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I had been running fine, but it's so much nicer with a friend along. By sharing all the stupid things that have happened to us and our friends in recent days, we don't have to be so aware of the miles. Thanks Stacy, it was a p.r. for the Hamilton Lakes loop for me.

Bridget made me feel good two weekends ago when she said my quads probably felt so beat up after Salem Lake because of trying to get traction on a wet, muddy day -- not because I'm weak or anything.

This past weekend, when I whined to her about how I was still slow, she told me to go run hills. If you want to run faster, she said, it's the thing to do.

So, in the dark at 6:15 this morning, there I was running up Northridge and trotting back down, three times, then one last hill on my way home. Not too awful, a nice break from the same old miles.

We'll see. I've got one month until Outer Banks. I'll try anything. Except track workouts.

Joan's been a hero of mine since 1979, when she won her first Boston Marathon in her characteristic fashion: low-key, no frills manner but decisive, take-no-prisoner wins.

These days I find her race times astonishing, making us all choke on our excuses of "my body's too old for this."

I was thrilled to meet Samuelson last spring when she came to town for the NC Marathon. As she headed out for a 10-mile training run (at a leisurely seven-minute pace), she acknowledged that it takes her a little while to warm up these days and work out the stiffness. So, she's human. Just fast.

I sent people to investigate and learned he was Bob, a grad student at Harvard who had coached lacrosse and soccer at Princeton. My crush daydreams grew to include fall afternoons hanging out at soccer games.

Early in the training, I was trying to figure out my typical pace and the difference that 10 or 15 seconds per mile would make. Not huge, in the course of a mile. Over the course of 26 miles, very big.

    Obviously, the pros won out. We writers love metaphor and symbolism -- and not writing in a vacuum. It's all here in blogging. The practice of entering a post mirrors the other discipline I'm attempting -- training for a November marathon to qualify for the Boston Marathon. And I love to gather a community. I take great comfort in learning I'm not the only runner struggling with getting slower after years of taking my ability for granted. And I love meeting others, women especially, who look at their imminent empty nest (my kids are 18 and 17) as a sign that they can attempt to do something new now, to put all that energy that went into raising kids into another constructive undertaking. 

    So here we are. I've got about nine weeks until the Outer Banks marathon on Nov. 8. I've just sent my oldest back to Pittsburgh for her sophomore year at college, and her little brother starts his senior year of high school on Tuesday. My husband, a college professor, starts his classes tomorrow. Order returns to our world; it's a fine time to start this practice again. 

    

The thought still cracks me up. How silly this must look to the casual observer -- runners in so much discomfort and agony, and it's a voluntary act of recreation. You know, for fun.

All the negatives about marathon training made me swear off of it for the last six years. Ask Will -- he and I co-founded the No More Marathon faction of our Saturday morning running group. Been there, done that, tired of the throbbing hamstrings. 

Go ahead and run one, I always tell runners who start dreaming about it. It's empowering and satisfying and you can apply it to the rest of your life. If I can run a marathon, you tell yourself, then I can get through this deadline, deal with this difficult person — anything that requires endurance and will power.

But don't think there's a lot of skill involved. Really, long-distance running is as much a mental exercise as anything. If you've got the time to commit to training and the desire to finish, you can do it.

The lack of desire was what did me in about six years ago. My first couple marathons brought that sheer satisfaction from finishing 26.2 miles. Then Pam and Patrice trained with me to run Cleveland and qualify for Boston. It was tough training through an Ohio winter with a qualifying time hanging over my head, but those two, and my long-time friend Dee, just seemed to pull me along in their wake, they're such strong athletes. Running Boston the next year was all a celebration, two days before I turned 40.

A few years later, those pals decided to run Nashville. I went so I wouldn't feel like a has-been. By mile 17, though, I would have paid anyone to drive me in. I had no love of the challenge, no good reason I could think to keep plugging along. All I wanted to do was to sit down, stop.

So here I am, at 49, trying to do the Boston qualifying thing again and sometimes wondering why, as Dena voiced at Salem Lake. I guess I still don't want to be a has-been. Boston, next April, falls exactly on my 50th birthday -- talk about celebration. But what I quickly discovered, a month or so ago, is how much I've slowed down in the last few years. I can't take a four-hour marathon for granted, where 10 years ago it would have been a walk in the park. So I'm fretting and scheming and yes, the hamstrings throb. And sometimes I even admit, not as publicly as Dena, that I don't really want to be doing this.

Then I go home, have a good shower and a cup of coffee and come to my senses. Or not.

After weeks, months really, of worrying about my pace, it was good to run a race and see how I was doing. Except being clueless about my pace kind of hurt me. I had to work my way through a slow, crowded first mile, so I thought I should push -- the specter of a Boston qualifying time is camped out on my shoulder, of course. Thankfully, Les and Jim from my Saturday morning Blueliners group ran by at the three-mile mark to let me know that I'd run a 7:50 pace, mile 2 to 3. Way too fast.

So I cranked back a bit and ran a fun next three miles with a gentleman who liked my pace. He inquired about the age of Sam, another Blueliner who passed by, so I asked him his. Ready? 69. Blew me away. Great guy. Started running at 41, and at 49 ran his marathon pr, 3:17. I was inspired.

The first half I averaged 8:30s, the second half in 9:10s. Lesson learned: aim for 8:45s and I'll probably feel better. And Outer Banks won't have all the twists and turns of this trail run.

I had a fun moment this afternoon in my post-race stupor, one of those times when you realize how foreign this running stuff is to most folks. I had to re-visit our cell phone situation, the continuing transition after Verizon bought Alltel. I had a not-great Verizon experience last week so I picked a new store, stumbled in with my phone and Bob's, and got Sierra, a nice salesman. We clicked. He's been beaten up for days by unhappy former Alltelers, including a family of three just before me. He helped me out,  finding a cheap way to get me back to my Blackberry, and he loved that I didn't bark at him. I was too tired, and I could tell he was being honest with me. 

Over the course of an hour-long visit, I couldn't control a few yawns. I was trying to decide mentally between a latte or nap when I was done with the phone stuff.

"So Lisa, tell me what you do. You just don't strike me as someone who sits around watching TV," Sierra says. 

I laughed. And felt good. He didn't see me as an exhausted old lady, he saw me as an athlete!

"Well, this morning I ran 18 and a half miles around a lake," I told him. He pushed back his chair and shook his head. "I knew it," he said, and called out to his colleague, "Hey! Do you know what this nice lady did this morning?"

I felt downright formidable.

Maybe you've heard of it. Galloway is the run/walk concept where, from the very start of a long run or race, you take regular walking intervals. I remember being vaguely aware of this when Jeff Galloway introduced it. Mentally I turned my nose up at the idea -- must be for those beginning runners or the perpetually slow who can't REALLY run a marathon.

Years later I met Neal, who joined our Saturday morning group. He brought all the zeal of a newcomer to exercise and running. He had just dropped some 50 pounds or so and loved running, kept wanting to do more and longer. Aches and pains, though, made him turn to Gallowaying. He's run four marathons since, each progressively faster, now hovering around four hours. He finishes in fine shape, ready to go celebrate while most of us have to limp off and lick our wounds.

Looking for any answers I can find to snag a Boston qualifying time, I've been asking Neal if I could try it with him. I finally got to yesterday, his last long training run before the Chicago marathon.

I LOVED it. Seventeen miles felt more like 10. Neal sets his Garmin to warn him, with four beeps, every 8 minutes. He walks for a minute (speed walks, I couldn't keep up with him), then four beeps warn him as the minute wraps up. It feels strange at first, when you're fresh, to stop and walk. He had warned me about this, that mentally the hardest thing about Gallowaying in a race is walking in those first miles while people run by you. But by now he knows that he'll be the one passing people in the last six or seven miles.

And that's the idea. That break from the monotony of the running pace uses slightly different muscles, preventing some of the fatigue in your legs. Just as important is the mental break, I think. It was all clear to me at about 15 miles yesterday. Normally by then I'd be hurting a bit and starting to doubt my toughness, scared that I couldn't really finish. Yesterday I realized I was running without fear or mental stress, because I knew that in eight minutes or less I'd get a little break. Brilliant!

The last remaining issue will be speed. Neal and I averaged somewhere between 9:15 and 9:30 minute miles, he says. We had much to discuss -- it was catching up and a business meeting wrapped into a run -- so we didn't focus on the clock a bit. I feel fairly sure I could pick up the pace, now that I know you really do feel fresher even after a few hours. That was my concern: that I'd feel just as tired at 16 miles, plus that much slower because of walking breaks.

Then there's injury prevention. Advocates say the Galloway method significantly cuts down on wear and tear. I left my house yesterday morning worried about my right achilles, which keeps getting worse. This could be the long run, I thought, that finally puts me on the sidelines -- we lost Marshall last week to a foot stress fracture. But, aside from the usual starting out pain, not a problem!

I plan to test Galloway next weekend with an 18-miler on my own. I need to find one of those computers-on-your-wrist and get a digitally savvy person to program it to beep like Neal's does. It was nice to not have to fuss with or check a watch at all, just listen for the beeps.

Eight weeks to go until Outer Banks -- happy trails.

Mind you, I'm hardly wasting away. But I do feel better than at a low moment in July. It was the end of a great bike trip with Dee and Virginia across New York State. We were toweling off in a high school locker room and I caught sight of my bare naked body in a full-length mirror. Compared to my two lean friends, I looked like the "before" picture and they were the "after" examples of what exercise can do for you. 

Pudgy wasn't how I had "seen" myself all week -- I had felt strong, athletic, with 500 hilly miles under my legs over 7 days. But the reality of the mirror reflected differently. It showed the cumulative effects of middle-age metabolism, which loves to pile the fat on in the middle of our bodies, and months and months of sedentary work.

Nothing like increasingly longer runs in late-summer humidity in North Carolina, however, to burn off some of that mid-section. It took the bike trip, followed immediately by marathon training, to jump start my metabolism. I hope the engine keeps running.

The Classical Voice of North Carolina, based out of Raleigh, has given us another insightful review of one of our plays.

Read the review.

Also, at our last Sunday matinee on Sept. 13th we had the definitive William Inge biographer, Ralph Voss, come and speak with us at our InSight talkback.

The Board of Trustees of Triad Stage met at our shop located off Swing Rd. in west Greensboro. Typically, the board meets at the theater downtown, but we wanted them to see where production team works & creates. They were able to meet most of the staff (who weren't loading in the Oleanna set) and tour the facilities. Many are sitting on chairs from the furniture stock we have out there, as well. The room you see them in now is the paint room where very large pieces of scenery can be painted and stored.

Christy Wright (production manager), Steven Box (director of sales & marketing), and Kathy Manning (vice-chair board member) look on as matters are discussed.


We had an invited artists panel to come talk to the board about being an artist at Triad Stage. Donna Bradby gestures as Krista Hoeppner and Beth Ritson look on.



Board members Hayes Clement, Ron Johnson, & Willie Taylor listen to the artists panel as Rich looks on.


Sherry Barr (director of audience services), Beth Ritson (actor), Donna Bradby (director & choreographer) and David Smith (sound designer).


The shop's main floor where sets are built in large pieces and then taken apart for transport and then loaded into the theater and put together onstage.


Board members listen as Christy Wright (production manager) describes how the departments work and how she has overseen tons of materials recycled or thrown away to in order to reorganize the shop.

Oleanna by David Mamet has now entered tech/dress rehearsals at Triad Stage.

Lighting designer John Wolf intentionally evokes the look of a boxing ring because of the combative nature of the play.

Julie Allen runs the light board.

Ginny Lee as Carol casts one of many dubious glances at her fellow actor playing John.

~

Lee Spencer plays John.

We will be taking Oleanna up to Boone for the Appalachian Summer Festival later this month.

More info below...

The set for Picnic under construction.

On the first day of rehearsal for William Inge's Picnic, Preston explains a couple important features of the set designed by Howard Jones.

This is the second time in Triad Stage's history that we have produced a William Inge play. (The first being Bus Stop back in the fall of 2004.)

Kelsey Hunt, the costume designer, explains the overall neutral color palatte and the reasoning behind her choice.

Here is a sample of one of her renderings AND to see more you should go to the
"Closer Look" page on our website.


Cheryl Koski (playing Millie) and Beth Ritson (playing her mother, Flo) react to questions about the script during tablework.


Amy Da Luz (playing Rosemary) and Jim Crawford (playing Howard) listen to Preston explain his thoughts on their tenuous relationship.


Phillip Eggers (playing Bomber) and Cheryl Koski (playing Millie) listen to others read during tablework.

The playwright and the composer talk to the cast during rehearsal for the reading.

Laurelyn Dossett singing "Lady of the Mountain."

Yours truly reading the stage directions.

Laurelyn Dossett on banjo with Christine Morris and Noah Duvarney reading.

Richard Whittington & Preston Lane, the co-founders of Triad Stage, give the Opening Night curtain speech.

Our Opening Night audience--a very full house.

We are teching are rehearsing Oleanna in Boone for the Appalachian Summer Festival.

King Street in downtown Boone.

~

John Wolf, the lighting designer, directs focus. He has designed the lights in such a way that highlights the combative nature of the play. He alludes to a boxing ring, but utilizes very neutral color.

___________

Nick Hussong, the master electrician, helps John with focus.

On genies and on ladders, in the air and on the ground, Nick Hussong is everywhere.

Kelsey Hunt describes the reasoning behind the neutral choices for costume colors.



David Smith describes how he sampled George Winston, but reconfigured the piano music to mold the moments of the play.



A patron peruses the dramaturgy boards in the lobby that include the prop newspaper created by Amy Peter.



The theater at rest.
(But just imagine all the seats filled.)

"OMG, have you heard?"

James Whale is best remembered for such classic fantasias as Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), though he himself preferred his 1936 version of the venerable musical Show Boat. One of Whale's more obscure efforts is 1933's The Kiss Before the Mirror, William Anthony McGuire's adaptation of a Ladislaus Fodor play, which the director remade a mere five years later as Wives Under Suspicion. Unlike the public domain retread, the original is currently unavailable on home video, but TCM premiered a lovely fullscreen print of this pre-Code melodrama on April 26, 2009.

The editor of Screem devoted the most recent issue to "Films That Scarred Us for Life." Contributors' examples included the usual suspects (The Exorcist [1973], Jaws [1975]), as well as several surprises (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang [1968], The Day of the Locust [1974]). The first movie I remember that frightened me half out of my wits was Dan Curtis' House of Dark Shadows, the producer/director's 1970 revision of his cult soap opera (1966-1971). I was so unhinged, to be perfectly frank, that my mother and grandmother had to remove my screeching five-year-old self from the theatre screening the picture. I still vividly recall trying to settle down in the lobby, and it was not until the summer of 1976 that I saw the full film--minus the usual television edits and interruptions--on the CBS Late Movie. The scene that most traumatized me was the moment in House when Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) ages a century-and-a-half after being overdosed with the anti-vampirism vaccine the lovelorn Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) inflicts upon him in a jealous fit. (The undead one's fallen hard for Collinwood governess Maggie Evans [Kathryn Leigh Scott], whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love Josette.) The image of this alarmingly ancient creature--like lots of children, I thought the elderly were ugly enough to raise haints in a graveyard--strangling the spiteful doctor, then biting his beloved Maggie, was too much for my nerves, which were becoming progressively raw as the film unfolded. I had never found the ABC series to be so intense, and, of course, it wasn't. MGM's feature release upped the violence ante considerably and emphasized Barnabas' romantically ruthless villainy, while writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell drastically compressed several months' worth of their original storyline. Events, in truth, hurtle past at breakneck speed, occasionally to the point of incomprehension, but, quite happily, the picture never fails to thrill me, even if it no longer provokes a screaming spell.

Cretinous handyman Willie Loomis (John Karlen), convinced that the legendary Collins jewels are hidden in the family mausoleum, unwittingly liberates the slumbering vampire from his hundred-and-fifty year confinement. Barnabas, posing as an obscure English cousin in those pre-googling Seventies, spends his time restoring the "Old House" on the Collins estate and courting Maggie, when he's not vampirizing the rest of the cast. Dr. Hoffman, who's researching the Collins family, realizes that Barnabas is undead when he casts no reflection in her compact mirror, and struggles to reverse his curse before giving him the business after learning the object of his affections. His handsome visage rejuvenated by a sanguinary feast, Barnabas plans to wed the entranced Maggie in the family's abandoned chapel, but her artist boyfriend Jeff Clark (Roger Davis) intervenes with a crossbow at the altar, accidentally shooting Loomis in the back. Loomis, who also adores Maggie, manages to stake Barnabas before he expires, and Clark finishes the job. You can't keep a good vampire down, however, and Barnabas turns into a bat after the credits.

Test audiences complained of the film's pacing, so Curtis removed approximately twelve minutes of footage--material which, unfortunately, appears to be forever lost. (The 1971 sequel, Night of Dark Shadows, suffered a similar fate, losing an astonishing thirty-seven minutes.) The opening sequence, in which the titles distractingly appear over a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing, excised a scene in which Maggie's charge, the bratty David Collins (David Henesey), pretends to have hanged himself in order to shock his governess. This action, coupled with the unwillingness of the boy's father Roger (Louis Edmonds) to locate the little monster, motivates Maggie to leave Collinwood for good. The studio feared that impressionable youngsters would either be distressed by, or attempt to duplicate, the child's prank, but the scene's removal obscures Maggie's reason for packing. (Barnabas, of course, convinces her to stay.) A conversation between Maggie and Jeff in the Collinwood greenhouse was also eliminated, causing further confusion. In the theatrical release, Barnabas tells Loomis that he's "done something for" Jeff, but the audience has no idea that Barnabas has recommended his rival to a local gallery so that the artist won't interfere with his plans for the governess. Finally, a sequence of Dr. Hoffman's associate, Professor Stokes (Thayer David), learning from Loomis that Barnabas is indeed undead was deleted, blunting the impact of the Van Helsing stand-in's later confrontation with the vampire at the Old House. (Stokes abruptly, almost randomly, sprouts fangs near the picture's climax, as does Roger Collins, while Roger's sister Elizabeth [Joan Bennett] retreats into a fugue state and disappears; ideally, House should have been two hours, not ninety-six minutes, long.)

MGM released this film and its sequel on videocassette in 1990, following with a double feature laserdisc three years later (all are out-of-print), but the pictures have yet to debut on DVD. The original series is available on disc, as is its 1991 NBC resurrection. Fullscreen transfers of both 1.85:1 features, sporting the same ludicrously unconvincing day-for-night shots found in theatrical prints, appear from time to time on Turner Classic Movies. Warner Brothers has announced plans to revamp Dark Shadows for the big screen with director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp, so perhaps House and Night will eventually return, like Barnabas, from their home video limbo.

I hereby apologize to all those patrons, including my family, whose enjoyment of House of Dark Shadows I spoiled nearly four decades ago.

Alas, the lost pleasures of midnight, that witching hour when androgyne and undead walked the earth. The age seems as distant to us now as the silent cinema was then. There was a palpable sense of community, of shared secrets which only a subculture could comprehend and appreciate. Home video altered everything, and the delights we experienced in the darkness of the Bijou are these days relegated to the sanctity and solitude of our living rooms--ironically, the very place where many midnight cults began, absorbing--and, in extreme instances, emulating--the archetypal images beamed like spells through cathode rays. Those fantasias all had their mysteries to disclose, and, in the classic compendium Midnight Movies (Harper & Row, 1983 [338 pages]; revised edition Da Capo, 1991 [348 pages]), J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum tell us how the message(s) ran.

"If the origins of art are to be found in religion," the authors argue, "the movies are surely the universal secular faith of the twentieth century." Theatres are cathedrals, reinforcing the wisdom of sociologist Edgar Morin's dictum that "no one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist"--a word, incidentally, that Alain de Benoist identifies, in his magisterial On Being a Pagan, as being "practically meaningless" in the world of antiquity. Movie palaces were and remain polytheistic temples, for the gods and goddesses of the silver screen will never tolerate the totalitarianism of a lone desert deity. Divinity in the Bijou is diverse, and diversity is divine.

Hoberman and Rosenbaum identify France's Cinema MacMahon, with its enormous lobby photos of the "Four Aces" (Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey, Otto Preminger, and Raoul Walsh), as the first theatre to harness the energy of cultism. Late shows were mounted at the Cinematheque Francaise and the Styx, which specialized in horror films, as well as at London's Electric Cinema and the Paris Pullman. In the United States, exhibitors programmed spook spectaculars and New Year's Eve revels. On the smaller screen, broadcasters needed to fill late-night air time, and motion pictures--particularly the killing kind--were an obvious solution. Human beings, hard-wired as we are for worship, require constant nourishment in our faith. How we hungered for the wee-hours appearances of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and all the other stars who seemed to come alive, like satellites and vampires, only at night. The counterculture vultures who subverted the Sixties were famished for visions that told them where they came from, what they were, and where they were going. Enter the underground. Andy Warhol was there in silver hair, as were George Romero's flesh eaters and John Waters' "filthiest people alive."

The authors dissect these artists chapter by chapter, beginning with the seminal efforts of such dark angels as Drella and his collaborator Paul Morrissey, as well as Kenneth Anger, Ken Jacobs, and Jack Smith. New York's Bleecker Street premiered Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and other freak-outs, but filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas claimed that the theatre's managers were worried that the "low quality of the underground" was tarnishing the Bleecker's reputation. His defiant response was a manifesto celebrating the "Baudelairean Cinemas" of the new auteurs ("a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh") and their marginal appeal: "There is now a cinema for the few, too terrible and too 'decadent' for an 'average' man in any organized culture." Epater la bourgeoisie!

Mexican mage Alexandro Jodorowsky "[asked] of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs." His self-styled "quest for sainthood" El Topo (1970) reversed the polarity of the New Western, cross-pollinating Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah with Panic Movement perpetrator Fernando Arrabal and rascal guru G.I. Gurdjieff. Jodorowsky, his ego inflating to heroically mammoth proportions, maintained that "'there was no difference between filming and reality," and expressed his "'hope [that] one day there will come Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.'" John Lennon was so affected by the picture that he convinced his manager Allen Klein's Abkco Films to procure what would become the pivotal midnight headtrip. Ben Barenholtz was suitably impressed to book the movie for his Elgin Theatre, where El Topo played for six-and-a-half months, enrapturing pothead audiences but dividing critics. Vincent Canby belittled Jodorowsky as "an intellectual William Randolph Hearst," while Peter Schjeldahl proclaimed El Topo "a monumental work of filmic art."

Unfortunately, Jodorowsky's subsequent release, 1973's The Holy Mountain (a work superior, I submit, to his preceding effort), was outshone at Cannes by Marco Ferreri's notorious La Grande Bouffe, and failed to duplicate El Topo's financial success. It had, however, an impressive sixteen-month run at Manhattan's Waverly. Jodorowsky, however, was never again able to pack so many seekers into theatres, and his following features--among them, the memorably gruesome Santa Sangre (1989)--faired poorly at the box office. Another film, 1980's Tusk, was barely even released, but the artist took everything in stride: "What I am doing is making my masterwork, which is my soul."

Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) marked a well-acknowledged turning point in horror cinema. "Until the Supreme Court establishes clearcut guidelines for the pornography of violence," Variety complained in that year's October 16 number, "Night...will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example." The Sixties were coming apart at the seams, and Romero's Image Ten troupe were documenting the decade's self-destruction. Indeed, Hoberman and Rosenbaum opine that the picture's title "could have been a beatnik poet's metaphor for the 'CBS Evening News'" in what was supposedly "the most violent year in [U.S.] history since the end of the Civil War." Romero's zombies remain potent symbols of a disintegrating society, though the director's conception of his ghouls has evolved significantly over the years, culminating in the post-9/11 (re)visions of Land of the Dead (2005) and his "fictuality" reboot, Diary of the Dead (2007).

Romero's first few follow-ups to Night--There's Always Vanilla (1971), Jack's Wife (1972), and The Crazies (1973)--made little critical or commercial impact, and masqueraded under various titles (e.g,. The Affair, Season of the Witch, and Code Name: Trixie). The Pride of Pittsburgh fared better with 1976's vampire character study Martin, which ran for forty-three weekends at the Waverly (where it faced stiff competition from David Lynch's Eraserhead). Romero hit paydirt again with Dawn of the Dead (1978), which shifted the Anubian siege from farmhouse to shopping mall. (Dawn, incidentally, was my first midnight movie experience, and it occurred--most appropriately--in a now-demolished mall.) Night has endured two remakes, while Dawn and Day of the Dead (1985) have weathered one each. The inevitable Crazies reworking is scheduled for winter release.

Waters' "prison and...pleasure dome were American suburbia." The Pope of Trash's Pink Flamingos (1972), with its infamous coprophagic climax, threw down the transgressive gauntlet. The director's remark that "if someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like a standing ovation," may be wishful thinking, but there's no doubt that Waters touched a nerve in the damaged American psyche. The authors examine his stock players (Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Edith Massey--several of whom spawned their own cults) and chronicle his celluloid misadventures from Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964) to Polyester (1980). Flamingos, of course, towers over Waters' oeuvre, flopping at midnight at New York's Orpheum, but playing for five nights a week for fifty-eight weeks at the Elgin, as well as forty-five weeks at the New Yorker. Inescapably, an element of danger crept into these screenings. "The audience was very bad," Barenholtz bemoaned. "[Flamingos] started getting Jersey and Brooklyn crowds, especially these gangs coming in and saying, 'Let's see the fag eat shit,' and throwing things at the screen.'" Waters went relatively mainstream with 1988's Hairspray, which became a Broadway musical and was itself filmed in 2007. The Court TV narrator is currently threatening a sequel.

Barenholtz also booked Lynch's hallucinatory urban horror Eraserhead (1977) at the Cinema Village where, after a slow start, the picture scrambled brains for a year. The film additionally had significant runs at San Francisco's Waverly (ninety-nine weeks) and Los Angeles' NuArt (over three-and-a-half years). Rosenbaum points out that Night and Eraserhead are rooted in "the fortress mentality of the fifties, an attitude becoming more prevalent again today" in our balkanised culture. Hoberman identifies Lynch's film and Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978) as "the only midnight movie[s] which [have] really addressed" the Seventies, and, in an intriguing footnote, the authors connect the industrial nightmare to New York's seminal punk bands--particularly Richard Hell and the Voidoids' anomic anthem, "(I Belong to the) Blank Generation," which they contend constitutes "a striking analogue to" the film. Eraserhead's mutant infant--whose special effects secrets Lynch, like a good magician, has never disclosed--reflects the double anxieties of delivery and abortion, and the film chillingly charts the dubious destiny of a decaying world.

Lynch's Oscar-winning sophomore feature, The Elephant Man (1980), performed admirably at the ticket booth--scoring singularly well with inner-city audiences--even as efforts to resurrect Eraserhead at theatres screening the John Merrick biopic were unsuccessful. The director belly-flopped with Dune (1984), but returned to popular myth-making with Blue Velvet (1986), the Twin Peaks teleseries and film (1990-1992), and the magnificent Mulholland Dr. (2001). The authors ascertain "a modified pop Hinduism" in Lynch's work--he's also a prominent transcendental meditation advocate--and, of all the artists profiled in their volume, the Missoula, Montana Eagle Scout comes closest to approximating the spiritual surrealism of Senor Jodorowsky.

Admittedly, no survey of midnight cinema is complete without an analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). The gender-bending musical really took off at the Waverly, where disciple Louis Farese, Jr.'s so-called "counterpoint dialogue" (in the hallowed tradition of the Glass Teat's horror movie hosts) was picked up by his coreligionists, and soon spectators began arriving for the picture dressed as cast members. Toronto's Roxy preceded their late-night screenings with cartoons (Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle), while the Neptune accompanied Charle Chaplin shorts with the tight harmonies of the BeeGees. Frank-n-Furter personator Tim Curry's erotic energy galvanized viewers, and Hoberman and Rosenbaum proclaim him "the very embodiment of Andre Breton's polemical desire to 'change my sex as I change my shirt.'" Homosexual audiences flocked to the film, especially on Saturdays at San Diego's Strand. A newspaper article on the midnight spectacle attracted the attention of what cultist/ethnographer Margery Walker Pearce described as "hard-hat types" (not, apparently, of the Village People variety), who arrived at the theater shouting obscenities and "threatening to 'kill the faggots.'" Ultimately, the lads fell in line, and Richard O'Brien's and Jim Sharman's glam slam miraculously continues to unite very discrete groups.

Other chapters survey Punk Cinema (Beth B. and Amos Poe), Camp (Mommie Dearest [1981]), Gore (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]), Drugs (Reefer Madness [1940]), and Agit-Prop (Tod Browning's infamous Freaks, of which Hoberman amusingly observes that "the most militant counterculture film was made in 1932"). An especial delight is the book's conclusion, in which the authors discuss the then-state of the late-night nation. Midnight movies aren't so much born as (to borrow an old tagline) kicked out of Hell, but different films reflect the concerns of different socio-economic orders. Dawn's audience, for example, is distinctly--though not exclusively--proletarian, whereas El Topo's eminence "was predicated on the existence of the kind of marginal leisure class that wouldn't think twice about going to see a midnight flick in the middle of the week."

Hoberman and Rosenbaum offer their choices for great unsung midnight movies, and impressive ones they are: Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished Ivan the Terrible trilogy (1944-58), "which intermittently comes across as the greatest Flash Gordon serial ever made." Other possibilities include such "epic, environmental" experiments as Warhol's twenty-five hour **** (1968--screened only once, at the New Cinema Playhouse) and Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971; a mere twelve hours and forty minutes). Rosenbaum nominates Frank Tashlin's "prophetic avant-garde masterpiece" Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and Hoberman suggests "a two-hour combination of Busby Berkeley's greatest hits."

Rosenbaum deplores such canonical splatter platters as Blood Feast (1963) and Basket Case (1982) ("neither of which I would have seen if we hadn't been doing this book"), but Hoberman wonders if gore cultists "[identify] with a lumpen, vengeful, rebellious element in popular taste," and laments that films "have turned out to be...a 'passing amusement.'" This is especially evident in the new millennium, an age whose youth prefer the virtual violence of video and computer games to traditional artistic experiences. Perhaps, in the final analysis, films aren't interactive enough, despite the call and response of the midnight mentality. As the authors note in their 1991 afterword, the enchanted era was ending by the time of the book's first edition "and we were speaking about a historical phenomenon." The mainstream sucked in the surreal, leading to a double-edged victory: Rosenbaum remarks "that midnight movies succeeded rather than failed" as their creators went Hollywood, "but it's a kind of success that resembles failure on certain fronts; it's like saying that socialism in this country succeeded rather than failed when it became part of the New Deal." Today's audiences, at any rate, crave more immediate sensations, and pushing a button or manipulating a joystick are, for them, less passive than watching a film or reading a book. The sons of night, and maids who love the moon, have, I fear, for evermore exchanged the midnight flower for the eye of vulgar light.

Some filmmakers have their fingers on the pulse of the movie-going public, others down its throat. The latter group constitutes the rogues' gallery of Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford's Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square! (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 2002; 315 pages). Landis, who earlier published a splendid biography of Luciferian auteur Kenneth Anger, and wife Clifford vividly recreate the lost world of Manhattan's 42nd Street, the former cesspool which now serves the Big Apple's international tourist, as opposed to its rough, trade. Landis (1959-2008) pulled several years as a projectionist/manager at sundry fleapits, braving a workplace where "muggings and bloody needles were the order of the day." His legendary fanzine helped legitimize the grindhouse genre, earning him the enmity of underground heavyweights Jonas Mekas and Ken Jacobs, while endearing him to Mr. Anger. (Anger later feuded with Landis over his unauthorized bio, but that's showbiz.)

The tour ranges from the stylized kink of the Olga trilogy (1964-66) and other early roughies to women-in-prison epics and mondo movies. Their creators are creatures of the night: shadowy, often pseudonymous people who move with hand-held Bolexes through the margins, where magic usually happens. Film distributor Stan Borden "was slobbering, but he was personable." Producer George Weiss "had a Jungian feel for the sordid American S&M unconscious." Andy Milligan made movies for as little as $750, and the costumes for his gory period pieces were loudly colored so as to survive the blowup to thirty-five-millimeter. Once, when his Sweeney Todd ripoff Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) was resurrected at the Lyric, a censored throatslitting--performed to appease the MPAA--resulted in the hurling from the balcony of a small refrigerator. "The crowd became agitated," Landis notes dryly. These were dangerous places to displease an audience.

The Cameo purveyed industrial-strength hardcore, while the Anco "sat on a nest of rotten eggs." Genderbenders from Ed Wood to Doris Wishman unreeled while "Latino junkies on the lam after a quick strongarm robbery slumped in the aisles." The Rialto programmed an unrelenting gore apocalypse; the Roxy's blaxploitationers "were as inflexible and distinct as the troublemakers sitting in the audience." These theatres form an infernal roll call as the authors invoke the Dark Gods of the Tenderloin.

Of course, conjuration demands sacrifice, preferably bloody. Roughie pioneer Michael Findley was decapitated in a helicopter crash atop the Pan Am building. Laurence Merrick, director of 1972's Oscar-nominated Manson documentary, was murdered several years after the film's release, as was interviewee Ronni Howard. The toll was also psychic. William Sanderson, best known today as hillbilly Larry from Newhart, hanged a black pastor's wife in Fight for Your Life (1977), a picture "calculated to drive inner city audiences berserk with rage." He told Clifford he was afraid the film would come back to haunt him. (Landis, who was present at an Empire screening, reports that "white patrons tried to leave the theatre as unassumingly as possible"). Many filmmakers never made any money from their work. Distributors sold prints to subdistributors, who could reissue them with impunity while their creators received no residuals whatsoever. Roger Watkins was unaware for years that his pseudo-snuff Last House on Dead End Street (1977) was actually playing somewhere and even turning a profit, as well as stomachs. The Dark Gods have a voracious appetite.

The title of Larry Buchanan's High Yellow (1965) "was so offensive you had to call the boxoffice." David Durston, director of Boy-napped (1975), spent a night in the pokey after star Jamie Gillis ran through Little Italy with a pistol, alarming the locals. Bob Roberts' 1976 porno take on the Patty Hearst saga, Patty, was closed by court order after only one week. Landis and Clifford enthusiastically convey the grit and the grime of psychosexual cinema in the funniest Deuce memoir since Josh Alan Friedman's Tales of Times Square.

This is not to suggest the book is without faults. The authors perpetuate the myths that Milligan directed 1964's The Naked Witch (it was Buchanan), and that celebrity monologist Spalding Gray appeared as the depraved El Sharif in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976). They also claim that Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was the director's response to Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox/Make Them Die Slowly (1981), when it's the other way around (though Lenzi did inaugurate this notorious subgenre). Ivan Rassimov, and not Massimo Foschi, is listed as the star of Deodato's The Last Survivor/The Last Cannibal World (1977), and so forth. These are curious errors for film cultists to make, and Sleazoid Express would have benefited from tighter editing.

To take this tour, however, is to experience by proxy the movies' anti-canon, a refreshing alternative to that puffed-up mainstream that imagines As Good As it Gets (1997) is as good as it gets. The socially disreputable sorcerers of cinema remain as vital as ever in this age of Hollywood product whose innovations are inversely proportional to their stratospheric budgets. Really, now: Wouldn't you rather watch I Drink Your Blood (1970) or White Slaves of Chinatown (1964) than the latest groaner from Jerry Bruckheimer? (Video companies are helpfully appendiced.) See them and die a thousand deaths.

Anger next journeyed to Crowley's Thelema Abbey, the Sicilian "monastery" where the magus conducted his sexual rituals. The place was scarcely more than an abandoned shanty (Crowley and his cronies had been deported in the early Twenties), but Anger helped to renovate the house, uncovering erotic frescoes and the temple room's magic circle. His half-hour documentary, Thelema Abbey, was sponsored by Picture Post and broadcast on British television in 1955, but disappeared when the magazine folded. Plans for a 1961 film of Pauline Reage's Story of O were scuttled when Anger discovered that the funds furnished by the lead actress's boyfriend derived from the ransom payment to automobile heir Eric Peugeot's kidnappers, and the actress's father--Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Finance--learned she wasn't off taking harpsichord lessons after all. Legend locates the twenty minutes Anger shot as being literally underground, though apparently this extends no further than the archives of the Cinematheque Francaise, and the book would have to wait fourteen years for Just Jaeckin's softcore adaptation. Anger's primary endeavor during this period was the work for which he is most infamous, Hollywood Babylon (1957; revised U.S. edition 1974).

Anger was down and out in Paris, and approached Cahiers du Cinema with the idea of compiling Hollywood's secret history. The journal suggested that he channel his gossipy, and not always accurate, tales of celebrity misbehavior into a book, which Jean Jacques Pauvert (who had previously defied French censors by publishing the Marquis de Sade) would release. Opening with a Crowley quote, "Every Man and every Woman is a Star," from Magick in Theory and Practice, Anger traces the hellish movements of his heavenly bodies in lurid, Bestial prose. "I have developed a case of enormous, petrified, extremely sour grapes over the subject of Hollywood," Anger once declaimed, and this mocking, overwrought chronicle--Tacitus in Tinseltown--is the destitute director's attack on the land in which he never became a Star. The picture-filled book is essentially a surrogate film, a documentary done for coffee tables. Anger dishes dirt on everyone from "Fatty" Arbuckle to "Monster" Mae West, climaxing in the "Hollywoodammerung" of various performers (replete with disturbing corpse shots of Lewis Stone and cover girl Jayne Mansfield). It's deconstruction by death ray, and it spawned numerous imitations in the fields of music and television. Anger later claimed to have written Babylon "for one reader in a thousand"--in other words, the book was supposedly composed in a secret code that no one has ever been able to decipher, if it even exists (though Anger did offer a thousand dollars to anyone who cracked it). The book's publishing history is as lurid as its sensationalism. Marvin Miller, who had earlier made a mint ripping off Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press, brought out an unauthorized, rewritten edition in the mid-Sixties, and later a softcore film of it. Anger was never compensated, though book and movie were ordered withdrawn by a federal court; bootlegs of both have surfaced periodically. Miller, whose outrageous career encompassed everything from embezzlement to arson, was eventually sentenced to eight years in Wire City, and Hollywood Babylon ultimately received an official American release through Rolling Stone's Straight Arrow imprint.

The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume One covers the first half of the director's Cycle, from finished projects to fragments and fragments to finished projects. (Regrettably, such teenage efforts as Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat [1941], The Nest [1943], and Demigods [1944] are nowhere to be found and likely no longer exist.) The set opens with the Prix Henri Chometter-award-winning Fireworks (1947; B/W, 15 minutes), lensed at Anger's parents' house when the Anglemyers were out of town (though Anger's brother Bob has located the shoot elsewhere), and unreleased for two years. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum have credited its creator with "provok[ing] the first major scandal of American avant-garde" cinema, and it's easy to see why: when Anger's hallucinatory homoeroticism was unspooled at London's Royal Film Society in 1950, the Indian Ambassador's wife cried, "That film should be burned," and left in a righteous huff. Seven years later, exhibitor Raymond Rohauer was convicted of disseminating obscenity for reviving Fireworks at his legendary Coronet Theatre. His conviction was overturned in 1959 by the California State Supreme Court, which imperiously declared "that homosexuality is not to be approved of, but society should understand its causes and effects." Sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey was so impressed with the picture that he obtained a copy for his archives; this marked the beginning of Anger's decades-long relationship with the Institute, for which he did volunteer research.

Anger has pronounced Fireworks "all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July." The Dreamer (Anger) wakes from his troubled sleep to cruise a darkened men's room, which opens into an alternative universe of freeways, a painted bar backdrop Anger liberated from an old western set, and swooning sexual violence. He encounters a body-building sailor (Bill Seltzer), who shows off by flexing his muscles and walking on his hands. Anger is swatted by Seltzer when he produces a cigarette and asks for a light (a common enough come-on, but one which, in Anger's psychoverse, contains magnetic resonance), has his arm twisted by another sailor, and is finally scourged by several chain-wielding tars, who rip open his chest to reveal a ticking electrometer. Anger's Eleusinian mini-epic offers male sadomasochism as mystery initiation, achieving apotheosis in the notorious money shot (seamen/semen) of a Roman candle phallus. Anger's subsequent transmogrification into a Christmas tree, which is consumed in the family fireplace, echoes his earlier Tinsel Tree (1942), while ritually lampooning the cult of the Dying Father. Sacrifice, a theme permeating Anger's work, would find further release in other projects, from the killing of an Aztec prince in 1950's Golden Bough-inspired The Love That Whirls--destroyed on grounds of obscenity, a then-frequent practice, by the Comstocks at Eastman-Kodak--to the more overtly Crowleyan ceremonies of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Lucifer Rising.

Anger prepared at least five different versions of Fireworks, two of which (an early draft and a 1966 hand-painted print) are lost. Anger's friend and fellow filmmaker, Ed Earle, notes that the sequence of the Dreamer lying naked in a public urinal was originally longer and contained additional violence. The director's narrated prologue has been restored by UCLA from the surviving prints; the original negative A/B rolls are themselves lost, leaving only positive copies. (Mystic Fire's and BFI's print, which contained red-lettered title and end cards, does not appear here but would have made a nice supplement; the title card is reproduced in the set's lavish booklet.) Emulsion scratches are present but scarcely distracting; if anything, they enhance the film's rich rawness. The source music, a melancholically martial excerpt from Ottorino Respighi's "The Pines of Rome," alternates with silence throughout. According to Anger, the original release also contained music by Ernest Schelling, but it is not retained in any video version.

The director states in his commentary that Fireworks was inspired by a dream, which was itself generated by Los Angeles' infamous Zoot Suit Riots. He identifies the actors as soldiers studying combat photography at the University of Southern California, though Earles has described the men as "tricks who had no inhibitions." Whatever the truth is (and that's sometimes a quantum question where this artist is concerned), Anger recalls them with obvious affection and protests that, despite his protagonist, he himself is an adamant non-smoker.

Anger began making private reels during this period, one of which--perhaps his greatest film maudit--briefly landed him in hot water as a federal fugitive. Freelancing for the Kinsey Institute, he recorded a sadist doctor putting his masochistic patients through stiff workouts in the man's soundproof torture chamber. The acts were consensual, but when Anger foolishly had the footage developed at a drugstore, the San Jose County police thought they had a bona fide snuff film on their hands. The doctor was arrested and Anger was interrogated, an experience the director appears to have relished. The Institute came to his aid, but Anger, who was to be the state's witness, defied an order to remain in California and ventured to Colorado for a film festival. He was taken into custody at director Stan Brakhage's house by the town sheriff (a friend of Brakhage's) and a San Jose County Assistant District Attorney. Brakhage's friendship with the sheriff, who now opened a file on him, ended then and there. One hopes that Anger's footage did not suffer the same ignominious fate as The Love That Whirls.

Anger made more private reels and returned to San Francisco to document the hippie scene. By now he had joined his friend Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, and his new project was a "fallen angel manifesto" called Lucifer Rising. Inspired by Crowley's "Hymn to Lucifer," Anger searched for the devil he considered "the patron saint of the visual arts." Lucifer is the Roman name for the planet Venus, and was worshipped both as Aurora (morning star) and as Vesper (evening star). The Gnostics revered Lucifer as the Herald of the Dawn, and Robert Graves speculated that the rebellious King of Babylon in the Book of Isaiah was derived from the observation that Venus is the last proud star to defy the sunrise, and that it must have been punished for its disobedience. Lucifer is also a surrogate for Horus, the "Crowned and Conquering Child" whose id dominates his superego, and he manifested himself in the form of Bobby Beausoleil. Beausoleil ("beautiful sun") was a guitarist and artist who'd been an early member of the Los Angeles rock band Love; he was also a member of Charles Manson's entourage.

Beausoleil became Anger's chauffeur and moved into his house, a former Russian embassy. The pair presented the Equinox of the Gods ritual for Mabon at the Straight Theatre, where Beausoleil's band, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, performed. Inevitably the two fell out, with Anger accusing Beausoleil of stealing his Lucifer footage from his car trunk after the guitarist decamped. This was the impetus for the full-page October 26, 1967 obituary for himself that Anger ran in The Village Voice to mark not the end of his life, but his cinematic career: "In Memoriam Kenneth Anger Film Maker (1947-1967)." The advertisement recalled Crowley's 1930 mischief when the Beast staged a suicide in an unsuccessful attempt to interest a publisher in a novel about just such a stunt. Anger recycled what was left of Lucifer as his "attack on the sensorium," Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), which won Film Culture's Tenth Independent Film Award that same year.

The director traveled to London, drifting into the orbit of the Rolling Stones, to whom he functioned as a kind of Cagliostro figure. Beausoleil had by this time been arrested and sentenced to death for the murder of Gary Hinman in a drug deal gone sour, though his sentence was commuted to life after California's abolition of capital punishment. The Stones' biographer Tony Sanchez contends that the group believed that Anger actually inspired Beausoleil to homicide, which made him a "perversely fascinating" figure for the rockers. Mick Jagger, whom Anger involved in his Lucifer project, is credited with "sound" on Invocation--an abrasive drone created on a Moog Modular synthesizer. (This same keyboard, which appears as a prop in Jagger's feature debut, Nicholas Roeg's and Donald Cammell's Performance [1970], was sold by the dissatisfied singer to Berlin's Hansa by the Wall recording studio, and ultimately wound up in the capable hands of Tangerine Dream leader Edgar Froese).

If ever a movie looked like a spell, Invocation of My Demon Brother (color, 11 minutes) is that picture in spades. The film is bookended by three yellow circles forming "as above, so below" triangles, effectively uniting starry world with atom. Horus appears in a painting under the titles. Anger combines frantic fragments of the Mabon ritual with shots of a dope-smoking funeral for his feline Midnight (LaVey cameos here in full devil gear, a shrunken cat head in each hand), as well as the Stones' disastrous, butterfly-obliterating Hyde Park concert in memory of their late guitarist Brian Jones, and looped footage of American soldiers disembarking from a helicopter in Vietnam. (This footage, printed on a C roll and playing to the A and B rolls, appears throughout Invocation and is allegedly visible through infrared glasses.) The albino Wand Bearer (Speed Hacker) presides over images of nude boys lounging and a hanged man's contorting legs, his photophobic eyes contracting in seemingly speed-induced muscular spasms. Back at the Straight Theatre, Beausoleil's band grooves while the Magus (Anger) holds aloft Mercury's symbol, burns Crowley's "Testament of Oz," and widdershins around a magic circle to summon Lucifer--Beausoleil's body with a solar swastika projected onto it. Images come at the viewer like missiles, kaleidoscopically and subliminally: the Eye of Ra, the Eye in the Triangle, Beausoleil's glowing orbs--more than any other Anger film, Invocation watches us while we watch it. The death-obsessed bikers of Scorpio have become the expendable legions of our National Security State, impulsively going to their doom in the eternal return of American empire-building, playing the war games of the War God. Anger's flame imagery is as powerful here as it is in Pleasure Dome; light scorches the retinas in pagan pyrotechnics. The film's most astonishing sequence is a smoky accelerated shot of Anger descending the staircase of his Embassy like a marble statue come alive, to (de)generate into a voodoo doll bearing the sign, "ZAP! YOU'RE PREGNANT! THAT'S WITCHCRAFT!"

Fantoma's internegative is taken from the original reversal A/B rolls and looks fine. The disc features, as a delightful bonus, part of the Magick Powerhouse of Oz's original recording sessions for Lucifer Rising--indeed, this is the band's only recording, period. This quasi-Indian forerunner of Beausoleil's later, definitive score was located by television producer Brian Butler, and was originally released as the second disc in White Dog's 2004 Lucifer Rising CD package. Fantoma urges the viewer to understand that this jam session is "not intended as an alternative soundtrack," though it makes a fascinating footnote to this film's strange history, and--given Anger's extensive modification of his work over the years--it deserves acceptance, and utilization, on its own considerable merits.

Late the following year, Anger finally unveiled Lucifer Rising (color, 28 minutes)--his biggest-budgeted production--at New York's Whitney Museum. The bulk of Michael Cooper's photography had been completed in 1973, but Anger spent the next several years editing the picture. ("Devil Film to Get State Aid," the Sunday Telegraph had memorably complained in 1971.) Originally he had engaged his fellow Crowleyite, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, to score the picture. Page had an extensive collection of Crowley's books and artwork--the world's second largest, in fact--and lived in the Beast's Loch Ness castle, Boleskine. According to the audio commentary, Page delivered only twenty minutes' worth of music, and Anger required more. He doesn't discuss his fallout with Page, who cameos in Lucifer, or the sensational press conference he held to humiliate the guitarist. (Anger was particularly peeved that Page hadn't selected him to direct the band's 1976 concert opus, The Song Remains the Same, a tumultuous task that fell to Joe Massot and Peter Clifton.) Anger now renewed his friendship with the imprisoned Beausoleil, who agreed to score the picture with his all-inmate band, and who delivered one of the truly classic film soundtracks.

Anger's Lucifer commentary is the most gossipy and entertaining of the bunch. He says of Gibril that she "had beautiful breasts and she wasn't at all shy about showing them." Cammell, who shot himself in the mid-Nineties, "was fascinated with death, and what're you gonna do?" (Curiously, Anger doesn't address Cammell's claim that he was one of Crowley's illegitimate children.) The most amusing recollections involve the drug-addled Faithfull: "Whenever she attempted to commit suicide, it was always with someone within range that could save her." Lucifer Rising, in truth, is littered with suicides; Cooper, who also photographed album covers for the Beatles, later took his life. (In typical fashion, Anger claimed responsibility for Cooper's final exit "because I bawled him out too often.") Anger deplores Faithfull's chain-smoking, "but Capricorns are very stubborn and you can't do anything about it. At least I don't care to." He also takes her to task for putting his crew at risk by smuggling a box of heroin into Egypt, a firing squad offense. The dope, which she concealed in a cosmetics case, "looked like gray powder, and since her makeup was gray anyway, I think sometimes she forgot herself and powdered herself with heroin."

Anger asserts that his crew observed an actual saucer at dawn, but the object moved too quickly for the camera and had to be recreated. It's worth noting that the contemporary vogue for UFOs dates back to 1947, the year of Parsons' Babalon Working, as the sorcerer scientist believed that alien spacecraft was an enigmatic engine in The Book of the Law. "The UFO is an idea intended to confound science," ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna wrote, "because science has begun to threaten the existence of the human species as well as the ecosystem of the planet." Our collective unconscious is thus alerting us to the ethical danger "whenever history builds to a certain kind of boil." The world inside our skull is transmitting hallucinogenic signals, but Anger states that, even though he "considered it like a sign from the gods that something was happening," he's "glad I don't know what it means, because it's a mystery....I certainly don't want the answer to everything." Anger's attitude extends to the rest of his commentaries, as he rarely discusses the esoteric meanings of his films.

Fantoma offers another sparkling transfer from a new internegative, and the score has been digitally remastered at Absinthe Studios from original sources. Beaulsoleil's soundtrack disc, though currently out of print, is available in digital download format, and is well worth seeking.

NEXT: THE MAN WE WANT TO HANG

Puce Women was originally intended as a feature about Hollywood actresses in the Nineteen Twenties. Unable to procure funding, Anger abandoned the project, eventually releasing the six minutes he had in the can as Puce Moment (1949; color). This fragment casts Yvonne Marquis (identified elsewhere as Anger's cousin, though he makes no mention of it in his commentary) as a star(let) selecting a sequin dress of the title shade from her vast wardrobe, reclining dreamily on a chaise longue, and walking four magnificent borzoi--an archetypal image oddly prefiguring Barbara Steele's memorable entrance as Katia in Mario Bava's La Maschera del Demonio (1960; U.S. Black Sunday). Puce Moment exudes the austere ambience of a silent film, achieved through eight-frames-per-second camera speed and Marquis' languid movements. Anger has said of his original conception that "I was, in effect, filming ghosts," and certainly his actress seems to exist in another, transdimensional time. There is much to savor here, from the screen-filling image of flapper gowns dancing on their racks as Marquis chooses one--they shimmer and shake like phantasms--to the Florine Stettheimer-inspired sequence of the siren on her floating couch.

MTI's digital transfer of the archival internegative looks grand. The perennially obscure Jonathan Halper's songs, the dissonant "Leaving My Old Life Behind" and the more introspective "I'm a Hermit," were added in 1971 (possibly supplanting a Verdi overture in Anger's original withdrawn version), and augment the film's temporal dislocation. The first tune's furious feedback sounded muddy in previous prints and especially benefits from Fantoma's upgrade. Anger observes in his commentary that Marquis later became mistress to former Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas, and states that the film's dresses were worn by the likes of Clara Bow and Barbara Lamarr. He also recycles the story that his grandmother was a costume mistress in the days before sound, but Anger's siblings have vigorously disputed this. The booklet credits the director as photographer, though most sources cite his fellow cineaste Curtis Harrington, who modestly demurred that he "was sort of there, you know, pushing the button."