Fleshpot on 42nd Street

(1929–1991), an American pioneer, outsider, and auteur, began his career as an actor and off-off-Broadway director/costumer. He turned to film in the 1960s, quickly moving from Nouvelle Vague influences to exploitation and horror. Self-taught and developing an immediately recognizable style, his films would often explore themes that included repressed sexuality and homosexuality, dysfunctional families, and transgression. Some memorable examples are his first short, Vapors (1965), Nightbirds (1970), Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972), and Carnage (a.k.a. Hell House, 1984). A storied character, to put it politely, or “very tormented, and very intelligent,” as Nicolas Winding Refn once wrote, many of his films today are considered lost; others, like his early, post-apocalyptic The Degenerates (1967), have only recently been rediscovered.