Michael John Fles

Michael John Fles (born November 11, 1936), known both as John Fles and Michael Fles, is an American poet, editor, musician and film personality. Professor David James referred to him as "the single most important promoter of underground film" in Los Angeles, California.

Michael John Fles was born to a Dutch father, George Fles, and a British mother, Pearl Rimel. As conscious communists, his parents had moved to the Soviet Union, where his father fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. The mother, pregnant with Michael John, left the Soviet Union to give birth in London. Mother and son later emigrated to the United States, where Pearl Rimel found employment in the aircraft industry. Michael John grew up in Los Angeles and Ojai, California, where he graduated from the Ojai Valley School in 1951.

Beat poet and editor

Fles studied at the University of Chicago, but did not graduate. While a student, he became the managing editor of the Chicago Review. In 1959 Fles was involved in the founding of the influential literary magazine Big Table. Later he was the editor of The Trembling Lamb, a one shot literary magazine which published Antonin Artaud's "Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society", LeRoi Jones's "The System of Dante's Inferno", and Carl Solomon's "Danish Impasse". In 1960 and 1961 he was a managing and contributing editor of Kulchur. During all these years he published his poetry far and wide.

Film personality and musician

In 1963 he founded the Movies Round Midnight program with Mike Getz. He ran the program until 1965. From 1962 and into the 1980s he wrote over a dozen movie scripts, usually with co-authors.

Over the last several decades, Fles has been active as a musician. He lives in Trinidad, California.