On Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures" (and other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc)

Reviled, rioted over, and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is the most important and influential underground movie ever released in America. J. Hoberman's monograph details the creative making and legal unmaking of this extraordinary film, a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini, and John Waters, as well as a scandal taken to the United States Supreme Court, described by its maker as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio." The story of Flaming Creatures is augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents, and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs by Norman Solomon. Expanding on notes originally prepared for the 1997 retrospective on Jack Smith at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on his unfinished features Normal Love and No President, as well as shorter film fragments.