Bottomless access to street life made avant-garde films possible

Evidence

Cruising the Coney Island boardwalk during the summer of 1962, he discovered a gang of motorcyclists hanging out by a roller coaster and was inspired to make a documentary portrait. (They accepted him, he would say, as a camera nut.) Anger also discovered a twenty-nine-year-old ex-Marine biker on Forty-Second Street, Bruce Byron (born Richard MacAulay), who became his lead. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 474

Categorization

• XREF: The biker as raw street material, a camera-friendly milieu, ties to the reader’s thesis that proximity and access to subcultures drove invention density.