Avant-garde film projects were financed by wealthy dilettante backers who could withdraw abruptly

Evidence

Always in need of money, Smith offered to sell a reel of No. 12 to Ginsberg for $110. In 1961, Ginsberg—then involved with Timothy Leary—organized a screening for Leary’s wealthy friends to raise money for Smith’s latest project, an animated version of The Wizard of Oz. The principal investors included supermarket heir Huntington Hartford, movie star Elizabeth Taylor, and a young millionaire, Henry Ogden Phipps, whose April 1962 suicide would effectively end the project. Discovering after a year that only twelve minutes of full color cell animation made using a multi-plane camera of Smith’s design had been produced, most likely under the influence of LSD, the remaining backers withdrew. The failure of this project did not improve Smith’s disposition. He began to drink heavily—but at the same time was consulted by the gallerist Richard Bellamy as to which psychedelics might best curb alcoholism. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 680

Categorization

• XREF: Evidence for the reader’s core thesis that avant-garde scenes ran on patronage and material contingency — connects to the shelf claim that cultural stagnation follows from the disappearance of such subsidizing conditions.