Sill from the film "The Wild Angels" (1966)

The Wild Angels, with Roger Corman

TUE NOV 29, 7:30 PM

Copresented by the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive

Visit the exhibition Joan Didion: What She Means before the film.  Galleries will be open until 7:30 p.m.

Live introduction by director Roger Corman

Roger Corman’s exploitation vehicle about an outlaw motorcycle club helped inaugurate the biker film as a genre, and these cheaply produced orgies of violence soon proliferated in drive-ins and grindhouses across the country. The idiom fascinated Joan Didion, who saw it as “a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents,” a form that “located an audience and fabricated a myth to exactly express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death.”

Print courtesy of the Jon Davison, Roger Corman, and Academy Film Archive Collection.

(1966, dir. Roger Corman, 35mm, color, 93 min.)