by MATTHEW HAYS

Kenneth Anger says he’s in a good frame of mind. “Do you know what day it is?” he asks, on the line from the lobby of the Hollywood Boulevard hotel he lives in. “It’s Friday the 13th. There are only two of those a year. I get more energy out of those witchcraft-connected things.”

Anger has a soothing voice, one that belies the often disturbing imagery in his groundbreaking oeuvre, an experimental odyssey that stretches back to the ’40s and continues today. The man’s story is as incredible as any one of his mind-bending films. Now, the filmmaker is the subject of an insightful feature-length documentary, Anger Me, made by Toronto-based filmmaker Elio Gelmini. In the film, he looks back on his career and reflects on his films, books and encounters with other public figures. Anger will be in town this week for the Montreal premiere of the doc, which screens as part of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

Anger began as a child actor at a mere four years old, appearing in the 1935 Hollywood production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While living in Beverly Hills, he found inspiration in his grandmother, who encouraged the young lad’s interest in the arts. A few years later, she would give her grandson a used 16mm camera, and he began to make movies in his spare time.

In 1947, Anger would take that camera and create a startling short film. His parents went away for a long weekend, and in that 72-hour span, he shot Fireworks, a dream-within-a-film short in which a young man (played by the incredibly handsome Anger himself) gets beaten up by sailors after trying to pick them up. Infused with libidinous energy, the brazenly homoerotic Fireworks remains shocking in its sheer audacity almost 60 years later. So sexually daring, it caught the eye of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who was the first person ever to buy a print of the film. “It’s about being attracted to something you’re afraid of,” Anger explains. “You’re attracted to something that’s particularly dangerous, like a rough, tough man can be. Like a working man can be, or even a college professor, who knows.”

He goes on to discuss part of the thrill of cruising itself. “The idea of being attracted to a stranger… sometimes if you look at someone a split second too long, it can happen that they’ll say, ‘What are you looking at?’ I knew not to do what the young man in the film does, which is to ask them for a light for their cigarette. That used to be, back in the ’40s, an old pick-up line. Among subterranean gay culture at the time, that was a way to get picked up.”

Magnificent digressions

While talking to Anger, it soon becomes clear that the man loves to digress. A discussion of Fireworks leads to talk of how gays smoke more than any other minority (“That’s why I don’t go to gay clubs,” he explains, “I’m allergic to smoke.”), what Bette Davis thought of her fans (she referred to them as “clods”) and his advice to fast-talking Martin Scorsese. (“I told him to slow down—this is California. I said, ‘Marty, you’re a motor mouth.’ He looked like I’d just punched him in the stomach.”

He’s so full of gossip-filled digressions and tangential anecdotes, it’s not hard to believe that this is the same man who wrote the hugely popular Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II, the books in which Anger painstakingly chronicled any and all manner of Tinseltown scandal and legend.

When I discuss showing Fireworks to friends, Anger inquires about where I rented the print. He’s quick to point out that many of his films have been pirated, including Fireworks and Scorpio Rising, and that’s been a real drain on him. “I don’t get any royalties for the pirated prints that are circulating. I don’t get any money, which is pretty painful because I live on the edge. The copies are often visually degraded. I don’t have the energy to do a long-distance dispute in many cases. It’s one thing for the Disney company to be pirated all over the world—and they are—but it’s another thing for me.”

I bring the conversation back to Fireworks, telling Anger that I’m amazed at how brazen the film is—and remains to this day. “It’s easy to be brazen when you’re 17 and know what you want to do and barely have the means to do it. My model is Arthur Rimbaud. He was writing poems that are classic and immortal when he was a teenager. Then he went to Africa and became an arms dealer and never wrote another poem.”

“But you never became an arms dealer,” I counter.

“No, in spite of the rumours,” says Anger.

Hollywood nightmare

Anger takes umbrage when I suggest that his films are anti-Hollywood. “No, I love a lot about Hollywood,” he argues. “My godfather was Edmund Goulding, and he made an incredible film noir called Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power. I was taken to the preview of it. I have a silver spoon that says, ‘From Eddie to Kenny.’”

But Anger does concede that he was put off by the post-war paranoia that he saw unfolding in America. “By the time I graduated from Beverly Hills High School in the late ’40s, the red menace thing had already begun. They were persecuting some friends of mine who were dancers but had also been involved with a youth labour group. Because they’d been involved with the free lunch program in New York, they were linked to communism. It was more grotesque than horrifying, but it led to a lot of people doing stupid things.”

And then, he returns to the story of Fireworks’ beginnings. Interestingly enough, the violence in the film was inspired by a race-related riot that Anger witnessed in 1944. “It was called the Zoot Suit Riot, and I happened to be there to see it. At that time, there was a lot of racial antagonism between Mexican cool cats who were living in L.A. and weren’t in the service, either because they weren’t citizens or because they had evaded the draft. They were dressed in these silk and satin zoot suits. They looked like cartoons, but it was on purpose. The sailors resented them because they saw them as slackers. There was some dispute over a girl and a fight broke out between the sailors and the zoot suiters. And I remember that those sailors ripped the suits right off the Mexicans, until they were stripped almost naked, and then the sailors beat them up. No one died, but some had to go to the emergency. It was on the front page of the L.A. Times the next day.”

These images stuck in Anger’s head, and dreams persisted. “These white uniforms would come out and attack, but in my dream they were attacking me.”

Fireworks would prove a triumphant film for Anger, leading him to France where he would be embraced by the likes of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. There he would remain, working in Paris at the Cinémathèque for a decade before living in Britain and the U.S.

As our conversation comes to a close, I express dismay that Anger has had a difficult time recovering royalties and residuals for his legendary films and best-selling books. “I have never been a businessman. My father wanted me to be an aircraft engineer, like him. I said that I wanted to be an artist. He said no one can make a living from that. I gave him a list of people who had, including Picasso. He cut me out of his will—left me a dollar.”

What about his still-unpublished book, Hollywood Babylon III?

“The publishers read it and said there are too many hot wires in there. The Church of Scientology people are very prone to sue. But I said if you cut the stuff out about John Travolta and Tommy Cruise and Karen Black, you’ve cut the heart out of the book.

“People compare me to Andy Warhol. But he had the Midas touch. He could take a piece of crap and sign his name to it and they’d sell it for a fortune.

“That’s not me.”

Kenneth Anger will screen his latest film, Mouse Heaven, and deliver a master class, moderated by Matthew Hays, at Concordia University’s Hall Building (Room H-110) on Thursday, Oct. 19, from NOON–1 p.m. Anger and Elio Gelmini will be present for screenings of Anger Me, presented as part of the Festival du Nouveau CinÉma; for info see www.nouveaucinema.ca

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