We’ll never know whether Anger actually did, because both men were, to put it mildly, unreliable storytellers.įor the most part, though-whether Anger was staging an ecstatic beatdown in Fireworks merging the occult, the New Testament and Chariots of the Gods sci-fi imagery in Lucifer Rising, or holding college students spellbound with tales of culture icons he’d known, worked, or feuded with-his tone was more contemplative and cheeky than dour. When Roger Ebert panned Vincent Gallo’s film The Brown Bunny, Gallo claimed Anger had put a hex on the critic’s colon, at Gallo’s request. Anger rejected the Christianity of his Presbyterian parents in childhood, and later joined Aleister Crowley’s occult society Thelema became friends with Anton LaVey had LUCIFER tattooed across his chest and claimed to have placed curses on people who had crossed him or his friends. His films were compared to spellcraft, and their maker to a sorcerer. To fans and foes alike, his name conjured unpredictability, mystery, fury. This was one of many such anecdotes gathered in Anger’s best-selling Hollywood Babylon, the only work of his that most people have heard of-a book repeating salacious Old Hollywood tales, many of them apocryphal, such as the story of Jayne Manfield being decapitated in a car wreck ( she wasn’t) and of Clara Bow having sex with the entire USC football team ( she didn’t) Anger claimed he’d researched it “mainly through telepathy.” Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger recounts how he arrived at a 1984 taping of Coca Crystal’s counterculture talk show in New York, blew up when he found out that the studio wasn’t paying for his cab ride, attacked the talent coordinator and tried to drag her into the taxi, and then fled after throwing $100 at the cabdriver and yelling, “Get me out of here!” A 2004 Guardian profile begins with his bellowing at a patron in a restaurant who had roared with laughter as he told his interviewer a story about an “A-list actor who began his career as a rent boy” and contracted gonorrhea. In interviews and public appearances, Anger could be confrontational, sarcastic, curt, even abusive. From his 1947 breakthrough Fireworks, a homoerotic fantasia of Navy sailors in a bar that’s saturated in milk and blood, though his biker-Nazi-Jesus-occult nightmare-satire Scorpio Rising and his shamanistic birth-of-Satan chronicle Lucifer Rising through late works like Don’t Smoke That Cigarette, The Man We Want to Hang, and Mouse Heaven, both anger and danger were always palpable, even when they were layered with humor, symbolism, analogy, social critique, and beauty for beauty’s sake. That last version turned “anger” into “danger,” another motivation of his. Sometimes he’d tweak them to read “An Anger Film” or “Film D’Anger” (he was fascinated with-and championed by-French critics, directors and artists before even the hippest Americans knew his name). “A Film by Anger” is what his possessory credits declared. That’s all you need to know.” That’s what the brilliant and mercurial filmmaker, author and raconteur Kenneth Anger told an interviewer in 2012, when asked why he’d changed his birth name from Anglemeyer. “I would stay away from that subject if I were you.”īut you couldn’t, and he didn’t actually want you to.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |