It’s likely the caboose of a career that began a few years after he graduated from Beverly Hills High with Fireworks, a canonical queer short filmed in 1947 (Alfred Kinsey purchased a copy), and went on to include collaborations with everyone from Manson Family murderer Bobby Beausoleil to Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. Now in his hard-of-hearing dotage, gap-toothed and beatific of bearing, he’s pleased to discuss his next project: the experimental short film Airships, involving rare vintage footage of his “favorite mode of transportation,” zeppelins, one of which he rode as a young boy with his grandmother, a United Artists costume designer. The San Pedro-based Anger, who attended Beverly Hills High School, was long known for his prickliness and reclusiveness. “He has the Anger touch,” says Ebner of the right-wing Drudge Report‘s entertainment coverage (Breitbart worked for Drudge for years). Mark Ebner, author of the Babylon-esque Hollywood, Interrupted with late conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, observes that Anger’s singular blend of besotted fascination and moralism is on display in another media and culture provocateur, Matt Drudge.
Hollywood has always been, in Anger’s words, a “synonym for sin,” a paradisiacal place where glamour lives and ethics don’t. Revisiting the Babylon books in the current climate is a reminder that while the entertainment industry has grown to see itself as something of a moral force over the past century, the rest of the country never subscribed. (Anger, who directed LaVey in Invocation of My Demon Brother, has a tattoo reading “LUCIFER” on his chest.) “Hollywood is very good for producing scandals it’s been producing them since the very beginning,” says Anger over a burger and Coca-Cola at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel before speaking at a nearby event in honor of his late friend Anton LaVey, the Church of Satan founder. After all, aside from his noted contributions to avant garde film (hailed by everyone from Scorsese to Sontag), Anger also is the industry’s oldest living scandalmonger, the author of the 1970s best- seller Hollywood Babylon and its sequel - salacious and much disputed histories of Golden Age cinema. But for 90-year-old Hollywood enfant terrible Kenneth Anger - the pioneering gay underground filmmaker - the news since Harvey Weinstein’s fall collectively elicits a shrug. Tomorrow, Brett Ratner’s and Dustin Hoffman’s predacious behavior will make headlines. Two evenings have passed since Anthony Rapp went public with Kevin Spacey’s alleged pedophilic advances.
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