American filmmaker Jack Smith was BOTD in 1932. Born in Columbus, Ohio, he was raised in Texas and Wisconsin, making films in his teens with a Super-8 camera. He moved to New York City in 1953, taking film classes at City College, befriending Andy Warhol and becoming involved in the underground film scene. In 1962, he released The Beautiful Book, a collection of photographic portraits of New York artists, presented in highly stylised theatrical settings. He is best known for his 1963 short film Flaming Creatures, a series of vignettes of drag queens appearing in a lipstick commercial, an earthquake and an orgy. Made on a micro-budget and fuelled largely by amphetamines, its free-range nudity and depictions of masturbation, rape and queer sex led to screenings being repeatedly closed by police. The film became a cause célèbre for artistic freedom, championed by left-wing progressives including critic Susan Sontag and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. In 1964, the New York Supreme Court held that the film was not obscene, significantly increasing its cultural caché. Smith’s later films including Normal Love and No President, and also starred in Warhol’s unfinished film Batman Dracula and Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra. In the 1980s, he became a fixture at New York nightclubs the Limbo and the Pyramid. He died in 1989 from an AIDS-related illness, aged 56. His work is widely credited with developing camp aesthetic and inspiring a generation of underground filmmakers, notably John Waters and Pedro Almodóvar.