Underground filmmakers framed their work as explicitly anti-Hollywood political gestures

Evidence

Around the time that Smith began previewing Flaming Creatures, Rice showed his footage in a benefit screening at the Living Theatre. “This is a wild mad rough cut like no Hollywood director would show the public for fear of having his ideas stolen,” he bragged in program notes. “We defy anyone to cop our style. This is only 70 minutes of a protracted [sic] 3-hour epic by the director of The Flower Thief. This is your opportunity to help challenge the Hollywood stranglehold on morals, expression, and art and what have you. Dig us.” (In a handout prepared for the event, Mekas called it “the most liberating, most shocking movie since Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or.”) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 422

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘challenge the Hollywood stranglehold’ framing evidences the adversarial self-consciousness that defined the transition from subculture to counterculture that structures this book. — connects to: Conspiracists read mainstream films as secretly encoded Illuminati messages — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 201