This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In early 1967, Kenneth Anger saw a young musician named Bobby Beausoleil performing at a countercultural gathering and asked him to appear in his still unfinished film Lucifer Rising, on one condition Beausoleil set himself, that he would also compose the score. Both men agreed, and for a time the arrangement held.
It did not hold for long. The two fell out during the troubled production, and by the time Anger's original master print was lost, the musical side of the project effectively collapsed with it. Anger turned instead to Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who recorded an early score during a period when Anger was living in Page's London home. That arrangement ended too, when Anger was evicted from the property in 1976. What happened next is the part of the story that makes this film's production history genuinely unusual among religious films of any kind. Beausoleil, by then incarcerated at Tracy Prison in California, wrote to Anger proposing to finally deliver on their original 1967 agreement. Working with a band of fellow inmates he called the Freedom Orchestra, Beausoleil composed and recorded the score inside the prison between 1976 and 1979, and its release on vinyl in 1980 is what finally let Anger distribute the finished film, fourteen years after the first footage was shot.
Reviewing the completed work, Anger's biographer Bill Landis called it a religious movie of the top order, a description this atlas treats as one serious critic's assessment of a film whose own maker was a sworn initiate of the tradition it portrays, not as this atlas's own theological judgment.