Morrissey broke out of the Warhol shadow with a surprisingly successful trilogy of films that he wrote, photographed, and directed with minimal resources from 1968 to 1972. Although all three films carry Warhol's title (Andy Warhol Presents Flesh, etc.) they are clearly Morrissey's films. True, they retain elements of what is usually considered the “Warhol aesthetic.” This Morrissey has called “exaggerated naturalism”: unconventional acting, lack of scripting, minimal camera work, the visible economy of verisimilitude, and a focus on the life-styles of the libertine and lethargic. But even where the films cohere with the Warhol aesthetic, they follow what he and Morrissey had done together, not Warhol's pre-Morrissey films, which were minimalist provocations with a single camera position. The more successful aesthetic evolved during Morrissey's control of the Factory experiments.

The trilogy also contributed to the period's revolutionary openness in its new explicitness in images both of drug use and of sexuality. After all, Hair – with its nude be-in – opened on Broadway in April 1968, and the even bawdier Oh, Calcutta! opened in June 1969. In film, Morrissey opened a new frontier in the representation of male nudity. There are more dangling penises in this trilogy than you can shake a stick at. Simply in depicting the male hustler's life in Flesh, Morrissey extended the boundaries of American cinema. Even in their adaptation of Warren Miller's The Cool World (1963), Shirley Clarke and Frederick Wiseman omitted the gay prostitute, Chester (though Clarke later confronted the character type's speech, if not deeds, in her Portrait of Jason).