The final vignette from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, which features Lower East Side staple Taylor Mead, who passed away on Wednesday. He acted in numerous Andy Warhol films, but let’s not hold that against him.

From Mead’s obituary by Douglas Martin in the New York Times: “It was as an actor in what was called the New American Cinema in the 1960s that he made his biggest mark. Warhol recruited him as one of his first ‘superstars,’ and from 1963 to 1968 he made 11 films with Mr. Mead. In all, Mr. Mead figured that he had made about 130 movies, many of them so spontaneous that they involved only one take.

The film critic J. Hoberman called Mr. Mead ‘the first underground movie star.’ The film historian P. Adams Sitney called one of Mr. Mead’s earliest films, The Flower Thief (1960), ‘the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.’

The Flower Thief, directed by Ron Rice, stars Mr. Mead as a bedraggled mystic wandering the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco with open-mouthed wonder. He carries with him his three prized possessions: a stolen gardenia, an American flag and a teddy bear.

It goes almost without saying that Mr. Mead was playing himself, as Susan Sontag observed in Partisan Review. ‘The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy,’ she wrote. ‘Nothing is more attractive in a person, but it is extremely rare after the age of 4.'”