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

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The mixture of images and Anger's text makes it into a feverish dream - and really, cinema should be a feverish dream.

Tra pura exploitationg e glitter, tra boa di struzzo e bagni nello champagne, tra "Cronaca vera" e splatter-pulp. Hollywood Babylon covers a time period from the 1920s to the 1950s so don't think that human catastrophes like Britney Spears or Anna Nicole Smith are anything but different versions of the same song. It can’t be overstated what glorious, unadulterated sleaze is contained within these pages, put across in a close approximation of that delicious style the old-timey tabloids utilised to dazzle and titillate their vast readerships way back when. The challenging job was to make sure that studio stars conformed to a strict image of morality is highest.

Howard Strickland, the head of the publicity at MGM and studio head Luis B Mayer had to make sure that all MGM movies are box office hits at Loew’s theaters. Layout wise this book is a nightmare; unlabelled photos, unsourced quotes and heavy handed underlining that serves no purpose (except possibly to make it look like a dodgy webpage, some feat given this book was originally published in 1975! While shooting the movie “Swamp,” which later became “Queen Kelly,” Gloria Swanson was so incensed with the antics of erratic and kinky director, Eric von Stroheim, she asked Kennedy to stop the “lunatic in charge of the film.

In 1938 Buzz was sued by Irving Wheeler for seeking the affections of Irving’s wife, actress Carol Landis, and the suit was dismissed.The chapters on Fatty Arbuckle and Thomas Ince are perhaps the most interesting because the stories have entered popular mythology. Kenneth Anger paints a sinister, evil picture of a Hollywood that chews its "stars" up and spits them out. Kenneth Anger was a trail blazer in the 60s with his bitter brand of celebrity reportage - Perez Hilton owes a debt to him - but the truth is that Anger's photo library is the best thing about this book, his sequel to the original bestseller. First published in the US in 1965, it was banned ten days later and would not be republished until 1975.

She was so sure of his “gayness,” she would strip naked and dress in front of him; he reported that often times she did not wear bras or panties. Originally published in Paris, this is a collection of Hollywood's darkest and best kept secrets from the pen of Kenneth Anger, a former child movie actor who grew up to become one of America's leading underground film-makers. And Charlie Chaplin's mustache supplementing his income by performing mustache stand-in duties for Hitler? In those “halcyon” days, even if you were one of the few lucky ones picked out for a life of shameless luxury, hedonism and blind adoration, chances were good you’d eventually do yourself in (accidental or not), be done in, or ended your life as an unhappy has-been, firmly clenching the bottle or drugged out of your mind by uppers, downers or screamers. Babylon, a 2022 film by Damien Chazelle depicting a fictionalized 1920s Hollywood that takes inspiration from claims featured in this book.He celebrates the self-destruction of people whose only crimes, truth be told, was that they possessed the aspiration to make something of themselves, however deluded that might have made them. Kenneth Anger (born as Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer) was an American underground avant-garde film-maker and author. When, in many cases, actual facts are widely available, Anger ignores them in favor of titillating conjecture.