Hollywood Babylon - Kenneth Anger

"Hollywood Babylon" is a truly fantastic and sometimes harrowing read. The book takes grim delight in revealing the rapid and sad downfalls of actors and actresses caught in the Hollywood machine. Scandals, drug addiction, manic depression, rape and suicide are some of the reasons for the descent into the abyss of some great Hollywood icons. The book is basically a smorgasbord of human weakness caught in the headlights of the media and the disapproving public. The book wants to destroy the "star" myth and tell the reader that actors and actresses who are revered are really only the same as us but living under the influence of human ...  Read the complete review

Kenneth Anger is the kind of guy you want to be sitting next to at a party, unless of course, you don't like gossip of the most salacious kind. The keeper of old Hollywood's sleaze stories, he sits you down and lets you have it right between the eyes. Civilised people? Pah! Role models for a nation? Phooey! More than mere mortals? Don't make him laugh. Little has escaped the film industry's version of J Edgar Hoover, except that this fount of all seedy knowledge genuinely loves and cares for dear old tinseltown. A child actor himself, he'll briefly boast of his appearance in "Midsummer's Night Dream", but ...  Read the complete review

There’s always something about the scandals of the past. Somehow whatever emerges from today's blaze, celeb-saturated media is never quite as fascinating as the half-remembered, half-covered up affairs of yesteryear- horrors that seem all the more shocking today for the utter innocence that surrounded them. In recent years there's been a glut of posthumous exposes but still the grand-daddy of them all remains Hollywood Babylon. Written by Kenneth Anger, former child actor and notable underground filmmaker, this no holds barred account of Hollywood scandals was originally published in Paris before cult success meant it eventually worked its way (in a ...  Read the complete review