Alejandro Jodorowsky

Born 17 February 1929, Jodorowsky dropped out of college and worked as a clown before founding Teatro Mímico in 1947. He moved to Paris in the early 1950s to study mime under Étienne Decroux, appearing in the silent film Les têtes interverties in 1957. From 1960 he split time between Mexico City and Paris, co-founding Panic Movement, a surrealist collective staging violent theatrical events. His first feature, Fando y Lis (1967), caused such scandal in Mexico it was banned. The acid western El Topo (1970) became the first midnight cult film and caught Lennon's ear; former Beatles manager Allen Klein gave Jodorowsky $1 million for The Holy Mountain (1973), a surrealist dive into western esotericism. Disagreements with Klein buried both films' distribution, though the underground claimed them. A failed attempt at Dune led to five more films, including Santa Sangre (1989) and two autobiographical entries beginning with The Dance of Reality (2013). He also wrote science fiction comics throughout the 1980s - The Incal, The Technopriests, Metabarons - and developed "psychomagic," his own spiritual system drawn from alchemy, tarot, Zen, and shamanism.