Halsted Plays Himself by William E Jones

Halsted Plays Himself by William E Jones

The life, times, and mysteries of Fred Halsted, gay porn's first film auteur, in a new, updated, and expanded edition.

Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn's first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dali repeatedly muttering "new information for me." Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted's star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted-to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time-and what it looked like when it collapsed.

The revised and expanded edition of Halsted Plays Himself includes material that came to light since the book's first publication, including details about the restoration of Halsted's films by the Museum of Modern Art, the true identities of several key figures in his life, new testimony from family members, and the rediscovery of his feature film Truck It (1973), previously considered lost.

Jones, William E.: - William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who was born in Ohio and now lives in Los Angeles. He has made two feature length films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997) which won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004). His work has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern and Anthology Film Archives, and has been included in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, Frieze and Little Joe. His book Imitation of Christ was named one of the best photo books of 2013 by Time magazine.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781635901764
ISBN 10	1635901766
Title	Halsted Plays Himself
Author	William E Jones
Series	Semiotext Native Agents
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Semiotext (E)
Year published	2022-11-01
Number of pages	208
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.