Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets

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Kenneth Anger 1965 US Hollywood Babylon article in REAL Magazine ( relates to 1st Eng Lang edition-banned within 10days of publication) Indeed, Anger possessed an enormous sense of self-publicity and camp outrage, which was reflected in his erratic yet dazzling debut proper, Fireworks (1947). In this 15-minute fantasy shot over a weekend using a borrowed camera, Anger plays a teenage boy who wanders into a dream where he is raped by a gang of American sailors, followed by scenes of crude erotic metaphor involving a Roman candle.

to mention language, trying to correlate the contents is near impossible -each edition is different. Even the photo selections aren’t consistent.

Kenneth Anger, who has died aged 96, was an American cult film director and the darling of the European avant-garde, but became best-known as a bestselling spreader of Hollywood scandal.

Although the film historian Leslie Halliwell described Anger’s early work as “undergraduatish… crammed with sexual symbolism and obscurity”, when the film was premiered at a French festival, a jury headed by the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau awarded it a prize. Only one film was completed in Europe, Eaux d’Artifice (1953), a period piece shot in the Tivoli Gardens in Rome set to the music of Vivaldi, hailed by The Daily Telegraph as technically brilliant and rather beautiful. But Anger only hit his stride with his cult classic Scorpio Rising, which he made on his return to the United States. In old age he lived alone in Los Angeles – “I’ve always been a loner” – and became a chronic insomniac. “I tune my radio to the BBC World Service,” he explained. “I can’t dream, but at least I can listen to the nightmares of the real world.”Although famous for books which lifted the lid on a sink of incendiary gossip about great Hollywood names, disdaining the fawning effusions normally heaped upon them, Anger was also acclaimed as a largely unsung maker of short art films, a pioneer of gay cinema, a leading light in the American underground, and the first to use pop songs for his films instead of a traditional score. For years Anger lived in New York, where he kept a huge collection of Hollywood memorabilia, including the neon RKO sign from Radio City Music Hall, the original design for the Hollywood sign, and hundreds of autographed pin-ups and other ephemera. Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon has never ceased to be a source of controversy and outrage ever since it was made publicly available in 1975 by Rolling Stone’s printers Straight Arrow.