Kenneth Anger was the dark and brilliant magus of Hollywood lore; a reclusive figure who had in his own lifetime assumed the status of myth or pop-culture rumour. He was virtually the Aleister Crowley of movie legend. He was the master of underground cinema and creator of avant-gardist short films treasured by connoisseurs as equivalent in importance to those of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.
But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre maudit to go with the films maudits. Anger’s genius was to present his delirious work, with all its horrendous squalor and grainy black-and-white tabloid-style photos, and whose content he later claimed to have intuited through telepathy, as a nonfictional history of scandals about legendary stars, the sort of thing withheld by the Hollywood PR machine which everyone knew had long been ruthlessly suppressing scandal and creating bowdlerised biographical accounts of actors and actresses rolling off the star machine production line.
