[Images of Barney Rosset and the Tropic of Cancer ad courtesy of Double O Film Productions.]
Barney Rosset, the man who risked prosecution to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the United States, has been a personal hero to me ever since I first encountered the book in high school. Reading it — and his much finer book Tropic of Capricorn — utterly transformed my life. (Whether that was for better or worse is debatable.) In my hours of browsing at used bookstores, I started to take a careful look at anything that happened to have been published by Grove in the 1950s and 1960s. It led me to Sherwood Anderson, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, some of Kerouac’s later stuff, Samuel Beckett, and — oddly enough — Henry James, whose reputation Grove helped to resucitate in the 1950s.
Barney Rosset is most noted for the battles he fought against obscenity laws. By publishing Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch, he provoked the censors. As Win McCormack, the publisher of Tin House, writes: “Through his legal victories in the resulting obscenity cases, as well as in one brought on by I Am Curious (Yellow), a sexually explicit Swedish documentary film he distributed, he was probably more responsible than any other single individual for ending the censorship of literature and film in the United States.”
And now Obscene, the 97-minute documentary film about Rosset, is receiving its San Francisco premiere tonight at the Roxie, at 7:00; a second screening is at 8:50. Directors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor promise all of the above, plus “Rosset’s public fight against hypocrisy is inextricable from his tumultuous personal life: the same unyielding, quixotic, restless energy that upended centuries of law brought Rosset perilously close to personal destruction.”
Juicy!
The run is from tonight through Thursday, September 11, nightly at 7:00 and 8:50, plus Sat, Sun and Wed at (3:00) and 5:00. The Roxie is at 16th and Valencia.
