Hollywood Babylon

Kenneth Anger – 1959 

Excerpt:  “Belshazzar’s Feast beneath Egyptian blue skies, spread out under the blazing Southern California morning sun: more than four thousand extras recruited from L.A. paid an unheard-of two dollars a day plus box lunch plus carfare to impersonate Assyrian and Median militiamen, Babylonian dancers, Ethiopians, East Indians, Numidians, eunuchs, ladies-in-waiting to the Princess Beloved, handmaidens of the Babylonian temples, priests of Bel, Nergel, Marduk and Ishtar, slaves, nobles and subjects of Babylonia.”

Avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon was an underground classic for many years between its original publication in France in 1959 and its second American printing in 1975.  Initially all about the scandalous underside of the movie business in its Golden Age, (the 1910’s through the 1950s), the later editions updated the story up through the end of the 60s, which was appropriate since the collapse of the studio system was happening at that very moment.  Much of the book, of course, needs to be taken with a grain of salt, as quite a few of Anger’s stories have been debunked as urban legends over the years.  It’s best not to regard it as a historical reference book at all, and if you can do that, it’s easy to enjoy as an epic, lurid poem about Hollywood decadence.  The real theme of the book, (also embraced by Camille Paglia years later), is that the eruption of cinema and Hollywood in the early 1900s signified the ultimate restoration of the natural paganism in the common people that had been repressed by Judeo-Christianity for hundreds of years.  Anger’s tone is strangely reverent even while describing the most corrupt acts; his position being that the weak mortals who became the new gods of the Silver Screen were only acting out traditions demanded of ancient cults, including almost pathological vanity, debauchery, violence and ultimately self-immolation.  This idea of Hollywood as a return of pagan idolatry is the main thing that elevates the book above what would otherwise be little more than salacious gossip illustrated with numerous photos of crime scenes and mug shots.  Some of the scandals that Anger covers involve Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Errol Flynn, Mae West, Charles Chaplin, Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Bugsy Siegel, Lupe Velez and Frances Farmer.  The concise, sordid tales of tragedy and heartache become heady, culminating in the 1969 death of strung-out camp icon Judy Garland and the Manson murders in the hills above L.A., which herald the final burning out of Hollywood’s pagan flame.