Milton Moses Ginsberg, who directed two ambitious but eccentric films before falling into obscurity, one about the meltdown of a psychiatrist and the other about a press aide in a Nixon-like administration who becomes a murderous werewolf, died on May 23 in his apartment in Manhattan.
He was 85.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Nina Ginsberg.
Milton Ginsberg, a film editor determined to make his own movies, wrote and directed "Coming Apart" (1969), a raw black-and-white film that used a single, almost entirely static camera to document the loveless trysts and psychological disintegration of a psychiatrist, played by Rip Torn, who surreptitiously records his encounters with a camera inside a mirrored box.
"Coming Apart" received mixed reviews, at best. But the one that devastated Ginsberg was from The Village Voice's Andrew Sarris, who wrote that "if everybody in the cast had refused to strip for action or inaction, 'Coming Apart' would have crumbled commercially into a half-baked amateur movie incapable of selling enough tickets to fill a phone booth."
Ginsberg blamed that review for the film's box- office failure.
He followed "Coming Apart" in 1973 with another low-budget film: "The Werewolf of Washington," a campy political parody inspired by the classic horror film "The Wolf Man" (1941), which terrified Ginsberg as a boy, and by President Richard M. Nixon, who terrified him as a man.
In Ginsberg's film, released more than a year into the Watergate scandal, Dean Stockwell plays an assistant press secretary who turns into a werewolf at inopportune moments, like when he's bowling with the president, and murders characters based on Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John N. Mitchell.
"The film isn't advertised as a documentary," syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, "but when you think about what's been going on around this town, you couldn't tell it from the plot."
In 1975, after Ginsberg received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, he fell into a depression that lifted only after he met and married Nina Posnansky, a painter, in 1983. She and his brother, Arthur, survive him.
After the commercial failure of his feature films, Ginsberg returned to film editing. He worked on various projects, including the Oscar-winning documentaries "Down and Out in America" (1986), about unemployed and homeless people left behind in the economy, which was directed by actress Lee Grant, and "The Personals" (1998), about a group of older people in a theater group.
He was in limbo, he wrote in Film Comment in 1999, for having made "Coming Apart," which he wryly called "murder on an audience."
Milton Moses Ginsberg was born on Sept. 22, 1935, in the Bronx. His father, Elias, was a cutter in the garment district, and his mother, Fannie (Weis) Ginsberg, was a homemaker.
Ginsberg's disappointment at the response to his features was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened "Coming Apart" in 1998. MoMA has shown it a few times since.