Cinematical

If you're going to make a documentary about obscenity and censorship, you must have the obligatory John Waters interview. The Pink Flamingoes filmmaker is building quite the side resume for himself appearing in docs like Inside Deep Throat, This Film is Not Yet Rated and now Obscene, which even recognizes the Waters asset by putting him front and center as its first talking head. Despite the need to feature Waters as an appropriate expert on shock, indecency laws and freedom of expression, the guy is also one of the most enjoyable personalities and storytellers that one could put in a non-fiction film. At one point, Waters comes on and supplies the film its greatest line, in which he retrospectively critiques Vilgot Sjöman's 1967 film I Am Curious (Yellow) as nothing more than "a limp dick and some ugly women naked."

The relevance of this comment is that Grove Press, whose founder, Barney Rosset, is the subject of Obscene, distributed the Swedish film. It is also a great assessment of what the obscenity law battles of the 20th century look like to us in the 21st. Rosset continually faced courtrooms and politicians who were offended and/or threatened by things that are embarrassingly tame and bland compared to what we've got nowadays. Rosset was the one who fought to get books like Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and others onto American bookshelves and later to get films like I Am Curious (Yellow) into American theaters. Grove wasn't all about contention, though; it also put(s) out less controversial classics like Waiting for Godot, A Confederacy of Dunces and Godard's film Week End.

The documentary, co-directed by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor, takes the straightforward biographical approach to Rosset, laying out the man's life beginning with his radically political school days with friend and cinematographer-to-be Haskell Wexler (together, the duo published something called "The Anti-Everything"). Following some life-shaping stuff like his first love and his army experience, it eventually takes us through his ups and downs as publisher and film distributor, his role as savior to Victorian erotica and his unfortunate loss of Grove in 1985 to an apparent take-over swindle. Interspersed through and finally, we see the Rosset of the present, a relatively penniless, somewhat forgotten hero in his mid-80s.

Unlike their subject, the makers of Obscene seem far from broke, as the film is possibly the most over-produced documentary since Inside Deep Throat (which was, after all, overseen by Brian Grazer). To make it more dynamic and appealing than the typical doc, Ortenberg, O'Connor and producers Alexander and Tanya Ager Meillier (who also shot and edited the film, respectively) have put in more than an adequate amount of stuff-of-the-times archive footage and pop music along with flashy, animated manipulations of Roy Kuhlman's ground-breaking book cover designs. This isn't really a problem for the film; as I said it makes it more dynamic and appealing, but it does somewhat take away from the themes of the film, which concern more underground, avant-garde approaches to literature, art and cinema.

If there were a problem with the film, as in something that really detracts from its interest and its entertainment, then irrelevant commentary would be it. It is great that the filmmakers got Gore Vidal (though he seems to be in every doc these days), but his anti-American remarks are a bit broad and likely mis-represented. And Ray Manzarek may fit because The Doors had their share of battles with indecency charges, but his function doesn't well serve the film as presented. Still, there are a lot of terrific, appropriate interviewees, including Jim Carroll, "Howl" publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rosset's son Peter and many of Grove's employees and authors. The most ingenious inclusion, though, comes with Obscene's structured use of an interview of Rosset conducted by Screw publisher Al Goldstein, which acts as a kind of chapter-marking, intercutting foundation. Goldstein's conversation with Rosset is better than anything anyone else could have offered the film, despite the pornographer's professed disdain for Rosset. The only sad omission is a current interview with Wexler relating to the schooldays segment. Or even an explanation why the still-working cinematographer couldn't be reached or bothered.

Obscene is something of a personal project for Ortenberg and O'Connor, both formerly of Avalon Publishing Group/Thunder's Mouth Press and longtime collaborators with Rosset on, respectively, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature and Blue Moon Books. So, there is that subjective feel to the documentary. Three years ago Ortenberg told Publisher's Weekly that the film would be "a cross between The Kid Stays in the Picture and Werner Herzog's My Best Friend." The finished product is like the former in that it can, at times, be disappointingly less about the product than the person -- despite its point to be such -- yet it isn't nearly as personal as the latter. At least all the biographical, non-Grove stuff eventually makes sense as a context for Rosset's reason for the whole enterprise: "I didn't do it to save humanity; I did it to save Henry Miller." With that confession Obscene reminds us that most often is the case that the product -- in this case the thousands of titles released by Grove and Rosset's other enterprises -- is about the person, without whom none of it would have existed in quite the same way.