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Emile de Antonio (1919–1989) was the most important political filmmaker in the United States during the Cold War
Director of such controversial films as Point of Order (1963), In the Year of the Pig (1969), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), and Mr. Hoover and I (1989), de Antonio lived a remarkable life in dissent. De Antonio was a womanizing raconteur, upper-class Marxist, Harvard classmate of John F. Kennedy, World War II bomber pilot, and failed English professor, who lived a colorful life even before he stumbled headfirst into the New York art world of the 1950s. Everything I learned about painting, I learned from De, Andy Warhol said about his friend, who famously drank himself unconscious in Warhol’s film Drink. De Antonio also was important to the early careers of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg, and John Cage. Then, in 1959, de Antonio took on the chance to distribute the Beat film, Pull My Daisy, and discovered filmmaking. In the first book on de Antonio’s life and work, Randolph Lewis traces the turbulent development of the filmmaker’s career. Lewis follows de Antonio’s struggle to make films about Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover (under whose direction the FBI compiled a 10,000-page file on de Antonio) and to work with such political allies as Mark Lane, Martin Sheen, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Berrigan, and members of the Weather Underground, whose activities he documented in the film Underground. Blending biography with critical insights about art, literature, and film, Lewis offers de Antonio as a lens to focus on the complex terrain of post-World War II America.
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