Anger’s genius was to present his delirious work, with all its horrendous squalor and grainy black-and-white tabloid-style photos, and whose content he later claimed to have intuited through telepathy, as a nonfictional history of scandals about legendary stars, the sort of thing withheld by the Hollywood PR machine which everyone knew had long been ruthlessly suppressing scandal and creating bowdlerised biographical accounts of actors and actresses rolling off the star machine production line. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre maudit to go with the films maudits. But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975.
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