Underground films were made from castoff stock in squalid cheap rooms

Evidence

Shot, like The Flower Thief, on outdated black-and-white film stock, Flaming Creatures evolved out of the photography sessions Smith staged in his roach-infested Lower East Side hovel from late 1961 through June 1962. … However, Zazeela’s meeting and subsequent involvement with the composer La Monte Young precluded her participation in Smith’s project. Thus, “La Gran Estrella Maria [sic] Zazeela,” as she is known in Smith’s journal, was replaced by another Lower East Side ingenue, Sheila Bick, the wife of Zazeela’s high school boyfriend, Irwin Bick. Tony Conrad, a disciple of Young’s who had just graduated from Harvard, was invited to stay at Zazeela’s now vacated East Ninth Street studio. There, in the early summer of 1962, he discovered Smith in residence and in the process of assembling The Beautiful Book, which Conrad deemed “some kind of bizarre, contemptible New York art pornography.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 413

Categorization

• CANDY: A great cocktail fact: a landmark avant-garde film was shot on outdated film stock in a roach-infested hovel.
• XREF: Evidence for the reader’s core thesis: physical proximity + cheap space + marginal outsiders + castoff materials = invention density.