Kenneth Anglemyer was born in 1927 in Santa Monica, the youngest of three children. His siblings would recall that Kenneth, the miracle child, was spoiled by his mother and it turned him bratty, selfish, and more than a little helpless. His home life, according to Anger, wasn’t particularly warm. His mother moved in with a female friend when he was young, and though he remembered his mother’s companion, Miss Diggy, as being supportive, it was also young Kenneth’s first brush with scandal, something that would come to define his life as much as his art. His fascination with film started very early. His mother took him to a fateful double of bill of Lloyd Bacon’s “The Singing Fool,” an Al Jolson-starring follow-up to his 1927 movie “The Jazz Singer,” the first of the major talkies, and “Thunder over Mexico,” a film edited out of Sergei Eisenstein’s oneiric unfinished odyssey “¡Que Viva Mexico!”. Kenneth’s grandmother “Big” Berta was a ‘wardrobe girl’ and regaled Kenneth with stories of Hollywood drama. His mother supported his young dreams of stardom (which manifested in his frequently dressing up in old gowns left in the attic), taking him to auditions and helping him possibly land a part in a 1935 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by William Dieterle. Anger’s biographer Bill Landis says this definitely happened, but like much of his accomplishments, there’s quite a bit of contention about whether it did. One thing is certain: he did make friends with “Midsummer” star Mickey Rooney, and he had to have met him somewhere. He also claims to have met Shirley Temple and danced with her at a cotillion. He was reportedly quite put out that he failed to become a child star like Temple or Rooney.
Anglemyer started directing his own movies, many of them flirting with experimental montage (he discovered and fell in love with the work of Jean Cocteau, who later became a friend), before he was old enough to drive. He met like-minded memorabilia and history nut Curtis Harrington, who, like Rooney, became a lifelong friend and like Kenneth became an experimental filmmaker. Harrington would represent the never-was of Kenneth’s own artistic life; where Kenneth refused to make movies that were anything but a reflection of his dreams, his urges, his fetishes, Harrington eventually learned to play ball and start directing movies that would be palatable to the broadest audience possible. The two created a small group called The Creative Film Associates to distribute their own work as well as that of other California-made non-narrative film and the two started sharing their favorite works by famous supposed devil-worshippers like Aleister Crowley and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Anglemyer idolized Crowley, the kitschy self-styled anti-Christian, like a rock star. His money, what little of it there was (his grandmother paid for his lifestyle), went to his art projects and drugs, while he studied film at the University of Southern California. In 1947, at age 20, he made his first landmark movie, the heaving daydream “Fireworks,” the first film to be released under his new name. Kenneth Anglemyer was no more. Kenneth Anger had been born.
“Fireworks,” the first of nine movies in what he would later call his Magick Lantern Cycle, features the director playing a thinly veiled version of himself, a gay outsider struggling with an imagined sexuality. He was a shy man and very thin, a small presence in rooms despite his massive height and stern looks. He’s a figure of tragic sexuality out of Cocteau, watching sailors flex their muscles and overpower him physically. Sexuality was a curious, sometimes painful thing for Anger. He had been arrested in a sting for cruising in the ‘40s and “Fireworks,” a film that frequently seems like a confession and meditation on this traumatic event, brought Anger to a Los Angeles court on obscenity charges. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in his favor: this was art, not smut. Just like that, Anger knew he was free to be who he wanted in his art … if there was financial support of course.