(2009, 65 min)
Country: U.S.
Director: Bob Mizer
Studio: Athletic Model Guild (AMG)
SYNOPSIS:
Bob's World celebrates the colorful, deliriously uninhibited carnival of late-period Mizer.
This DVD of Mizer films spanning 1958–1980 is specially edited to accompany a new book, which
gives a never-before-seen glimpse behind the doors of the infamous AMG compound.
REVIEW:
Bob Mizer spent 48 years making photos and films for his Athletic Model Guild, and 41 years
publishing Physique Pictoria, America's first, and most explicitly gay physique magazine.
His diaries, kept from the age of eight, make it clear that he was openly homosexual from his late
teens, but until the age of 42 he lived and worked in his mother's L.A. rooming house, where his
strict ethical code prevented him from fully expressing his fantasies. For 24 years he worked in
black and white and never showed a completely naked man, but following his mother's death in 1964
Mizer built a kingdom dedicated to the pleasures of male flesh, and photographed fully nude men in
explicit poses and psychedelically saturated colors.
In the 1970s and '80s Bob Mizer's compound, centered around the old rooming house, became home to
dozens of his young models, who lived outdoors on couches and porch gliders among the chickens,
geese, goats and monkeys, Roman statuary, cast off Christmas trees and other sundry props that
featured in his increasingly quirky films and photography.
Sometimes called the Hugh Hefner of gay publishing for his pioneering magazine, Mizer influenced
figures in art and society from David Hockney – who first came to America partly to meet Bob
Mizer – to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who modeled for Mizer in 1975.
-- From publisher Taschen's press release ( http://www.taschen.com )
