Fireworks (1947)

Interesting facts

Fireworks is a 1947 homoerotic experimental short film by Kenneth Anger. Filmed in his parents' home in Beverly Hills, California, over a long weekend while they were away, the film stars Anger and explicitly explores themes of homosexuality and sadomasochism. It is the earliest of his works to survive. Fireworks is known for being the first gay narrative film in the United States.

Production

During the Zoot Suit Riots, Anger witnessed a group of sailors in white uniforms chase down Mexican men and attack them. He had a persistent dream of men in white uniforms attacking at night, which eventually became a dream about people chasing him. This dream became the premise for Fireworks.

Anger stars in Fireworks as the dreamer, and Gordon Gray plays the sailor from the opening scene. According to Anger's account, he found the cast of Fireworks while sitting in on film classes at UCLA. He convinced some classmates who were in the Navy to steal a few thousand feet of Navy film stock for him to use. They acted in his film, using their summer uniforms as costumes.

Anger upgraded from a spring-wound camera when his grandmother gave him a Bell & Howell 16 mm camera as a birthday gift, which allowed him to film at 24 frames per second. Anger placed the shoot at his parents' home in Beverly Hills over three days; however, his older brother Bob has stated that Fireworks was shot at a home in the Hollywood Hills. One scene was shot in a public bathroom at a park in Olive Hill, California.

When editing the film, Anger directly scratched the film stock for two scenes. Worried that he might get in trouble trying to sell prints of Fireworks by mail, he scratched out his genitals from one brief shot in a public urinal. In the film's ending, Anger etched in a corona of light around a man's face. He scored the film with Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.