Many years ago I lived in the courtyard apartments Charlie Chaplin built for his crew across the street from his studio on La Brea Avenue. Needless to say, it was an eye-opening experience, raising my awareness of a number of different behaviors, coupling possibilities, creative use of inanimate objects, etc. A bit morbid, but the subjects are treated with much care by the author; today's tabloids do not give the same treatment to many of new hollywood's starlets. What makes the subject mattter of old Hollywood is not the subject itself, but how Kenneth Anger tells the tales. This is TRULY FUCKING AMAZING and naturally being prone to interest in scandal and hearsay, I was salivating over how these long dead, "America's sweetheart" "deus ex machina" stars of the old Hollywood had such fucked up, mysterious and Lynchian lives, both in front of and behind the curtains of the film industry.

This book has more namedropping than Madonna's Vogue rap and is more apocolyptic than Deborah Harry's Rapture rap from her Blondie days. I really appreciated, for example, the extended coverage of the seedy life of that Kennedy clan patriarch and wannabe film producer, the sinister Joseph Kennedy. Of course one doesn’t read this kind of material for its factualness, that would be a mistake of the utmost gravity.The book also claimed that Lupe Vélez was found drowned in her own vomit with her head in a toilet after she committed suicide by swallowing more than 500 sleeping tablets. I believe you judge a tree by its fruits, from the mindwashing destructive propaganda that Hollywood spews out to the many screwed up people that work in the business as performers, some of whom deserve to be scorned, some deserve your pity. I really enjoyed both Hollywood Babylon books but this one for some reason seemed even more cynical than the first, which is just what is needed!

Mr Anger is back to trawl through Hollywood for gossip, death (including a lengthy section, pre-Wikipedia, on Hollywood suicides), and gangster connections - ending with an impassioned attack on then-president Ronnie Reagan. And Charlie Chaplin's mustache supplementing his income by performing mustache stand-in duties for Hitler?

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! 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. Upon its second release, the New York Times said of it, "If a book such as this can be said to have charm, it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit.

Hollywood itself officially started in 1912 - the evolution is more complex than that, but no matter.After all, the almighty dollar and commercial considerations utterly ruled the land, and if it turned out you couldn’t cut it, you had no business being there in the first place. It turned out that when Clark Gable was still a bit player at MGM, he had let himself blow-serviced by Haines and seek his help to further his career at MGM.

The fallacies, myths, and exaggerations of Hollywood Babylon were the focus of season 10 of Karina Longworth's podcast You Must Remember This: "Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon". The first appearance of Kenneth Anger's sensationalist swipe at Hollywood, packed with photos, gritty detail, and innuendo. Ed Burns of Cinemabilia hever answered the two requests for info on the distributor of the pirate of Hwd-Babylon.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. It’s a dark, often unpleasant journey to be sure, but that doesn’t preclude some bitter laughs of schadenfreude along the way. Who knows after 50+ years how true that is, except that this is a scarcer edition than the original one published in France in the late 1950's. Anger begins here to establish his theme, that of a phony Babylon, sex and violence amid plaster and Potemkin villages.