The underground scene pooled marginal types unemployable by Hollywood

Evidence

Around the time Ron Rice’s film played the Charles, Jack Smith—who, during one of the Filmmakers Festivals, had already shown Scotch Tape, a short film made with Ken Jacobs’s camera on Jacobs’s Lincoln Square “set” during the making of Star Spangled to Death—began populating a Lower East Side rooftop with an assortment of neighborhood poets, painters, vanguard composers, Communists, druggies, wild women, and homosexual men such as no Hollywood orgy master, neither D. W. Griffith nor Erich von Stroheim, would ever use. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 412

Categorization

• XREF: Direct material evidence for the reader’s core thesis about how proximity of cheap-labor creative types — poets, painters, druggies — produced the avant-garde.