Before the internet made celebrity downfall a 24-hour commodity, there was Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. First published in the U.S. in 1965 and promptly banned for a decade, the book was a psychedelic fever dream of Tinseltown’s “true” history. When it finally returned to shelves in 1975, it brought with it the grisly receipts: the mangled wreckage of Jayne Mansfield’s Buick, the tragic stillness of Carole Landis, and the horrific, bisected remains of Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia).

Anger, a filmmaker and devotee of Aleister Crowley, viewed Hollywood through an occult lens, popularizing the quote “Every man and every woman is a star.” He traded in urban legends like a currency: Clara Bow and the entire USC football team (including a young John Wayne) or the myth of Mansfield’s decapitation. Most of it was debunked long ago, but as the saying goes: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The book led to a sequel and a 1992 syndicated series hosted by Tony Curtis.

But before that, there was this, an unauthorized film.

Directed by Van Guylder (The Bang Bang Gang and a later sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, taken from the TV show) and written by L.K. Farbella, this plays just as loose with reality as its inspiration. Fatty Arbuckle was exonerated for the death of Virginia Rappe and paid for it with his career. Here, he gets away with assaulting her with a bottle of champagne. Rudolph Valentino inspired gay clubs and had a fondness for butch women. Erich von Stroheim got off watching women get whipped. And yes, Clara Bow wears out those Trojans. The football players, if not the rubbers, because they all went in bareback.

Yes, Olive Thomas killed herself, but she died in a hospital instead of a hotel room. Wallace Reid was probably addicted to drugs before this movie claims that he was. Charlie Chaplin slept with Lita Grey when she was 15, but did he have other women give him fellatio while she watched, so that he could train her to never have actual sex with him again? And why does no one look like the actors they’re supposed to be, and while this mentions nearly everyone, it gets shy about William Randolph Hearst?

Yet for fans of 70s exploitation, the cast is a who’s who of the era’s “it” girls. Uschi Digard—the queen of the Super-Vixens—is present, which for many viewers is the only endorsement needed. You also get Jane Ailyson (The Godson and A Clock Work Blue taking the whip and Suzanne Fields (Dale Ardor from  Flesh Gordon) lighting up a party scene.

That narration — listen to this prose: “This was Hollywood, once considered a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles – destined, perhaps doomed, to become its very heart. In 1916, however, it was just a junction of dirt roads and a scattering of orange groves. If there was sin, it was not to be seen. Scandalous sin that is, for what was going on at the studio on Sunset Boulevard was merely play-acting, a Babylonian orgy involving hundreds, nay thousands of actors and extras, portraying the doom of Belshazzar. This passion play, D.W. Griffith’s most ambitious epic, was titled “Intolerance,” and it set the tone for Tinseltown… something to live up to, something to live down. The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood. Scandal was waiting just out of camera range.”

There is a masterpiece to be made from Anger’s book, a surrealist, high-budget exploration of the dark energy beneath the palm trees. Ideally, Anger himself would have directed it. Instead, we have this: a rare specimen of a movie that contains all the ingredients for a riotous time: scandal, nudity, and historical blasphemy.

Yet somehow manages to be a bit of a slog. It is a “Babylonian orgy” that feels more like a long afternoon at a dusty swap meet.