Jacobs reconceived abandoned footage from one of Smith’s unfinished projects (a monster movie-comedy collaboration with Bob Fleischner) into a portrait of the artist that Jonas Mekas immediately declared one of “four works that make up the real revolution in cinema today.” Jacobs described Blonde Cobra as “a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guiltstructured and yet triumphing—on one level—over the situation with style, because he's unapologetically gifted, has a genius for courage, knows that a state of indignity can serve to show his character in sharpest relief. He carries on, states his presence for what it is. Does all he can to draw out our condemnation, testing our love for limits, enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal 'screw-off'."

Nothing short of notorious, Flaming Creatures marked a significant moment in the history of postwar American film and culture. The film was banned and seized, caused theaters to be shut down, and was the subject of an obscenity case that reached the US Supreme Court. And yet Flaming Creatures was, according to Smith, ultimately meant to be a comedy. On a rooftop above one of New York’s oldest extant (now demolished) movie houses, characters disrupt gender and sexual “norms” as they act out carnal fantasies on a set resembling an Arabian harem. Excerpts from Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman contribute to Tony Conrad’s assembled soundtrack as Smith’s creatures dance and chase one another about the bacchanal.

Known for his expression of the Beat sensibility in underground filmmaking, Ron Rice completed a handful of films before his early death, often collaborating with Taylor Mead and Jack Smith. While Rice’s The Flower Thief had inspired Flaming Creatures, Rice found the atmosphere on the production of Smith’s Normal Love (currently unavailable), equally stimulating. Chumlum depicts Smith and members of his cast (during the making of Normal Love) in a colorful reverie of superimpositions and costumed figures—including Smith in Arabian dress—dancing and swinging on hammocks in Rice’s downtown loft.