Professor David James referred to him as "the single most important promoter of underground film" in Los Angeles.

[3] As conscious communists, his parents had moved to the Soviet Union, where his father fell victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

[5] Mother and son later emigrated to the United States, where Pearl Rimel found employment in the aircraft industry.

[8] Later he was the editor of The Trembling Lamb, a one shot literary magazine that 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".

[7] In October 1963[12] he founded the Movies Round Midnight program at the Cinema Theatre at 1122 N. Western Ave. in Los Angeles,[12] along with Mike Getz.