i just read Kenneth Anger's
Hollywood Babylon. it was very good. it felt very modern, which makes sense, cos Anger was very ahead of his time, and wrote in a blogger style a la Gawker or something, a constant stream of current events and scandals and celebrity culture dramatizing the human experience.
it is a history of the birth of the Hollywood legend. by some twist of fate the birth of cinema (the larger than life projection) coincided with prohibition (and gangsters/bootleggers), women's suffrage, the birth of tabloid and celebrity culture, the swinging 20s, cocaine and heroin, post-Theosophian exoticism, nuveau riche, real estate schemes, mobsters on both coasts, the Great Depression, the Red Scare, and the countless men and women (stars) who came to Hollywood with a dream and often paid for it with their lives. it starts with a quote:
"Every man and every woman is a star. - Aliester Crowely"
at one point a studio declare they have "More stars than there are in heaven". Anger describes this massive set depicting babylon for a film. he goes into the behind-the-scenes orgies, love affairs, murders, sex scandals, diary leaks, etc. there are many real life heroes and villains, and no one is safe from the crazy magic of this newfound medium. it was the birth of tabloid culture, paparazzi, which played its part in egging on the spectacle. it was several decades before the invention of sound and nobody knew how long pictures would last, how long that money would keep rolling in. there are many monsters exposed and many tragedies. it is interesting to see the changes in how society reacts to these phenomena, the pictures. we see that film and movies are a modern archetypal fantasy ritual in the same lineage as religious and ritualistic performances of old. it is a kind of magic, creating your image, being shown literally larger than life. many died for this dream.
many who were famous for decades and lost it all in the Great Depression or introduction of Talkies. some cursed the sound man for making them sound bad on purpose, their careers ruined, falling into addiction and being exploited throughout by the media until they died glorious and tragic deaths. by this time there was pressure for the industry to self-regulate and you had performers like Mae West and Jayne Mansfield shamed and censored and made examples of.
when the Anti-Commie Red Scare started it was just another tool wielded to silence and make examples of people. outspoken actors like poor Francis Farmer were jailed and locked away in a sanitarium, their careers ended, their minds and bodies fucked by institutionalism, sacrificed to the God of Good Clean Enteratinment. one actor jumped from the 13th letter of the Hollywood sign. it originally said HOLLYWOODLAND and the D became a popular suicide spot for a time. it was a (failed?) real estate development, which was a popular thing for new money to get into. a NY-LA gangster transplant flush with Hollywood money developed some hotels out in the desert and the neon dream of Las Vegas was born.
the craziest story i read was the 1958 case of Lana Turner which involved her 14-year old gangster-killing daughter saving the family by stabbing this LA underworld mastermind who was threatening to kill them all in the stomach with a knife. it went to trial and they found it Justifiable Homicide. it was a media circus, naturally, and public opinion was heavily divided. its a crazy story though, straight out of a David Lynch movie.
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