This book is a second volume with the same title and fills in the material not covered in the first book and additional info about less-known stars. Book appears moderately to well read with a slight cock to the spine and some wear and chipping at edges. As a professional, a mere mention of it to one’s surroundings – let alone to the unsuspecting fans, whose naïve fantasies about their stars (deftly supplied to and greedily devoured by them) needed to be maintained at all cost – meant being branded either as ungrateful or, worse, a pariah.

Later, the Klan assaulted Haines and Shields when they were coming out of a party at El Porto beach in Los Angeles. He celebrates the self-destruction of people whose only crimes, truth be told, was that they possessed the aspiration to make something of themselves, however deluded that might have made them. Needless to say, it was an eye-opening experience, raising my awareness of a number of different behaviors, coupling possibilities, creative use of inanimate objects, etc.Salacious volume of Hollywood calumny, lovingly assembled by one of underground cinema's self-styled bad boys, and notable for its complete lack of compassion.

The sequel to my 2013 naughty cruise read for my 2014 cruise :) More of the best in Old Hollywood gossip, in Anger's inimitable style.I will read the "coffee table" edition someday, but for the time being this is satisfying enough, and truer to its form.

After all, the almighty dollar and commercial considerations utterly ruled the land, and if it turned out you couldn’t cut it, you had no business being there in the first place. The first appearance of Kenneth Anger's sensationalist swipe at Hollywood, packed with photos, gritty detail, and innuendo. One night I read “Hollywood Babylon” while guzzling an entire bottle of red Zinfandel and eventually fell asleep with the book by my bed.It would take a couple of decades (just as its influence was waning, perhaps unsurprisingly) before old Hollywood in earnest turned a self-critical, unflinching gaze towards itself, through such films as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Compared to these - infinitely more classy - films, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (originally published in Paris in 1959) is a different beast altogether: a highly readable, veritable cornucopia of dirt on a morally and spiritually corrupt Hollywood and its various participants, spanning five decades.

Sadly, the tragic "Chords of Fame" have continued to play on for far too many in and out of Hollywood in subsequent years, despite the cautionary tales of their forebears. It begins in 1915, a convenient place to begin a history of the scandals of Hollywood, though the film business had already been around for almost a generation, and scandals and censorship battles had already become a part of it, as does anything touched by humans. Sucked me right down the gutters and dark alleys of the glittery and smutty Old Hollywood, so much so that I could barely stop to eat. Los dos volúmenes de Hollywood Babilonia nos hablan de la historia de todos esos escándalos y secretos a voces de la Meca del Cine, de ese Hollywood con más estrellas de las que hay en el cielo, lleno de dioses del celuloide, y que en el mejor de los casos podría decirse que tenían los pies de barro, por no decir diréctamente que estaban hundidos en la mierda. That so many of these "wasted" silver screen deities ended up in the loony bin, alone, unloved, is too often a repeated tale.The story of Hollywood gossip and depravity begins at the turn of the century in this book - and continues through the excess of the 20s, through to the 60's, although most of the stories focus on the 20s to 40s.