Will I love Hollywood Babylon?

If this beautifully illustrated collection of Hollywood tragedies were only kink, only lurid scandal like so many cheap TV potshots, it wouldn’t be the iconic masterpiece it has become. Kenneth Anger’s take on the faded and fallen Hollywood differs because he loves the place and its people with all his heart.

A child starling and renegade director in his own right (Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandoes), he oozes child-like wonder and horror on every page. As he puts it in the book’s equally stark sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, the movies “promise immortality, but don’t really deliver.”   

It must be said out loud and straightaway that much of this classic, influential book is, as the kids say, bullshit. But it is iconic bullshit, hair-raising bullshit, bullshit that you simply cannot ignore or pretend away. Anger, an avant-garde filmmaker whose work teems with sexual and occult content, published this book in 1965 when many of the stars of classic Hollywood whose hidden proclivities he discusses were still either alive or part of a revered pantheon: Marilyn Monroe, Errol Flynn, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, and so on. And his claims about their sex lives, criminal activities, and… show more.