Anger

Known worldwide for his bestselling Hollywood Babylon books, Kenneth Anger is an underground filmmaker whose tremendous influence has been acknowledged by directors as diverse as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Dennis Hopper. As the father and most highly regarded member of American cinema's avant-garde, Anger made three films now considered masterpieces: Fireworks, Scorpio Rising, and Lucifer Rising. More than forty years later his aesthetic ripple is still being felt in contemporary mediums such as rock videos. Beginning with Anger's life as a child actor in Hollywood (he was featured in A Midsummer Night's Dream with Mickey Rooney), Bill Landis's biography takes the reader on a wild journey from the beginning of the underground film movement in the United States and Europe through the equally underground gay world of the '40s and '50s to the '60s in London and San Francisco, when Anger was at his peak of fame, and up to the present.