Craig Denney’s 1976 film The Astrologer became an unlikely cinematic missing person. Denney directed and starred in the picture, while his mother, Dorothy June Pidgeon, wrote its wildly episodic screenplay: a carnival hustler discovers genuine psychic powers, smuggles diamonds through Kenya, survives prison and a cobra attack, crosses the ocean, works a pearl-diving scheme in Tahiti, assists the U.S. Navy in locating a ship lost in the Devil’s Triangle, and eventually becomes the subject of a hit film within the film. Republic Pictures was attached to the production, but the movie’s actual distribution history became so murky that later accounts could not agree on whether it had ever received a normal official release. Its heavy use of copyrighted music is widely cited as a likely reason for the disappearance. The film was eventually recovered by the American Genre Film Archive in a batch of approximately 1,000 pornographic prints, an almost perfectly bizarre fate for a grandiose, self-financed-feeling auteur project that critics later described as a “vanity film” and a “treat of a trainwreck.” A successful Indiegogo campaign then financed its digitization, allowing the once-obscure picture to circulate through Internet Archive access and midnight screenings.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
The Lost Astrological Vanity Film Found Among 1,000 Pornographic Prints
The Astrologer / 1970s
Craig Denney’s 1976 film The Astrologer became an unlikely cinematic missing person. Denney directed and starred in the picture, while his mother, Dorothy June Pidgeon, wrote its wildly episodic screenplay: a carnival hustler discovers genuine psychic powers, smuggles diamonds through Kenya, survives prison and a cobra attack, crosses the ocean, works a pearl-diving scheme in Tahiti, assists the U.S. Navy in locating a ship lost in the Devil’s Triangle, and eventually becomes the subject of a hit film within the film. Republic Pictures was attached to the production, but the movie’s actual distribution history became so murky that later accounts could not agree on whether it had ever received a normal official release. Its heavy use of copyrighted music is widely cited as a likely reason for the disappearance. The film was eventually recovered by the American Genre Film Archive in a batch of approximately 1,000 pornographic prints, an almost perfectly bizarre fate for a grandiose, self-financed-feeling auteur project that critics later described as a “vanity film” and a “treat of a trainwreck.” A successful Indiegogo campaign then financed its digitization, allowing the once-obscure picture to circulate through Internet Archive access and midnight screenings.
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