anti-vaxxer. John Penley, a former East Villager now living in Las Vegas, stays connected to his friends from his years in the neighborhood, and is incensed at the vaccine deniers among them. Penley said Zedd was all about being “in your face,” so he could appreciate the following criticism being leveled at him, even in an obituary.

“I just heard that Nick Zedd died of hep C and other things caused by hep C,” he said. “There are good treatments for hep C that have completely cured many people. But I doubt that he tried this since he also was a COVID denier at a time when bodies were stacking up in Mexico City, where Zedd lived. So many bodies, they had to do mass burials and cremations, where thick clouds of black smoke were making the area where they did it unsafe to go outside. Too bad he did not trust medical professionals; if he did he might still be alive. Moral of this sad story is get tested for hep C because it can go for years, and by the time it shows up, it is too late for treatment. But if you get treated it can be completely cured.”

After meeting his partner, Monica Casanova, who is from Mexico, Zedd moved to Mexico City 15 years ago to live with her.

Although Zedd had never made much money, he was able to sell his collection of letters, artwork and “retro porn” to New York University’s Fales Library.

“Fales offered him more money for his collection than Zedd had ever made before,” Davis writes in the Vice article. “I asked Zedd if he found it ironic that he had sold his collection to N.Y.U., which many people see as a primary force in Downtown Manhattan’s gentrification. ‘I figured if they were forcing me to move out of New York, at least I could get them to pay me for it,’ he said.”

Zedd is survived by his partner, Monica Casanova, as well as a son and a step-daughter.