History gone soft: performing the scandalous 1920s in Hollywood Babylon

ABSTRACTAdapted (without permission) from Kenneth Anger’s notorious book about early Hollywood scandals, the 1972 sexploitation version of Hollywood Babylon is a quasi-documentary that alternates between public-domain footage from silent-era films and softcore re-enactments of some of Anger’s most lurid anecdotes. The film’s generic reframing of his dubious stories as late-period sexploitation fodder participates in the book’s mission of desacralizing the stars, but its reticence to include unsimulated sex softens the punch of its scandalous subject matter, while inadvertently flaunting Anger’s fictionalization of history. This article argues that the performances in Hollywood Babylon doubly signal the ‘softness’ of both the filmmakers’ depictions of sex and Anger’s Hollywood lore, compounding the book’s thematic linkage of on-screen decadence, off-screen perversion, and movieland failures.KEYWORDS: Documentarysexploitationadaptationperformancere-enactmentscandal Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Here and in the following, references to the Hollywood Babylon pressbook and cover letter are from the private collection of Lisa Petrucci Vraney, who continues to make the film available via Something Weird Video. My supreme thanks to Lisa for making these documents available.2 Ironically, several of Anger’s own late-period films, including Green Hell (Anger, dir. Citation2007a) and I’ll Be Watching You (Anger, dir. Citation2007b), largely consist of pirated footage from gay porn videos.3 Additionally, Dietrich and Von Sternberg’s collaborative Hollywood period was the 1930s, rather than the 1920s, so this segment does not even fit the film’s purview.