The Astrologer

• Writer-director-star Craig Denney bankrolled the film himself with money from his real business, Moon House International, a mail-order computerized horoscope service; production began in 1972 on a reported $1.5 million budget.
• The screenplay was written by Denney's own mother, Dorothy June Pidgeon.
• Production traveled well beyond California, shooting on location in Kenya and Thailand.
• The film never got a legitimate theatrical or home-video release because Denney used a stack of unlicensed Moody Blues songs on the soundtrack (and even advertised the band's 'participation' on the poster) -- a rights problem that made it legally unshowable for decades.
• A surviving 35mm print resurfaced in 2013 inside a donated batch of roughly 1,000 grindhouse and adult prints given to the American Genre Film Archive, and was initially mixed up with a completely different film also called The Astrologer, made the same year by producer James Glickenhaus.
• AGFA restored the film in 2K and premiered it at their Endangered Fest before it slowly found wider audiences online years later.

Everything about Craig Alexander's arc -- a fake psychic gift that turns real, sudden fortune, a movie made about his own life -- reads like Denney's wish-fulfillment fantasy for his real horoscope company projected onto the screen, making the film less fiction and more a document of its maker's self-mythology (a self-mythology his own associates later disputed as exaggerated).

The film's dueling reputations as 'one of the worst movies ever made' and 'an underrated American epic' aren't actually in conflict -- both readings agree it's a raw, unfiltered document of 1970s New Age hucksterism, right down to an ending where Craig's old carnival partner tells him flatly, 'You're not an astrologer. You're an asshole.'

The reason almost nobody saw this for 40+ years wasn't quality control, it was a rights disaster: Denney's unlicensed use of Moody Blues tracks turned a finished film into a legally unreleasable one, meaning the movie's infamous obscurity is a legal accident rather than a curatorial judgment.

Craig Denney writes, directs, and stars as Craig Alexander, a carnival hustler running a fake fortune-telling con — until the day a cold reading turns out to be real. He rides that gift from grift straight into a diamond-and-ruby heist in Kenya, a U.S. Navy contract to locate a ship lost in the Devil's Triangle, and a horoscope broadcasting empire that makes him rich enough that Hollywood eventually makes a movie about his own life. The fairy tale curdles fast: his old carnival partner Darrien resurfaces after falling into sex work, their reunion marriage makes international headlines, and when she cheats on him, he shoots the other man. Denney — a real-life self-styled astrologer who poured his own horoscope-business fortune into the picture — built something less like a horror movie and more like a fever-dream vanity epic: equal parts Citizen Kane knockoff and its own maker's unraveling ego.