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Speaker at UCI Cocteau Festival Today : Kenneth Anger Looks Forward to Making Film of ‘Holly Baby’ Books

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Times Staff Writer

Is Hollywood ready for Kenneth Anger?

“I want to make a mainstream movie,” says the creator of such ‘60s cult films as “Scorpio Rising” and “Kustom Kar Kommandos.”

Is Hollywood ready for a Kenneth Anger movie adapted from his kinky chronicle of Tinseltown scandal, “Hollywood Babylon,” and its deliciously tacky sequel, “Hollywood Babylon II”?

“I hope so,” says the only living link between Jean Cocteau and Dennis Hopper, sitting for an interview at his Los Angeles home in a crimson chair in a crimson room surrounded by his collection of rare motion-picture memorabilia.

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“That’s basically why I came back from New York,” he says. “I want to do a movie, maybe not on the scale of Fellini, but I want it to have some quality.”

Anger, who will speak today at the Cocteau Centenary Festival at UC Irvine, has gained wider notoriety from his two “Holly Baby” books than from all 2 dozen of his films, a handful of which were made by the time of his senior year at Beverly Hills High School in 1950.

“I could have gone into the industry then,” Anger, 58, says. “But Hollywood was entering one of its most unpleasant periods. People were already denouncing each other. The blacklist had begun. I didn’t want any part of that, not that I was politically engage .”

At the same time, Anger received an admiring letter from Cocteau about a 15-minute film called “Fireworks” that Anger had entered in a festival competition at Biarritz. “It touches the quick of the soul, and this is very rare,” wrote Cocteau, who was on the jury.

The Biarritz festival was devoted to film maudit --underground works that had encountered censorship or generally were considered beyond the pale for reasons of content (usually erotic) or form (usually difficult).

“Fireworks,” which Anger says was influenced by Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet,” is a dreamlike mirage filled with graphic violence and homosexual imagery. It won first prize in the Biarritz festival’s “poetic film” category in 1949.

“Cocteau’s letter was more encouraging than anything I had locally,” Anger recalls. So, on his graduation from high school, he went straight to Paris, where Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise arranged a private screening of his films for Cocteau and Jean Genet and some of the Surrealists.

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“I had very little money, and in theory I was going just for a visit,” says the Santa Monica-born film maker. “I ended up working at the Cinematheque Francaise for nearly 12 years. My parents didn’t approve. They wanted me to go to Caltech. But my grandmother, who had been a costume mistress in silent films, basically sponsored me.”

As he reminisces about Cocteau, Anger folds his arms across the rings of Saturn on his sweater. Mae West reclines over his shoulder in a poster for “Goin’ to Town.” Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova stare into space above him in their wedding photograph. And a lifelike mannequin of child actor Bobby Driscoll, dressed in white tails and the opera hat he wore in “So Dear to My Heart,” stands with his ear cocked as though listening at the door.

Cocteau awas already in his 60s when they met. Yet, Anger recalls, he seemed to have boundless energy, “was full of spontaneous witticisms,” and took delight in his bad-boy pose as both subversive artist and literary rebel, ironically referring to himself as “a pet rhinoceros.”

“Cocteau skated on the surface of life,” Anger says, “always managing to be comfortable. He had a way with the rich, and some people say that’s because he was a skilled whore, a courtesan. But he always had a sense of humor about himself.”

Anger remembers visiting Cocteau “in very small rooms that were all decorated like little velvet boxes covered in opera red. It was almost like a doll’s house, the rooms were so small. And he had blackboards on which he would draw reminders of things he had to do. They were funny drawings. Each day he would erase the old drawings and do new ones.”

Not long after Anger’s arrival, Cocteau gave him the film rights to a 1946 ballet, “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.” In 1951, Anger made a black-and-white film of it, starring Jean and Nathalie Babilee. It was to be a study for a 20-minute version in color. But he couldn’t find a producer to underwrite the cost of a color production.

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“Even with Cocteau recommending the project, nobody cared,” Anger says. “As he himself told me, none of his own films ever made money. They were prestige projects. They were a big success in Paris. But the rest of France didn’t give a damn.

“I don’t put a halo around Cocteau’s head,” he continues. “He unquestionably went through a period of being out of fashion for maybe 15 years after his death (in 1963). Now he has begun coming back into fashion. I think the French see him the way the British see Noel Coward, as sort of a one-man band.”

Reflecting on his own career, Anger regrets only that he didn’t capitalize on the media attention he received during the ‘60s when “Scorpio Rising” scored an art-house success and became one of the most notorious underground films of its time. Its images of motorcycles and male torsos set to a sound track of rock ‘n’ roll struck a sympathetic chord in certain Hollywood quarters, as well as in Greenwich Village.

Dedicated to the Hell’s Angels, James Dean, “and all overgrown boys,” the movie inspired “a whole series of Hollywood biker films, most prominently, ‘Easy Rider,’ ” writes film historian Robert Haller.

“I never appreciated the term ‘underground,’ ” says Anger. “That was a term invented by Newsweek. I considered myself an experimental film maker. Making mainstream movies is not superior to what I did, but I’m sorry I wasn’t more ambitious.

“Probably at the time of ‘Scorpio Rising,’ if I had submitted a script to someone like Roger Corman for a motorcycle movie, I could have made a low-budget Hollywood film as Dennis Hopper did. I know I influenced him. And I know I influenced Martin Scorsese in ‘Mean Streets.’ ”

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Now the stakes are considerably higher. Anger feels that if “Hollywood Babylon” is to be done properly, it cannot be made as a low-budget movie. But he and producer Ed Pressman have yet to come to an agreement on the “Holly Baby” budget.

“I’ve submitted the script and it’s been discussed,” says Anger, who also hopes to direct the movie. “They said the budget would be too high. That disappointed me. But I’m rewriting to pare down the cost.”

In the meantime, he’ll continue working on his next book, a biography of Rudolph Valentino. With the centennial of Valentino’s birth coming in 1995, he anticipates a blockbuster.

After all, Anger is probably the world’s foremost authority on the Silent Screen’s “Greatest Lover.” And though he insists that he “has sympathy for fallen stars,” he also has enough salacious tidbits to entertain a new generation that may never even have heard of Valentino.

Film maker and author Kenneth Anger will speak on “Cocteau and the Magic Mirror” today at noon in the Stewart Room at the Bren Events Center at UC Irvine. Admission: $12, including lunch. Information: (714) 856-6617.

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