Kenneth Anger and the Unbelievably Godawful Hollywood Babylon TV Show Hosted By Tony Curtis

When I was fourteen years old I was a goddamn pervert. Maybe all fourteen year old boys are creeps and sleazoids but I know that when I reached that awful age all that really mattered to me was boobs, butts, nudity and sex. 

I loved movies because I’m a born cinephile but also because film is one of the greatest art forms ever created to disseminate images of naked boobs and butts. As a horny, repressed, confused teenager that was of the utmost importance to me. 

I vaguely remember reading Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon after I found a copy in my aunt and uncle’s basement when I was living there and being intrigued by the book’s unrelenting emphasis on sex and sleaze. 

Hollywood Babylon depicts Hollywood as a Sodom and Gomorrah-like bastion of sin and degradation where everyone famous is a sex addict, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a closeted homosexual or all of the above. 

Needless to say, Hollywood Babylon made an indelible impression on the young Nathan Rabin. Looking back it’s nothing but slander and defamation of some of the biggest names in silent film and the talkies. 

I got an early, extremely questionable education in Hollywood history through Hollywood Babylon. The things that I learned from the book were not necessarily true but they sure were colorful! 

One anecdote that has stayed with me involved Clara Bow having sex with an entire college football team that included a young John Wayne. Was it true? No, it DEFINITELY was not true, to the point that Bow’s relatives considered suing Anger. 

I first learned about Fatty Arbuckle, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe through Hollywood Babylon. 

Hollywood Babylon follows the old dictum, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of suspected college sex athlete John Wayne’s most memorable films. 

It’s so unrelentingly, unapologetically sleazy that when I learned that one of the most important and influential experimental filmmakers of all time was named Kenneth Anger I assumed that it had to be someone else. 

Surely the sleaze behind Hollywood Babylon couldn’t also be a revered avant-garde filmmaker. I was wrong.

THE Kenneth Anger who directed Scorpio Rising also wrote Hollywood Babylon and its sequel. 

VERY revealing.

I was particularly surprised to learn that Hollywood Babylon was the work of someone considered a genius because I was familiar with the book but also its wonderfully terrible television adaptation. 

As a fourteen year old I would watch LITERALLY anything as long as it was on television and there was at least a small chance that it would include nudity or sex. If it was about movies, even better! 

Since it was syndicated as well as sinful, Hollywood Babylon couldn’t show boobs but it could slander the hell out of the dead. It could kill some of the biggest movie stars of all time a second time through character assassination and juvenile cruelty. 

name a more iconic duo!

Hollywood Babylon was hosted by Tony Curtis, who clearly hated himself for taking such a sordid gig. You can see Curtis visibly reading from cue cards or a teleprompter. He looks and sounds like there is a gun pointed at his head and its trigger will be squeezed unless Curtis delivers his copy as written. 

The missing link between infamous 1950s tabloids like Confidential and the current true crime wave featured some of the most wonderfully terrible reenactments in the history of re-enactments.

Ninety eight percent of the time reenactments are embarrassing, cheesy and terrible. The other two percent of the time Errol Morris is doing them. 

Reenactments are sketchy and low-rent under the best of circumstances. Hollywood Babylon featured the very worst of something that was almost invariably comically awful to begin with. 

Hollywood Babylon’s reenactments all seem to take place in the same depressing, sparsely appointed room and feature actors who don’t look ANYTHING like the legends they’re supposed to be playing but don’t act anything like them either. 

There aren’t many episodes online, unfortunately, but the episode on John Belushi features a gloriously off-brand Belushi who is skinny, tall and looks strangely like Emo Phillips. 

The reenactments are cheap and exploitative but they’re also weirdly glum. Anger understood that sin was fun. That’s why people do it but Hollywood Babylon depicts sin as vaguely soul crushing. 

When I saw that Kenneth Anger died at 96, at the end of a long and impressive life the first thing I thought about was that godawful TV show and the look of understandable mortification on Curtis’ face as he faces a public all too familiar with just how far he had fallen since the days of Sweet Smell of Success and Some Like It Hot. 

Anger was an arty genius as well as was a compiler and appreciator of sordid show-business gossip. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 

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