An obituary I missed: Noted underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, 96, died on May 11 but was made public just a few days ago. He was known for his experimental works and influencing other "underground" filmmakers. However, there wasn't always a lot of money in making films nobody watched, and, as this link notes, he was desperate for money in the mid-1960s. He and a ghostwriter got together and came up with a spectacular work of what is now seen as largely fiction but unfortunately used real public figures, living and dead, to destroy their reputations titled Hollywood Babylon. It, like Anger, became an underground legend despite or perhaps because of potential lawsuits by targets and relatives of targets in the book.
Very little of it was found to be true or they were wildly exaggerated claims. Because the book was a hit of sorts, Anger came up with a second volume of celebrity gossip, Hollywood Babylon II.
Snip:
But those films, or at least the greatest of them, are timeless. And after a while he resumed making them, right into the 2000s. They were hit-or-miss now, without the rhapsodic pull of his defining work, but in 2005, at the Museum of Modern Art, I finally saw a new Anger film that synced up to the heartbeat of his old ones. It’s called “Mouse Heaven,” and it is, of all things, an homage to Mickey Mouse built around a friend of Anger’s outrageously vast collection of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. Mickey Mouse, of course, first appeared in a cartoon in 1928, so the subject took Anger back to the old Hollywood he still lived in. The film was about the enchantment of Mickey Mouse — and Anger’s editing once again cast a spell. It was enough to remind me that his films, in their intoxicating wink of rapture, always showed you the light in the darkness. And that’s why, however many devils he sowed, history will remember Kenneth Anger as an artist on the side of the angels, as well as the greatest underground filmmaker who ever lived.
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