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The FIR Vault

LOOK BACK WITH KENNETH ANGER

By Roy Frumkes • Nov 6th, 2008 • Pages: 1 2 3 4

Actual fullpage obituary printed in the Village Voice.

FIR: And Bobby just happened to break down there?

KA: Yes. It’s one of those coincidences that, if it were in a novel or screenplay, you’d be pushing it in the coincidence department. But that is how it happened and that is how he got mixed up with the Manson family, because he did move in.

At the time, they were dealing dope and so forth. That’s how they were living, as well as from petty theft. A musician had sold some marijuana, a rather large quantity of it, to Manson. And Manson, acting as a middleman, had resold it to a chapter of the Hell’s Angels. And the Hell’s Angels, when they smoked this stuff out in the desert somewhere, had nearly died.

It turned out at that time that the DEA – the Drug Enforcement Agency – were doing dirty tricks on hippies. They were treating drugs with cyanide, etc. So that if you smoked it you’d get sick almost to the point of expiring. The idea was that it would create a paranoid situation where you couldn’t trust the pot, so you wouldn’t smoke it anymore. In any case the Hell’s Angels got very sick and their girlfriends got very sick. They all turned green, started to have convulsions, and when they got over this enough so that they could make some coherence of their thoughts, a group of them went to see Manson, who said “Well, I got the dope from somebody else.” And they said, “Okay. You kill whoever you got it from.” So Manson, being the little chicken-shit coward that he is, chose Bobby and said, “As the newest member of the family…” to test him, I guess, “you go and kill Gary Hinman,” who was the musician, living in Topanga Canyon, who was also a Buddhist, ironically, considering that this tainted dope came from him. And so, Bobby, with one of the girls, (Susan, who later became notorious for being involved in the Sharon Tate massacre) killed him, after doing some very nasty things like cutting off an ear, while Gary recited some sort of Buddhist mantra the whole time.

FIR: Good lord.

KA: Bobby was an intelligent kid, but these guys were taking acid, smoking hashish and pot, and dropping pills all at once. They were out of it. Imagine killing someone, throwing the bloody knife in the back of the guy’s car and stealing the car – which may have been better than the old jalopy that Bobby had, but… He was caught the next day driving around in Gary’s car, with the knife that he killed Gary with still in the back seat, with the blood still on it. He was sent to jail in 1969. He was in prison a month before the Sharon Tate massacre, which was done by a group of the Manson family on the instructions of crazy Charlie. Charlie never did these things himself, but sent his zombies out to do them.

About a month after the reels were stolen, t received a call from a woman and was told I could have them back for 10 thousand dollars. I said, “Well, I don’t pay ransom. And I don’t have the ten grand, anyway. So get lost.” She said. “Charlie told me to tell you.” I didn’t know who Charlie was. I never met Manson. To me, they were just crazy hippies. I was getting pissed off at the whole scene. I thought, all these kids, representing so-called flower power, they’re all in a moral swamp. They don’t know good from bad or up from down. And they’re stoned all the time. I was older than they were by quite a bit. I was in my 30s and they were in their teens. That was about the time that the Gray Line tourist bus started to come around, the looky-loos, full of tourists gawking at the hippies, and that was really the end of it. It made them all self-conscious. And then the heroin moved into the scene.

I was crushed when my film was gone. Friends told me to leave California, and in a sense I’d always felt that anyway. If something bad happens somewhere and I can possibly get away from the actual place, I will. So I went to New York, and that’s when I took out the ad. I felt I either had to do that or I had to do something very strong to stabilize my inner psyche, because I was in a terrible state. I was actually quite suicidal. And I said, I will kill the artist in me. I won’t make any more films, it’s over. And I’ll do an obituary with a black border, with dates from FIREWORKS to the murdered LUCIFER RISING. It worked in the sense that I didn’t kill myself.

I then went to England and pieced together the scraps of LUCIFER RISING that had been left in the dutting bin and, just as a joke, showed them to Mick Jagger. And he said, “It’s great. I’ll do a score for it.” And he improvised on the Moog synthesizer for 11 minutes and created my score for INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER. And that’s how that film came about, culled from the scraps of LUCIFER RISING.

When I was in England – now we’re talking about the early ’70s – I was going to give up movie making completely after making one last film. I put everything I had into this new one. I sold my stocks and bonds. I wanted to make a feature. It was conceived like a dance film. The movements and the music would all be conceived at the same time. I basically remade the original using the same title, LUCIFER RISING, but with a cast including Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris, Marianne Faithfull, and my friend Donald Cammell, the director of PERFORMANCE, who played Cyrus. It evolved into something much more interesting. With my connections in London, I got, amazingly enough (I’m the only American who ever did), assistance from the National Film Finance Corporation, which was a (now-extinct) government bank for film projects. They had permission, as a branch of the government in England, to finance artistic projects that weren’t necessarily going to bring back their money. They had put up the money for UNDER MILKWOOD when that was made into a film. I submitted an outline to them, and I got the equivalent of $50,000, which was a considerable amount of money at the time, particularly for a 16mm experimental project.

Frame enlargement of a film fragment found after the theft. depicting Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer in LUCIFER RISING. Courtesy Kenneth Anger.

FIR: I must tell you, it looks like it cost more than that.

KA: Well, it did. It cost twice that because I ran out of money, and then Hamburg Television, which at the time had a very enlightened artistic director named Hans Brecht, saw my rushes and put up another 50 thousand. I took six people to Egypt, and we stayed at the Mina House, a luxury hotel right next to the pyramids, and we got a special discount from the government. The Egyptians were, at that time, wonderfully cooperative, plus, because of the connections I had going back to Cocteau, the permissions came. I could hardly believe it. They allowed us to film the Sphinx and actually put Marianne Faithfull on it. Now they’re afraid that a little pebble will crumble off of it.

We had a wonderful time in Egypt. We had a lot of not so wonderful things happen, too. I’m not telling secrets: as she wrote in her book, Marianne Faithfull had a drug problem. And I told her, “Marianne, you can’t bring anything with you when you come because if they catch you with anything, all of us will be guilty, and we’ll either he expelled or thrown in prison… or stood before a firing squad.” I think in Egypt it’s actually a death sentence. Well, she’s a Capricorn. A very sly fox. She put her heroin in the face powder box in her makeup kit. It’s gray-white. But her makeup for the film was also gray-white. She was supposed to look dead and dug up. So I used a special ghost pancake makeup first used in Blithe Spirit. She was playing Lillith, the first wife of Adam, the spirit of female discontent, which circles the earth like a satellite according to Jewish folklore. She’s every bad woman, including Scarlet O’Hara and the Bette Davis characters. They all come out of Lillith.

FIR: What became of Bobby Beausoleil?

KA: He was first condemned to death, and then California did away with the death penalty. It was commuted from being on death row to life in prison. And he comes up for parole every eight years and he’s consistently turned down. He’s a middle-aged man. And so am I. Only I’m older than he is. I’m getting to where the social security starts to kick in. Luckily, I’m able to look forward to that. I went to prison to see him. He’s in a place called Duell Correctional Facility, which is the euphemistic name they give to prisons in California. They’re very violent places and they have lethal fights among prisoners-Mexican mafia, the blacks, and the whites. And Bobby belonged to something called the Aryan Nation, and the blacks and the Mexicans are both after him. He got stabbed not so long ago and nearly died. But he’s still alive. He’s collected a few scars. But oddly enough, once he was behind bars we became friends again. It was a changed relationship, to say the least. And he did the score for the new LUCIFER RISING.

FIR: He actually did the score?

KA: Yes. Because I was friendly with the head psychiatrist of the whole California prison system. Her name was Dr. Minerva Berthols. She was a great champion of Bobby’s, and she was instrumental in arranging for the recording to take place. He recorded the music in prison, with a prison orchestra of 12 musicians, all doing fairly long time. They were given a time sheet, and I was able to show them a work print of the film. Two thousand copies of the LP were sold. And it also came out on a CD, but that’s sold out too. I think it’s the only experimental film that’s ever had a sound track album.

FIR: It’s certainly one of the most ambitious experimental films I’ve ever seen.

KA: I could only do it with friends; if I’d had to pay people like Donald Camell and Marianne Faithfull salaries, I couldn’t have done it. My camerman was Michael Cooper who, as a still photographer, did the cover of Sgt. Pepper. And he also did the lenticular 3-D cover for the Rolling Stones for Their Satanic Majesty.

FIR: I’d read that Jagger’s song Sympathy for the Devil was influenced in some way by you.

KA: Jagger had at one point agreed to play Lucifer. It was a verbal agreement. But then he got cold feet. Of course, he was raised in the English church and he started to give me a message, to sport a rather large gold crucifix. And then, shortly after that, he married Bianca. I was furious with him over dropping me. I hate people that say yes and then say no. I don’t think anybody likes that, but I found it particularly tacky of him to lead me on that way. As it was, he did a bunch of lousy movies, like that horrible thing in Australia, Ned Kelly. It was laughable. Ned Kelly is a figure like Billy the Kid. I don’t think he can ever go back there. They may have forgotten by now, but at the time they said, “This spindly wimp, daring to play one of our national heroes..”

FIR: And what ever became of the stolen footage from the original LUCIFER RISING?

KA: At that time, Manson’s family was living in a canyon on the side of Death Valley, actually in the place where Von Stroheim shot the last sequence of GREED. I learned later that they apparently buried the film there, and if it was buried in Death Valley, where the temperatures get up to 120 in the Summer, the film would have been turned to Fritos. The metal cans may still be there but the film inside would be useless, even if anyone could find it.

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