The good folks at Movies on a Big Screen (MOBS) will show Obscene: How Barney Rosset Published Dirty Books for Fun & Profit on Friday, December 5th. Through Rosset's Grove Press some of the most avant garde, outsider, and counterculture literature found an imprint. It is a tale of sound and fury, including the censorship trials that evolved from efforts to publish Lady Chatterly's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
Barney Rosset is the greatest American publisher of the twentieth century and the most influential cultural figure that you haven't heard of. Under Rosset, Grove Press and Evergreen Review fought decisive battles, including many before the state and federal supreme courts, defeated legal censorship, and opened American life to new and dangerous currents of freedom. But Rosset's public fight against hypocrisy and injustice is inextricable from his tumultuous personal life: the same unyeilding, quixotic, restless energy that upended centuries of law brought Rosset perilously close to destruction.
With: Barney Rosset, Amiri Baraka, Jim Carroll, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Al Goldstein, Erica Jong, Ray Manzarek, Michael McClure, John Rechy, Ed Sanders, John Sayles, Gore Vidal, and John Waters. And archival footage featuring Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and Malcolm X.
There will be guest speakers in attendance.
