Excerpt
(kustom kar kommandos film project)
Film project by Kenneth Anger utilizing the Eastman rapid color
emulsion Ektachrome ER, whose ASA rating of 125 opens up
hitherto inaccessible realms of investigation in low-key color lo-
cation work for the independent creative film-maker. Running
time 30 minutes, track composed of pop music fragments com-
bined with sync location-recorded sound effects and dialog.
kustom is an oneiric vision of a contemporary American (and
specifically Californian) teenage phenomenon, the world of the
hot-rod and customized car. I emphasize the word oneiric, as
kustom will not be a "documentary" covering the mechanical
hopping-up and esthetic customizing of cars, but rather a dream-
like probe into the psyche of the teenager for whom the unique
aspect of the power -potentialized customized car represents a
poetic extension of personality, an accessible means of wish-
fulfillment. I will treat the custom cars created by the teenager
and his adult mentors (such customizers as Ed Roth, Bill Cush-
enberry and George Barris, whose Kustom City in North Holly-
wood is a mecca of this world) as the objects of art — folk art if
you prefer — that I consider them to be.
The aforementioned adult "mentors," most of whom are located
in the periphery of Los Angeles and hence readily accessible for
filming, will be shown at work in their body shops on various
cars-in-the-process-of-becoming, in the role of "arch-priests" to
the teenagers whose commission they are fulfilling. (The locales
of body shops and garages will be presented uniquely in gleam-
ing highlighted low-key, in a manner already essayed for the
motorcycle garage locations of scorpio rising); the idolized
customizers (the only adults seen in the film) will be represented
as shadowy, mysterious personages (priests or witch-doctors)
while the objects of their creation, the cars, will bathe in a pool
