She was like my sponsor: she bought my camera for me. I became friends with him, too.' Did his parents see it? 'Um, no. Dr Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, also came.

'Among the people who came was James Whale, the British director of Frankenstein, and I became friends with him. How did public screenings go? 'Well, it was shown to an elite audience,' Anger says. 'I just put the furniture in the garden and the living room was the set. Anger made it in his parents' Beverly Hills home when they were away at an uncle's funeral. The case went to the California Supreme Court, which declared the film to be art. Anger was arrested on obscenity charges following its release. It's not only surreal and scary, it is devastatingly beautiful.Īstonishingly, it was made in the McCarthy era. His heart is ripped apart to expose a ticking time-piece.

Blood pours from his eyes as he is pulverised by the sailors, and a firework explodes from his zip. The camera lingers on his apparent erection – which turns out to be a model of an African soldier. As with all his films, there are no words, and the story, such as it is, has a dramatic music score. Fireworks features a young man (Anger) wet-dreaming a sequence in which he is seduced/gang-raped by a group of sailors after he tries to pick one up. This appeared three years before Jean Genet's groundbreaking homoerotic prison masterpiece, Un Chant D'Amour. I wasn't a communist, I just found it very unpleasant.' His voice is a cat's purr.Īlthough he made films as a boy, Anger's earliest surviving work is 1947's Fireworks. 'There was a possibility of going into the industry, but there was a very unpleasant atmosphere in the early 50s, the ridiculous witch-hunt of reds. But he did not want to be part of the system. He was handsome enough to have been a leading man. He trained as a dancer, and as a boy danced with Shirley Temple. He is both beautiful and grotesque: Warren Beatty meets Frankenstein's monster. One eye is bigger than the other, and his face is unlined. Anger is 83 years old his hair is jet black, his shoes red, his trousers tan. We meet at a London hotel that smells of cabbage. Among the books' more scandalous passages are allegations that Lucille Ball started Hollywood life as a prostitute that James Dean had a 'disconcerting interest' in a 12-year-old boy and that Bette Davis killed her second husband. This great avant-gardist is also a writer, best known for Lalaland's two most scurrilous gossip digests: Hollywood Babylon 1 and 2 the first was published in 1965, banned immediately and not published again until 1975. He has created some of the most disturbing, gorgeous, crazy and influential films ever, even if he has yet to make a feature.

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