Skullfuck: The Brutalist Cinema of Jon Moritsugu

Glimmering with candor and dead-on humor, this memoir tells the story of the meteoric rise of Japanese American filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (born 1965), from 1980s teenage delinquent in Honolulu to Ivy League slumster to take-no-prisoners movie auteur with a serious attitude problem, detailing Moritsugu’s dive into drinking, drugging, narcissism and a fast and polluted lifestyle that might arguably have been the biggest influence on his string of utterly original films. The New York Times describes his work as funny, anarchic, provocative and exhilarating; his first feature was tagged by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest punk rock movies of all time. The book includes hundreds of never-before-seen color and black-and-white photographs, production stills, journal entries, love and rejection letters, notes and drawings. Film sets constructed of 1,000 pounds of rotting meat; offers from studio moguls shot down in seconds; contracts burned in record company offices: it’s all here, the ups and downs of one of the world’s most extreme and uncompromising movie directors.