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B movies (The exploitation boom)
Encyclopedia
The 1960s and 1970s mark the golden age of the independent B movie
, made outside of Hollywood's major film studios. As censorship pressures lifted in the early 1960s, the low-budget end of the American motion picture industry increasingly incorporated the sort of sexual and violent elements long associated with so-called exploitation film
s. The death of the Production Code
in 1968 and the major success of the exploitation-style Easy Rider
the following year fueled the trend through the subsequent decade. The success of the B-studio exploitation movement had a significant effect on the strategies of the major studios during the 1970s.
(AIP) the previous decade, was the new face of the double feature. In July 1960, the latest Joseph E. Levine
sword-and-sandals
import, Hercules Unchained
, opened at neighborhood theaters in New York. An 82-minute-long suspense film, Terror Is a Man, produced by a Manila-based, American-Philippine company, ran as a "co-feature." It had a now familiar sort of exploitation gimmick: "The dénouement helpfully includes a 'warning bell' so the sensitive can 'close their eyes.'" That year, Roger Corman
took American International down a new road: "When they asked me to make two ten-day black-and-white horror films to play as a double feature, I convinced them instead to finance one horror film in color." A period piece in the vein of Britain's Hammer Films
, House of Usher
was a success, launching a series of Poe-based movies Corman would direct for AIP. It also typifies the continuing ambiguities of B-picture classification. House of Usher was clearly an A film by the standards of both director and studio, with the longest shooting schedule and biggest budget Corman had ever enjoyed. But from a latter-day perspective, it is regarded as a B movie—that schedule was a mere fifteen days, the budget just $200,000, one-tenth the industry average. Low-budget-movie aficionado John Reid reports once asking a neighborhood theater manager to define "B picture." The response: "Any movie that runs less than 80 minutes." House of Ushers running time is close, 85 minutes. And despite its high status in studio terms, it was not sent out into the world on its own, but screened in tandem with a crime melodrama asking the eternal question Why Must I Die?
With the loosening of industry censorship constraints
, the 1960s and 1970s saw a major expansion in the production and commercial viability of a variety of B-movie subgenres that have come to be known collectively as exploitation films. The term gained broader application as well: Exploitation-style promotional practices had become standard practice at the lower-budget end of the industry; with the majors having exited traditional B production, exploitation became a way to refer to the entire field of low-budget genre films. The combination of intensive and gimmick-laden publicity with movies featuring vulgar subject matter (as judged by mainstream standards) along with often outrageous imagery dated back decades—before such milestones as The Tingler
(1959), before Women in Bondage (1943), before even The Terror of Tiny Town
(1938). Exploitation had originally defined truly fringe productions with a dose of shocking content, made at the lowest depths of Poverty Row or entirely outside the Hollywood system. Many graphically depicted the wages of sin in the context of promoting prudent lifestyle choices, particularly "sexual hygiene." Audiences might see explicit footage of anything from a live birth to a ritual circumcision in such films. They were not generally booked as part of movie theaters' regular schedules but rather presented as special events by traveling roadshow promoters (they might also appear as fodder for "grindhouses," which typically had no regular schedule at all). The most famous of those promoters, Kroger Babb
, was in the vanguard of marketing low-budget, sensationalistic films with a "100% saturation campaign," inundating the target audience with ads in almost any imaginable medium. In the era of the traditional double feature, no one would have characterized these exploitation films as "B movies." As production and exhibition practices changed, so did the terms of definition.
In the early 1960s, exploitation movies in the original sense continued to appear: 1961's Damaged Goods, a cautionary tale
about a young lady whose boyfriend’s promiscuity leads to venereal disease, comes complete with enormous, grotesque closeups of VD's physical manifestations. At the same time, the concept of fringe exploitation was merging with a closely related and similarly venerable tradition: “nudie
" films featuring nudist-camp footage or striptease artists like Bettie Page
had simply been the softcore
pornography of previous decades. As far back as 1933, This Nude World, which promised an "Authentic Trip Through an American Nudist Colony!", was "Guaranteed the Most Educational Film Ever Produced!" In the late 1950s, as more of the old grindhouse theaters specifically devoted themselves to "adult" product, a few filmmakers began making nudies with some greater semblance of plots. Best known was Russ Meyer
, who released his first successful narrative nudie, The Immoral Mr. Teas
, in 1959. Five years later, on a sub-$100,000 budget, Meyer came out with Lorna
, "a harder-edged film that combined sex with gritty realism and violence." Meyer would build an underground reputation as a talented director with movies such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1965) and Vixen!
(1968), the sort of films, virtually ignored by the mainstream press, that had become known as sexploitation
pictures. Another leading director in the genre was Joseph Sarno, who had his first commercial success in 1963 with Sin in the Suburbs. Many of his subsequent films, including the artistically crafted Red Roses of Passion (1966) and Odd Triangle (1968), examined the hesitant transformation of sexual mores among the American middle class. Films such as Meyer's and Sarno's—though not sexually explicit during this period—were largely relegated to the fringe circuit of "adult" theaters, while AIP teen movies with wink-wink titles like Beach Blanket Bingo
(1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini
(1966), starring Annette Funicello
and Frankie Avalon
, played drive-ins and other relatively reputable venues. Roger Corman's The Trip (1967) for American International, written by veteran AIP/Corman actor Jack Nicholson
, never shows a fully bared, unpainted breast, but flirts with nudity throughout. The Meyer and Corman lines were drawing closer.
One of the most influential films of the era, on B's and beyond, was Paramount
's Psycho. Its $8.5 million in earnings against a production cost of $800,000 made it the most profitable movie of 1960. Its mainstream distribution without the Production Code
seal of approval helped weaken U.S. film censorship. And, as William Paul notes, this move into the horror genre by respected director Alfred Hitchcock
was made, "significantly, with the lowest-budgeted film of his American career and the least glamorous stars. [Its] greatest initial impact...was on schlock horror movies (notably those from second-tier director William Castle
), each of which tried to bill itself as scarier than Psycho." Castle's first film in the Psycho vein was Homicidal
(1961), an early step in the development of the slasher
subgenre that would flourish in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It seemed the less money available for a horror film, the better the chances of being grossed out by it: Blood Feast
(1963), a movie about human dismemberment and culinary preparation made for approximately $24,000 by experienced nudie-maker Herschell Gordon Lewis
, established a new, more immediately successful subgenre, the gore or splatter film
. Lewis's business partner David F. Friedman
drummed up publicity by distributing vomit bags to theatergoers ("You May Need This When You See Blood Feast")—the sort of gimmick Castle had become renowned for in the 1950s—and arranging for an injunction against the film in Sarasota, Florida—the sort of problem exploitation films had long run up against, except Friedman had planned it. Lewis and Friedman's efforts typify the emerging sense of "exploitation": the progressive adoption of traditional exploitation and nudie elements into horror, into other classic B genres, and into the low-budget film industry as a whole.
Despite Psychos impact and the growing popularity of horror, major Hollywood studios largely continued to disdain the genre, at least for their own production lines. Along with the output of "off-Hollywood" U.S. concerns like Lewis and Friedman's, distributors brought in more foreign movies to fill the demands of rural drive-ins, lower-end urban theaters, and outright grindhouses. Hammer Films' success with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and its remake of Dracula
(1958) had established the studio as an important supplier of horror movies to the American B market, a positioned it maintained throughout the 1960s. In 1961, American International released a movie clearly influenced by Hammer's characteristically bold visual style and moody pace—Black Sunday was a dubbed horror import from Italy, where it had premiered the previous year as La maschera del demonio. It became the highest grossing film in AIP history. The movie's director was Mario Bava
, who would launch the horror subgenre known as giallo
with La ragazza che sapeva troppo
(The Girl Who Knew Too Much; 1963) and Sei Donne per l’assassino
(Blood and Black Lace; 1964). Many gialli, highly stylized films mixing sexploitation and ultraviolence, were picked up for U.S. B-market distribution and would prove influential on American horror films in turn, especially of the slasher type. While in the past, the term B movie had been applied, both in the United States and abroad, almost exclusively to low- and modest-budget American films, the growing Italian exploitation film industry now also became associated with the label (usually styled in Italy as B-movie).
The Production Code was officially scrapped in 1968, to be replaced by the first version of the present-day rating system. That year, two horror films came out that heralded directions American filmmaking would take in the next decade, with major long-range consequences for the B film. One was a high-budget Paramount production, directed by the celebrated Roman Polanski
and based on a bestselling novel by Ira Levin
. Produced by B-horror veteran William Castle, Rosemary's Baby
"took the genre up-market for the first time since the 1930s." It was a critical success and the seventh-biggest box office hit of the year. The other was George A. Romero
's now classic Night of the Living Dead
, produced on weekends in and around Pittsburgh for $114,000. Essentially a war movie pitting a small group of humans against a zombie
corps
, it built on the achievement of B-genre predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its subtextual exploration of social and political issues. The movie doubled as both a highly effective thriller and an incisive allegory for America's treatment of the descendants of its former slaves at home and its conduct of a distant war against Vietnamese nationalists
. Its greatest influence, though, derived not from its ideological implications but rather its clever subversion of genre clichés and the connection made between its exploitation-style imagery, its low-cost, truly independent means of production, and its high rate of return: $3 million in earnings in 1968, with much more to come as it was revived in various fashions.
With the Production Code gone and the X rating
established, major studio A films like Midnight Cowboy
could now show "adult" imagery, while the market for increasingly hardcore pornography
exploded. In this transformed commercial context, work like Russ Meyer's gained a new legitimacy. In 1969, for the first time a Meyer film, Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!
, was reviewed in the New York Times. Soon, Corman would be putting out nudity-filled sexploitation pictures such as The Student Nurses (1970) and Women in Cages
(1971). With The Vampire Lovers
(1970), Hammer similarly launched "a cycle of lesbian vampire movies that bordered on soft porn."
In May 1969, the most important of all exploitation movies premiered at the Cannes Film Festival
. Much of Easy Rider
s significance owes to the fact that it was produced for a respectable, if still modest, budget and released by a major studio. The project was first taken by one of its cocreators, Peter Fonda
, to American International. Fonda had become AIP's top star in the Corman–directed The Wild Angels
(1966), a biker movie, and The Trip, as in LSD
. The idea Fonda pitched would combine those two proven themes. AIP was intrigued but balked at giving his collaborator, Dennis Hopper
—who had appeared in The Trip and several other AIP opuses—free directorial rein. The duo then took their concept, for which they had projected a $60,000 budget, to producer Bert Schneider
. Suggesting that they would have an easier time raising $600,000, Schneider helped arrange a financing and distribution deal with Columbia Pictures
, where his brother was president. Two more graduates of the Corman/AIP exploitation mill joined the project: Jack Nicholson and cinematographer László Kovács
. The film (which managed to incorporate another favorite exploitation theme, the redneck menace, as well as a fair amount of nudity) was brought in at a cost of $501,000. Easy Rider would earn $19.1 million in rentals, becoming, as one history puts it, "the seminal film that provided the bridge between all the repressed tendencies represented by schlock/kitsch/hack since the dawn of Hollywood and the mainstream cinema of the seventies."
, Film Ventures International
, Fanfare Films, and Independent-International Pictures brought exploitation films to mainstream theaters around the country. The major studios' top product was continuing to inflate in running time—in 1970, the ten biggest earners averaged 140.1 minutes. The B's were keeping pace: In 1955, Corman had a producorial hand in five movies averaging 74.8 minutes, with a range between 69 and 79. He played a similar part in five films originally released in 1970, two for AIP and three for his own New World, including an Italian horror film that he purchased for around $25,000: the average length was 89.8 minutes, with a range between 86 and 94. These films could turn a tidy profit. The first New World release, the biker movie Angels Die Hard, cost $117,000 to produce. It was no Easy Rider, but its box-office take of $2 million–plus meant a 46 percent return for New World's investors.
In addition to the startups, the growth of exploitation in the 1970s also involved the leading studio in the low-budget field. In 1973, American International gave a shot to director Brian De Palma
, whose previous movie, a Warner Bros.
comedy, had flopped badly. Reviewing Sisters, De Palma's first horror film, New Yorker
critic Pauline Kael
observed that its "limp technique doesn't seem to matter to the people who want their gratuitous gore. The movie supplies it, but why is there so much gratuitous dumbness too?... [H]e can't get two people talking in order to make a simple expository point without its sounding like the drabbest Republic
picture of 1938." Many examples of the so-called blaxploitation
genre of the early and middle part of the decade, featuring stereotype-filled stories revolving around drugs, violent crime, and prostitution, were the product of AIP. One of blaxploitation's biggest stars was Pam Grier
, who began her film career with a bit part in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
(1970) and who had appeared in several New World pictures, including The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972), both directed by Jack Hill
. Hill also directed her best-known performances, in two AIP blaxploitation films: Coffy
(1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Grier has the distinction of starring in the first widely distributed movie to climax with a castration scene.
Blaxploitation was the first exploitation genre to picked up by the major studios in a substantial way. Indeed, the United Artists
release Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis
, is seen as the first significant film of the type. Crossing over before the genre had even gotten established, Laurence Merrick's micro-budget independent The Black Angels (aka Black Bikers from Hell; 1970) followed by a few months. But the movie regarded as truly igniting the blaxploitation phenomenon, again completely independent, came the following year: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
is also perhaps the most outrageous example of the form—wildly experimental in style, borderline pornographic ("Rated X by an All White Jury," declared the ads), and essentially a manifesto for a black American revolution. Melvin Van Peebles
wrote, co-produced, directed, starred in, edited, and composed the music for the film, which was completed with the last-minute help of a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby
. It premiered in April 1971, distributed by Cinemation Industries
, a small company then best known for releasing dubbed versions of the Italian Mondo Cane
"shockumentaries" and the Swedish skin flick Fanny Hill, as well as for its one in-house production, The Man from O.R.G.Y. (1970). These were the sort of films that played in the "grindhouses" of the day—many of them not outright porno theaters, but rather specializing in all manner of exploitation cinema. As director Quentin Tarantino
describes in a 2007 interview, "Grindhouses were usually in the ghetto. Or they were the big old downtown movie theaters that sometimes stayed open all night long, for all the bums. At the grindhouse that I went to, every week there was the new kung fu movie, or new car-chase movie, or new sexploitation movie, or blaxploitation movie." The days of six quickies for a nickel were gone, but a continuity of spirit was evident.
In 1970, a low-budget crime drama shot in 16 mm
by a first-time American director won the international critics' prize
at the Venice Film Festival
. Wanda
, written and directed by Barbara Loden
, is both a seminal event in the independent film movement and a classic B picture. The plot—involving a disaffected divorcée who drifts away from her coal-town life and aimlessly falls in with a small-time, would-be hardboiled
crook—and the often seedy settings would have been suitable to a straightforward exploitation film or (with a little shifting of sex roles) an old-school B noir
. Loden, who spent six years raising money for the sub-$200,000 production, created a film that Vincent Canby
of the New York Times praised for "the absolute accuracy of its effects, the decency of its point of view and the kind of purity of technique that can only be the result of conscious discipline." While Wanda would be the only movie Loden ever made, she "left us with a film that anticipated the independent spirit that would reinvigorate the industry."
Like Romero and Van Peebles, other filmmakers of the era made pictures that combined the gut-level entertainment of exploitation with biting social commentary. The first three features directed by Larry Cohen
, Bone (aka Beverly Hills Nightmare; 1972), Black Caesar
(1973), and Hell Up in Harlem
(1973), were all nominally blaxploitation movies, but Cohen—also the screenwriter on each film—used them as vehicles for a satirical examination of race relations and the wages of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), for AIP, might have "the look of tabloid sleaze," but one leading critic found it "perhaps the most intelligent film about American politics ever to come out of Hollywood." The gory horror film Deathdream (aka Dead of Night; 1974), directed by Bob Clark
and written by Alan Orsmby, is also an agonized protest of the war in Vietnam. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg
made serious-minded low-budget horror films whose implications are not so much ideological as psychological and existential: Shivers
(1975), Rabid
(1977), and The Brood
(1979) all involve a degree of self-reflexiveness
that, as William Paul points out, "makes Cronenberg's status as a genre director somewhat odd.... His works foreground their meaningfulness in a way that is unusual for the horror film." An Easy Rider with conceptual rigor, the movie that most clearly presaged the way in which exploitation content and artistic treatment would be combined in modestly budgeted films of later years was the biker-themed Electra Glide in Blue
(1973), a United Artists release directed by James William Guercio. Critical admiration was hardly universal at the time: Roger Greenspun of the New York Times wrote, "Under different intentions, it might have made a decent grade-C Roger Corman bike movie—though Corman has generally used more interesting directors than Guercio."
The horror field continued to attract young, independent American directors whose work would prove especially influential. As critic Roger Ebert
explained in one 1974 movie review, "Horror and exploitation films almost always turn a profit if they're brought in at the right price. So they provide a good starting place for ambitious would-be filmmakers who can't get more conventional projects off the ground." The particular movie under consideration was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
. Written and directed by Tobe Hooper
, it was made on a budget of somewhere between $93,000 and $250,000. It would earn $14.4 million in domestic rentals and become one of the most influential horror films of the decade. John Carpenter
, whose debut feature, the $60,000 sci-fi comedy Dark Star
(1974), had become a cult classic, made his lasting mark four years later. Halloween
(1978), produced for $320,000, grossed over $80 million at the box-office worldwide, making it "the most successful 'indie' movie ever released." The film effectively established the slasher mode as the primary expression of the horror genre for the next decade. Just as Hooper had learned from Romero's landmark Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, in turn, largely followed the model of Black Christmas
, directed by Deathdreams Bob Clark.
The impact of these films still echoes through such movies as the Saw
series, including 2006's Saw III
, a mainstream, $10 million production—far below the current Hollywood average, but more than a hundred times Hooper's budget and well out of any true independent's league.
In various ways, the B movies of the era have inspired later filmmakers blessed with much better financial backing. Almost all the works of Quentin Tarantino—in particular, Jackie Brown
(1997), the Kill Bill
movies (2003–4), and his Death Proof segment of Grindhouse (2007)—pay explicit tribute to classic exploitation cinema. Blaxploitation is directly homaged by the former, while the Kill Bill pictures reference a wide variety of Asian martial arts films, which appeared as imports in U.S. theaters regularly during the 1970s. These "kung fu" films as they were often called, whatever specific martial art was featured, were popularized in the United States by the Hong Kong–produced movies of Bruce Lee
. His films and later ones with such stars as Hong Kong's Jackie Chan
and Japan's Sonny Chiba
were marketed to the same genre/exploitation audience targeted by AIP and New World. Death Proof is inspired by a range of exploitation styles, particularly giallo/slasher pictures and car-chase movies like 20th Century-Fox's Vanishing Point
(1971) and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
(1974) and New World's Cannonball
(1976) and Grand Theft Auto
(1977).
audience, made the midnight movie a significant new mode of cinematic exhibition, with transgressive connotations. Socializing in a countercultural
milieu was part of the original attraction of the midnight filmgoing experience, something like a drive-in movie for the hip
. One of the first films adopted by the new midnight movie circuit in 1971 was the three-year-old Night of the Living Dead. The midnight movie success of low-budget pictures made entirely outside of the studio system, like John Waters
' Pink Flamingos
(1972), with its campy spin on exploitation, spurred the development of the independent film movement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
(1975), an inexpensive film from 20th Century-Fox that spoofed all manner of classic B-picture clichés, became an unparalleled hit when it was relaunched as a late show feature the year after its initial, unprofitable release. Even as Rocky Horror generated its own subcultural
phenomenon, it contributed to the mainstreaming of the theatrical midnight movie.
On television, the parallels between the weekly series that became the mainstay of prime-time programming and the Hollywood series films of an earlier day had long been clear. In the 1970s, original feature-length programming increasingly began to echo the B movie as well. While there had been dramatic feature presentations made especially for TV since the beginning of the medium's mass commercialization in the late 1940s, they had by and large not crossed over with the realm of the B movie. In the 1950s, the live television drama—a unique amalgam of cinematic and theatrical elements exemplified by Playhouse 90
(1956–1961)—had predominated. Over the course of the 1960s, there was a transition to prerecorded features; most of those produced by the major networks either aspired to the prestige of major motion pictures (e.g., CBS
's 1965 Cinderella
) or were intended as pilots for projected series. During this period, AIP produced a number of low-grade genre pictures such as Zontar, The Thing from Venus (1966) intended for the first-run TV syndication
market.
As production of TV movies expanded with the introduction of the ABC Movie of the Week
in 1969, soon followed by the dedication of other network slots to original feature presentations, time and financial factors shifted the medium progressively into B-picture territory. In a 1974 Time
article, "The New B Movies," Richard Schickel
begins by discussing a few recent high-priced TV features, only to argue that
While many TV films of the 1970s were action-oriented genre pictures of a type familiar from contemporary cinematic B production, the small screen also saw a revival of the B melodrama. Television films inspired by recent scandals—such as ABC
's The Ordeal of Patty Hearst
, which premiered a month after her release from prison in 1979—harkened all the way back to the 1920s and such movies as Human Wreckage and When Love Grows Cold, pictures from low-budget studio FBO made swiftly in the wake of celebrity misfortunes. Some TV movies, such as Nightmare in Badham County (ABC; 1976), headed straight into the realm of road-tripping-girls-in-redneck-bondage exploitation.
The reverberations of Easy Rider could be felt in Nightmare in Badham County, as well as in a host of big-screen exploitation films of the era. But perhaps its greatest influence on the fate of the B movie was less direct. By 1973, the major studios were clearly catching on to the commercial potential of genres that had once been consigned to the bargain basement. Rosemary's Baby had shown that a well-packaged horror "special" could be a box-office hit, but it had little in common with the exploitation style. Warner Bros.' The Exorcist
, directed by William Friedkin
, was a different story. It showed that a heavily promoted and distributed film in the genre could be an absolute blockbuster. And more: In William Paul's description, "it is the film that really established gross-out as a mode of expression for mainstream cinema.... [P]ast exploitation films managed to exploit their cruelties by virtue of their marginality. The Exorcist made cruelty respectable. By the end of the decade, the exploitation booking strategy of opening films simultaneously in hundreds to thousands of theaters became standard industry practice." It was the biggest movie of the year and by far the highest-earning horror movie yet made. On behalf of its genre, Universal
's American Graffiti
did something similar. Released when writer-director George Lucas
was twenty-nine years old, it is described by Paul as "essentially an American-International teenybopper pic with a lot more spit and polish"—a combination that made it the third biggest movie of 1973 and, likewise, by far the highest-earning teen-themed movie yet made. A-budgeted B-themed movies of even greater historical import would follow in their wake.
B movie
A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....
, made outside of Hollywood's major film studios. As censorship pressures lifted in the early 1960s, the low-budget end of the American motion picture industry increasingly incorporated the sort of sexual and violent elements long associated with so-called exploitation film
Exploitation film
Exploitation film is a type of film that is promoted by "exploiting" often lurid subject matter. The term "exploitation" is common in film marketing, used for all types of films to mean promotion or advertising. These films then need something to exploit, such as a big star, special effects, sex,...
s. The death of the Production Code
Production Code
The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of the vast majority of United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Hollywood's chief censor of the...
in 1968 and the major success of the exploitation-style Easy Rider
Easy Rider
Easy Rider is a 1969 American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...
the following year fueled the trend through the subsequent decade. The success of the B-studio exploitation movement had a significant effect on the strategies of the major studios during the 1970s.
Cheesecake and choppers: 1960s
Despite the many transformations in the industry, the average production cost of an American feature film was effectively stable over the course of the 1950s. In 1950, the figure had been $1 million; in 1961, it reached $2 million—after adjusting for inflation, the increase in real terms was less than 10 percent. The traditional twin bill of B film preceding and balancing a subsequent-run A film had largely disappeared from American theaters. The dual genre-movie package, popularized by American International PicturesAmerican International Pictures
American International Pictures was a film production company formed in April 1956 from American Releasing Corporation by James H. Nicholson, former Sales Manager of Realart Pictures, and Samuel Z. Arkoff, an entertainment lawyer...
(AIP) the previous decade, was the new face of the double feature. In July 1960, the latest Joseph E. Levine
Joseph E. Levine
Joseph E. Levine was an American film producer.He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His Embassy Pictures Corporation was an independent studio and distributor responsible for such films as Hercules , The Carpetbaggers, Harlow, The Graduate, A Bridge Too Far and The Lion in Winter.Levine is famous...
sword-and-sandals
Sword and sandal
The Peplum , also known as Sword-and-Sandal, is a genre of largely Italian-made Historical or Biblical Epics that dominated the Italian film industry from 1957 to 1965, eventually being replaced in 1965 by the "Spaghetti Western"...
import, Hercules Unchained
Hercules and the Queen of Lydia
Hercules Unchained is a 1959 Italian epic fantasy feature film starring Steve Reeves and Sylva Koscina in a story about two warring brothers and Hercules' tribulations in the court of Queen Omphale. The film is the sequel to the Reeves vehicle Hercules and marks Reeves' last appearance as Hercules...
, opened at neighborhood theaters in New York. An 82-minute-long suspense film, Terror Is a Man, produced by a Manila-based, American-Philippine company, ran as a "co-feature." It had a now familiar sort of exploitation gimmick: "The dénouement helpfully includes a 'warning bell' so the sensitive can 'close their eyes.'" That year, Roger Corman
Roger Corman
Roger William Corman is an American film producer, director and actor. He has mostly worked on low-budget B movies. Some of Corman's work has an established critical reputation, such as his cycle of films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 2009 he won an Honorary Academy Award for...
took American International down a new road: "When they asked me to make two ten-day black-and-white horror films to play as a double feature, I convinced them instead to finance one horror film in color." A period piece in the vein of Britain's Hammer Films
Hammer Film Productions
Hammer Film Productions is a film production company based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1934, the company is best known for a series of Gothic "Hammer Horror" films made from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers, film noir and comedies and in later...
, House of Usher
House of Usher (film)
House of Usher is an American International Pictures horror film starring Vincent Price, Myrna Fahey, and Mark Damon: the story is about a New England family cursed with madness, criminal conduct, and debauchery...
was a success, launching a series of Poe-based movies Corman would direct for AIP. It also typifies the continuing ambiguities of B-picture classification. House of Usher was clearly an A film by the standards of both director and studio, with the longest shooting schedule and biggest budget Corman had ever enjoyed. But from a latter-day perspective, it is regarded as a B movie—that schedule was a mere fifteen days, the budget just $200,000, one-tenth the industry average. Low-budget-movie aficionado John Reid reports once asking a neighborhood theater manager to define "B picture." The response: "Any movie that runs less than 80 minutes." House of Ushers running time is close, 85 minutes. And despite its high status in studio terms, it was not sent out into the world on its own, but screened in tandem with a crime melodrama asking the eternal question Why Must I Die?
Production Code
The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of the vast majority of United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Hollywood's chief censor of the...
, the 1960s and 1970s saw a major expansion in the production and commercial viability of a variety of B-movie subgenres that have come to be known collectively as exploitation films. The term gained broader application as well: Exploitation-style promotional practices had become standard practice at the lower-budget end of the industry; with the majors having exited traditional B production, exploitation became a way to refer to the entire field of low-budget genre films. The combination of intensive and gimmick-laden publicity with movies featuring vulgar subject matter (as judged by mainstream standards) along with often outrageous imagery dated back decades—before such milestones as The Tingler
The Tingler
The Tingler is a 1959 horror-thriller film by American producer/director William Castle. It is the third of five collaborations with writer Robb White and stars Vincent Price, Darryl Hickman, Patricia Cutts, Pamela Lincoln, Philip Coolidge and Judith Evelyn.The film tells the story of a scientist...
(1959), before Women in Bondage (1943), before even The Terror of Tiny Town
The Terror of Tiny Town
The Terror of Tiny Town is a 1938 American film produced by Jed Buell, directed by Sam Newfield, and starring Billy Curtis. It is the world's only musical Western with an all-midget cast....
(1938). Exploitation had originally defined truly fringe productions with a dose of shocking content, made at the lowest depths of Poverty Row or entirely outside the Hollywood system. Many graphically depicted the wages of sin in the context of promoting prudent lifestyle choices, particularly "sexual hygiene." Audiences might see explicit footage of anything from a live birth to a ritual circumcision in such films. They were not generally booked as part of movie theaters' regular schedules but rather presented as special events by traveling roadshow promoters (they might also appear as fodder for "grindhouses," which typically had no regular schedule at all). The most famous of those promoters, Kroger Babb
Kroger Babb
Howard W. "Kroger" Babb was an American film and television producer and showman. His marketing techniques were similar to a travelling salesman's, with roots in the medicine-show tradition...
, was in the vanguard of marketing low-budget, sensationalistic films with a "100% saturation campaign," inundating the target audience with ads in almost any imaginable medium. In the era of the traditional double feature, no one would have characterized these exploitation films as "B movies." As production and exhibition practices changed, so did the terms of definition.
In the early 1960s, exploitation movies in the original sense continued to appear: 1961's Damaged Goods, a cautionary tale
Cautionary tale
A cautionary tale is a tale told in folklore, to warn its hearer of a danger. There are three essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways. First, a taboo or prohibition is stated: some act, location, or thing is said to be dangerous. Then, the...
about a young lady whose boyfriend’s promiscuity leads to venereal disease, comes complete with enormous, grotesque closeups of VD's physical manifestations. At the same time, the concept of fringe exploitation was merging with a closely related and similarly venerable tradition: “nudie
Nudity in film
Nudity in film is any presentation in motion pictures of people while naked or wearing less clothing than contemporary norms consider modest. Many actors and actresses have appeared nude, or exposing parts of their bodies or dressed in ways considered provocative by contemporary standards at some...
" films featuring nudist-camp footage or striptease artists like Bettie Page
Bettie Page
Bettie Mae Page was an American model who became famous in the 1950s for her fetish modeling and pin-up photos. She has often been called the "Queen of Pinups"...
had simply been the softcore
Softcore
Softcore pornography is a form of filmic or photographic pornography or erotica that is less sexually explicit than hardcore pornography. It is intended to tickle and arouse men and women. Softcore pornography depicts nude and semi-nude performers engaging in casual social nudity or non-graphic...
pornography of previous decades. As far back as 1933, This Nude World, which promised an "Authentic Trip Through an American Nudist Colony!", was "Guaranteed the Most Educational Film Ever Produced!" In the late 1950s, as more of the old grindhouse theaters specifically devoted themselves to "adult" product, a few filmmakers began making nudies with some greater semblance of plots. Best known was Russ Meyer
Russ Meyer
Russell Albion "Russ" Meyer was a U.S. motion picture director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, actor and photographer....
, who released his first successful narrative nudie, The Immoral Mr. Teas
The Immoral Mr. Teas
The Immoral Mr. Teas is the first commercially successful film of director Russ Meyer.-Etymology:The name "Teas" is a homophone of the word tease, and one of the meanings of "tease" includes to sexually excite another person by subtle means, usually explicitly avoiding advancement to more...
, in 1959. Five years later, on a sub-$100,000 budget, Meyer came out with Lorna
Lorna (film)
Lorna is a 1964 film by Russ Meyer. Shot mainly on the small main street that runs through the town of Locke, California in September 1963, this was Meyer's first film in 35 mm. It was Meyer's first film to employ a dramatic storyline, the most expensive film he had filmed to date, and the first of...
, "a harder-edged film that combined sex with gritty realism and violence." Meyer would build an underground reputation as a talented director with movies such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a 1965 exploitation film directed by Russ Meyer, who also wrote the script with Jack Moran. It stars Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams....
(1965) and Vixen!
Vixen!
Vixen! is a 1968 satiric softcore sexploitation film directed by American motion picture director Russ Meyer. It was the first film to be given an X rating for its sex scenes, and was a breakthrough success for Meyer...
(1968), the sort of films, virtually ignored by the mainstream press, that had become known as sexploitation
Sexploitation
Sexploitation, or "sex-exploitation", describes a class of independently produced, low-budget feature films generally associated with the 1960s and serving largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and gratuitous nudity. The genre is a subgenre of exploitation films...
pictures. Another leading director in the genre was Joseph Sarno, who had his first commercial success in 1963 with Sin in the Suburbs. Many of his subsequent films, including the artistically crafted Red Roses of Passion (1966) and Odd Triangle (1968), examined the hesitant transformation of sexual mores among the American middle class. Films such as Meyer's and Sarno's—though not sexually explicit during this period—were largely relegated to the fringe circuit of "adult" theaters, while AIP teen movies with wink-wink titles like Beach Blanket Bingo
Beach Blanket Bingo
Beach Blanket Bingo is an American International Pictures beach party film, released in 1965 and was directed by William Asher. It is the fifth film in the beach party film series...
(1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini is a 1965 beach party film from American International Pictures. The sixth entry in a seven-film series, the movie features Mickey Rooney, Annette Funicello, Dwayne Hickman, Brian Donlevy, and Beverly Adams...
(1966), starring Annette Funicello
Annette Funicello
Annette Joanne Funicello is an American singer and actress. She was Walt Disney's most popular cast member of the original Mickey Mouse Club, and went on to appear in a series of beach party films.-Early life and early stardom:...
and Frankie Avalon
Frankie Avalon
Frankie Avalon is an American actor, singer, playwright, and former teen idol.-Career:By the time he was 12, Avalon was on U.S. television playing his trumpet. As a teenager he played with Bobby Rydell in Rocco and the Saints...
, played drive-ins and other relatively reputable venues. Roger Corman's The Trip (1967) for American International, written by veteran AIP/Corman actor Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...
, never shows a fully bared, unpainted breast, but flirts with nudity throughout. The Meyer and Corman lines were drawing closer.
One of the most influential films of the era, on B's and beyond, was Paramount
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
's Psycho. Its $8.5 million in earnings against a production cost of $800,000 made it the most profitable movie of 1960. Its mainstream distribution without the Production Code
Production Code
The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of the vast majority of United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Hollywood's chief censor of the...
seal of approval helped weaken U.S. film censorship. And, as William Paul notes, this move into the horror genre by respected director Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
was made, "significantly, with the lowest-budgeted film of his American career and the least glamorous stars. [Its] greatest initial impact...was on schlock horror movies (notably those from second-tier director William Castle
William Castle
William Castle was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Castle was known for directing films with many gimmicks which were ambitiously promoted, despite being reasonably low budget B-movies....
), each of which tried to bill itself as scarier than Psycho." Castle's first film in the Psycho vein was Homicidal
Homicidal
Homicidal is a 1961 thriller film produced and directed by the self-proclaimed "King of Showmanship", William Castle. Written by Robb White, the film stars Glenn Corbett, Patricia Breslin, Eugenie Leontovich, Alan Bunce, Richard Rust, and Joan Marshall...
(1961), an early step in the development of the slasher
Slasher film
A slasher film is a type of horror film typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe...
subgenre that would flourish in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It seemed the less money available for a horror film, the better the chances of being grossed out by it: Blood Feast
Blood Feast
Blood Feast is a 1963 American horror film directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, often considered the first "splatter film". It was produced by David F. Friedman. The screenplay was written by Alison Louise Downe, who had previously appeared in several of Lewis' other films. Lewis also wrote the...
(1963), a movie about human dismemberment and culinary preparation made for approximately $24,000 by experienced nudie-maker Herschell Gordon Lewis
Herschell Gordon Lewis
Herschell Gordon Lewis is an American filmmaker, best known for creating the "splatter film" subgenre of horror...
, established a new, more immediately successful subgenre, the gore or splatter film
Splatter film
A splatter film or gore film is a subgenre of horror film that deliberately focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and graphic violence. These films, through the use of special effects and excessive blood and guts, tend to display an overt interest in the vulnerability of the human body and the...
. Lewis's business partner David F. Friedman
David F. Friedman
David Frank Friedman was an American filmmaker and film producer.-Life and career:Friedman first became interested in entertainment after spending part of his childhood in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama, traveling carnival sites. He met exploitation film pioneer Kroger Babb during his stay in...
drummed up publicity by distributing vomit bags to theatergoers ("You May Need This When You See Blood Feast")—the sort of gimmick Castle had become renowned for in the 1950s—and arranging for an injunction against the film in Sarasota, Florida—the sort of problem exploitation films had long run up against, except Friedman had planned it. Lewis and Friedman's efforts typify the emerging sense of "exploitation": the progressive adoption of traditional exploitation and nudie elements into horror, into other classic B genres, and into the low-budget film industry as a whole.
Despite Psychos impact and the growing popularity of horror, major Hollywood studios largely continued to disdain the genre, at least for their own production lines. Along with the output of "off-Hollywood" U.S. concerns like Lewis and Friedman's, distributors brought in more foreign movies to fill the demands of rural drive-ins, lower-end urban theaters, and outright grindhouses. Hammer Films' success with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and its remake of Dracula
Dracula (1958 film)
Dracula, also known as Horror of Dracula in the United States, is a 1958 British horror film. It is the first in the series of Hammer Horror films inspired by the Bram Stoker novel Dracula. It was directed by Terence Fisher, and stars Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Carol Marsh, Melissa Stribling and...
(1958) had established the studio as an important supplier of horror movies to the American B market, a positioned it maintained throughout the 1960s. In 1961, American International released a movie clearly influenced by Hammer's characteristically bold visual style and moody pace—Black Sunday was a dubbed horror import from Italy, where it had premiered the previous year as La maschera del demonio. It became the highest grossing film in AIP history. The movie's director was Mario Bava
Mario Bava
Mario Bava was an Italian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer remembered as one of the greatest names from the "golden age" of Italian horror films.-Biography:Mario Bava was born in San Remo, Liguria, Italy...
, who would launch the horror subgenre known as giallo
Giallo
Giallo is an Italian 20th century genre of literature and film, which in Italian indicates crime fiction and mystery. In the English language it refers to a genre similar to the French fantastique genre and includes elements of horror fiction and eroticism...
with La ragazza che sapeva troppo
La ragazza che sapeva troppo
The Girl Who Knew Too Much is a 1963 Italian giallo film. Directed by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, the film stars John Saxon as Dr. Marcello Bassi and Letícia Román as Nora Davis. The plot revolves around a young woman named Nora, who travels to Rome and witnesses a murder. The police and Dr....
(The Girl Who Knew Too Much; 1963) and Sei Donne per l’assassino
Blood and Black Lace
Blood and Black Lace is a 1964 Italian thriller film directed by Mario Bava. Bava cowrote the screenplay with Giuseppe Barilla and Marcello Fondato. The film stars Cameron Mitchell and Eva Bartok...
(Blood and Black Lace; 1964). Many gialli, highly stylized films mixing sexploitation and ultraviolence, were picked up for U.S. B-market distribution and would prove influential on American horror films in turn, especially of the slasher type. While in the past, the term B movie had been applied, both in the United States and abroad, almost exclusively to low- and modest-budget American films, the growing Italian exploitation film industry now also became associated with the label (usually styled in Italy as B-movie).
The demise of the Code
Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few "truly international filmmakers."...
and based on a bestselling novel by Ira Levin
Ira Levin
Ira Levin was an American author, dramatist and songwriter.-Professional life:Levin attended Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa...
. Produced by B-horror veteran William Castle, Rosemary's Baby
Rosemary's Baby (film)
Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 American horror film written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on the bestselling 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin...
"took the genre up-market for the first time since the 1930s." It was a critical success and the seventh-biggest box office hit of the year. The other was George A. Romero
George A. Romero
George Andrew Romero is a Canadian-American film director, screenwriter and editor, best known for his gruesome and satirical horror films about a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. He is nicknamed "Godfather of all Zombies." -Life and career:...
's now classic Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent black-and-white zombie film and cult film directed by George A. Romero, starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea and Karl Hardman. It premiered on October 1, 1968, and was completed on a USD$114,000 budget. After decades of cinematic re-releases, it...
, produced on weekends in and around Pittsburgh for $114,000. Essentially a war movie pitting a small group of humans against a zombie
Zombie
Zombie is a term used to denote an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means such as witchcraft. The term is often figuratively applied to describe a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli...
corps
Corps
A corps is either a large formation, or an administrative grouping of troops within an armed force with a common function such as Artillery or Signals representing an arm of service...
, it built on the achievement of B-genre predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its subtextual exploration of social and political issues. The movie doubled as both a highly effective thriller and an incisive allegory for America's treatment of the descendants of its former slaves at home and its conduct of a distant war against Vietnamese nationalists
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. Its greatest influence, though, derived not from its ideological implications but rather its clever subversion of genre clichés and the connection made between its exploitation-style imagery, its low-cost, truly independent means of production, and its high rate of return: $3 million in earnings in 1968, with much more to come as it was revived in various fashions.
With the Production Code gone and the X rating
X-rated
In some countries, X is or has been a motion picture rating reserved for the most explicit films. Films rated X are intended only for viewing by adults, usually legally defined as people over the age of 17.-United Kingdom:...
established, major studio A films like Midnight Cowboy
Midnight Cowboy
Midnight Cowboy is a 1969 American drama film based on the 1965 novel of the same name by James Leo Herlihy. It was written by Waldo Salt, directed by John Schlesinger, and stars Dustin Hoffman and newcomer Jon Voight in the title role. Notable smaller roles are filled by Sylvia Miles, John...
could now show "adult" imagery, while the market for increasingly hardcore pornography
Hardcore pornography
Hardcore pornography is a form of pornography that features explicit sexual acts. The term was coined in the second half of the 20th century to distinguish it from softcore pornography. It usually takes the form of photographs, often displayed in magazines or on the Internet, or films. It can also...
exploded. In this transformed commercial context, work like Russ Meyer's gained a new legitimacy. In 1969, for the first time a Meyer film, Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!
Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!
Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! is a 1968 film by Russ Meyer. The story involves the goings-on at a topless go-go bar on the Sunset Strip. Meyer himself makes an appearance in this film...
, was reviewed in the New York Times. Soon, Corman would be putting out nudity-filled sexploitation pictures such as The Student Nurses (1970) and Women in Cages
Women in Cages
Women in Cages is a 1971 film in the women in prison sexploitation sub-genre, co-produced by Roger Corman and directed by Gerardo de León. It was prominently featured in the Planet Terror portion of the 2007 film Grindhouse....
(1971). With The Vampire Lovers
The Vampire Lovers
The Vampire Lovers is a 1970 British Hammer Horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Peter Cushing, Ingrid Pitt, Madeline Smith, Kate O'Mara, and Jon Finch. It is based on the J. Sheridan Le Fanu novella Carmilla and is part of the so-called Karnstein Trilogy of films. The other films in...
(1970), Hammer similarly launched "a cycle of lesbian vampire movies that bordered on soft porn."
In May 1969, the most important of all exploitation movies premiered at the Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
. Much of Easy Rider
Easy Rider
Easy Rider is a 1969 American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...
s significance owes to the fact that it was produced for a respectable, if still modest, budget and released by a major studio. The project was first taken by one of its cocreators, Peter Fonda
Peter Fonda
Peter Henry Fonda is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget and Justin Fonda...
, to American International. Fonda had become AIP's top star in the Corman–directed The Wild Angels
The Wild Angels
The Wild Angels is a 1966 Roger Corman film, made on location in Southern California. The Wild Angels was made three years before Easy Rider and was the first film to associate actor Peter Fonda with Harley-Davidson motorcycles and 1960s counterculture...
(1966), a biker movie, and The Trip, as in LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
. The idea Fonda pitched would combine those two proven themes. AIP was intrigued but balked at giving his collaborator, Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...
—who had appeared in The Trip and several other AIP opuses—free directorial rein. The duo then took their concept, for which they had projected a $60,000 budget, to producer Bert Schneider
Bert Schneider
Berton "Bert" Schneider is an American movie producer, who was behind a number of important and topical films of the late-1960s and early-1970s. The son of Abraham Schneider, onetime president of Columbia Pictures, the younger Schneider tended toward the rebellious. He briefly attended Cornell...
. Suggesting that they would have an easier time raising $600,000, Schneider helped arrange a financing and distribution deal with Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
, where his brother was president. Two more graduates of the Corman/AIP exploitation mill joined the project: Jack Nicholson and cinematographer László Kovács
László Kovács (cinematographer)
László Kovács, A.S.C. was a Hungarian cinematographer who was influential in the development of American New Wave films. Most famous for his award-winning work on Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, Kovács was the recipient of numerous awards, including three Lifetime Achievement Awards...
. The film (which managed to incorporate another favorite exploitation theme, the redneck menace, as well as a fair amount of nudity) was brought in at a cost of $501,000. Easy Rider would earn $19.1 million in rentals, becoming, as one history puts it, "the seminal film that provided the bridge between all the repressed tendencies represented by schlock/kitsch/hack since the dawn of Hollywood and the mainstream cinema of the seventies."
Sleazeballs and slashers: 1970s
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of low-budget film companies emerged that drew from all the different lines of exploitation as well as the sci-fi and teen themes that had been a mainstay since the 1950s. Operations such as Roger Corman's New World Pictures, Cannon Films, New Line CinemaNew Line Cinema
New Line Cinema, often simply referred to as New Line, is an American film studio. It was founded in 1967 by Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne as a film distributor, later becoming an independent film studio. It became a subsidiary of Time Warner in 1996 and was merged with larger sister studio Warner...
, Film Ventures International
Film Ventures International
Film Ventures International is an independent movie production and distribution company originally situated in Atlanta, Georgia during the 1970s. FVI garnered a notorious reputation within the industry for producing films which were highly derivative of many blockbusters of the era...
, Fanfare Films, and Independent-International Pictures brought exploitation films to mainstream theaters around the country. The major studios' top product was continuing to inflate in running time—in 1970, the ten biggest earners averaged 140.1 minutes. The B's were keeping pace: In 1955, Corman had a producorial hand in five movies averaging 74.8 minutes, with a range between 69 and 79. He played a similar part in five films originally released in 1970, two for AIP and three for his own New World, including an Italian horror film that he purchased for around $25,000: the average length was 89.8 minutes, with a range between 86 and 94. These films could turn a tidy profit. The first New World release, the biker movie Angels Die Hard, cost $117,000 to produce. It was no Easy Rider, but its box-office take of $2 million–plus meant a 46 percent return for New World's investors.
Brian De Palma
Brian Russell De Palma is an American film director and writer. In a career spanning over 40 years, he is probably best known for his suspense and crime thriller films, including such box office successes as the horror film Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Mission:...
, whose previous movie, a Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
comedy, had flopped badly. Reviewing Sisters, De Palma's first horror film, New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
critic Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
observed that its "limp technique doesn't seem to matter to the people who want their gratuitous gore. The movie supplies it, but why is there so much gratuitous dumbness too?... [H]e can't get two people talking in order to make a simple expository point without its sounding like the drabbest Republic
Republic Pictures
Republic Pictures was an independent film production-distribution corporation with studio facilities, operating from 1934 through 1959, and was best known for specializing in westerns, movie serials and B films emphasizing mystery and action....
picture of 1938." Many examples of the so-called blaxploitation
Blaxploitation
Blaxploitation or blacksploitation is a film genre which emerged in the United States circa 1970. It is considered an ethnic sub-genre of the general category of exploitation films. Blaxploitation films were originally made specifically for an urban black audience, although the genre's audience...
genre of the early and middle part of the decade, featuring stereotype-filled stories revolving around drugs, violent crime, and prostitution, were the product of AIP. One of blaxploitation's biggest stars was Pam Grier
Pam Grier
Pamela Suzette "Pam" Grier is an American actress. She became famous in the early 1970s, after starring in a string of moderately successful women in prison and blaxploitation films such as 1974's Foxy Brown. Her career was revitalized in 1997 after her appearance in Quentin Tarantino's film...
, who began her film career with a bit part in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a 1970 American schlock melodrama film starring Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, John LaZar, Michael Blodgett and David Gurian...
(1970) and who had appeared in several New World pictures, including The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972), both directed by Jack Hill
Jack Hill
Jack Hill is an U.S. film director, noted for his work in the exploitation film genre. Despite this, several of Hill's later films have been characterized as feminist works.Hill was born in Los Angeles...
. Hill also directed her best-known performances, in two AIP blaxploitation films: Coffy
Coffy
- Track listing :# "Coffy Is The Color" - 3:03Vocals – Dee Dee Bridgewater, Roy Ayers, Wayne Garfield# "Priscilla's Theme" - 3:58# "King George" - 3:00Vocals – Roy Ayers# "Aragon" - 2:55# "Coffy Sauna" - 2:16# "King's Last Ride" - 1:10# "Coffy Baby" - 2:26...
(1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Grier has the distinction of starring in the first widely distributed movie to climax with a castration scene.
Blaxploitation was the first exploitation genre to picked up by the major studios in a substantial way. Indeed, the United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....
release Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis
Ossie Davis
Ossie Davis was an American film actor, director, poet, playwright, writer, and social activist.-Early years:...
, is seen as the first significant film of the type. Crossing over before the genre had even gotten established, Laurence Merrick's micro-budget independent The Black Angels (aka Black Bikers from Hell; 1970) followed by a few months. But the movie regarded as truly igniting the blaxploitation phenomenon, again completely independent, came the following year: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 American independent drama film, written, produced, scored, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles, father of actor Mario Van Peebles . It tells the picaresque story of a poor African American man on his flight from the white authority...
is also perhaps the most outrageous example of the form—wildly experimental in style, borderline pornographic ("Rated X by an All White Jury," declared the ads), and essentially a manifesto for a black American revolution. Melvin Van Peebles
Melvin Van Peebles
Melvin "Block" Van Peebles is an American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and composer.He is most famous for creating the acclaimed film, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which heralded a new era of African American focused films...
wrote, co-produced, directed, starred in, edited, and composed the music for the film, which was completed with the last-minute help of a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby
Bill Cosby
William Henry "Bill" Cosby, Jr. is an American comedian, actor, author, television producer, educator, musician and activist. A veteran stand-up performer, he got his start at various clubs, then landed a starring role in the 1960s action show, I Spy. He later starred in his own series, the...
. It premiered in April 1971, distributed by Cinemation Industries
Cinemation Industries
Cinemation Industries was a New York City-based film studio and distributor. Among other films, the company has distributed exploitation films such as Shanty Tramp , Teenage Mother , The Cheerleaders , The Black Six , and The Black Godfather .But the company has also distributed unexpected smash...
, a small company then best known for releasing dubbed versions of the Italian Mondo Cane
Mondo cane
Mondo cane is a documentary written and directed by Italian filmmakers Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti. The film consists of a series of travelogue vignettes that provide glimpses into cultural practices around the world with the intention to shock or surprise Western film...
"shockumentaries" and the Swedish skin flick Fanny Hill, as well as for its one in-house production, The Man from O.R.G.Y. (1970). These were the sort of films that played in the "grindhouses" of the day—many of them not outright porno theaters, but rather specializing in all manner of exploitation cinema. As director Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
describes in a 2007 interview, "Grindhouses were usually in the ghetto. Or they were the big old downtown movie theaters that sometimes stayed open all night long, for all the bums. At the grindhouse that I went to, every week there was the new kung fu movie, or new car-chase movie, or new sexploitation movie, or blaxploitation movie." The days of six quickies for a nickel were gone, but a continuity of spirit was evident.
In 1970, a low-budget crime drama shot in 16 mm
16 mm film
16 mm film refers to a popular, economical gauge of film used for motion pictures and non-theatrical film making. 16 mm refers to the width of the film...
by a first-time American director won the international critics' prize
FIPRESCI
The International Federation of Film Critics is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world for "the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests." It was founded in June 1930 in...
at the Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
. Wanda
Wanda (film)
Wanda is an independent 1970 drama film that was written and directed by Barbara Loden, who also stars in the title role. It is set in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania.-Plot:...
, written and directed by Barbara Loden
Barbara Loden
Barbara Loden was an American film and stage actress and film director....
, is both a seminal event in the independent film movement and a classic B picture. The plot—involving a disaffected divorcée who drifts away from her coal-town life and aimlessly falls in with a small-time, would-be hardboiled
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
crook—and the often seedy settings would have been suitable to a straightforward exploitation film or (with a little shifting of sex roles) an old-school B noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
. Loden, who spent six years raising money for the sub-$200,000 production, created a film that Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...
of the New York Times praised for "the absolute accuracy of its effects, the decency of its point of view and the kind of purity of technique that can only be the result of conscious discipline." While Wanda would be the only movie Loden ever made, she "left us with a film that anticipated the independent spirit that would reinvigorate the industry."
Larry Cohen
Lawrence G. "Larry" Cohen is an American film producer, director, and screenwriter. He is best known as a B-Movie auteur of horror and science fiction films - often containing a police procedural element - during 1970s and 1980s...
, Bone (aka Beverly Hills Nightmare; 1972), Black Caesar
Black Caesar (film)
Black Caesar is a 1973 American blaxploitation film, starring Fred Williamson and Gloria Hendry. The film was written and directed by Larry Cohen. It is a remake of the 1931 film Little Caesar. It features a notable musical score by James Brown , his first experience with writing music for film...
(1973), and Hell Up in Harlem
Hell Up in Harlem
Hell Up in Harlem is a 1973 blaxploitation film, starring Fred Williamson and Gloria Hendry. The film was written and directed by Larry Cohen...
(1973), were all nominally blaxploitation movies, but Cohen—also the screenwriter on each film—used them as vehicles for a satirical examination of race relations and the wages of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), for AIP, might have "the look of tabloid sleaze," but one leading critic found it "perhaps the most intelligent film about American politics ever to come out of Hollywood." The gory horror film Deathdream (aka Dead of Night; 1974), directed by Bob Clark
Bob Clark
Benjamin "Bob" Clark was an American actor, director, screenwriter and producer best known for directing and writing the script with Jean Shepherd to the 1983 Christmas film A Christmas Story...
and written by Alan Orsmby, is also an agonized protest of the war in Vietnam. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the...
made serious-minded low-budget horror films whose implications are not so much ideological as psychological and existential: Shivers
Shivers (film)
Shivers is a 1975 Canadian body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg. Cronenberg won "Best Director" at the 1975 Sitges Film Festival.-Plot:Dr...
(1975), Rabid
Rabid
Rabid is a 1977 horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It features Marilyn Chambers in the lead role, supported by Frank Moore, Howard Ryshpan, Joe Silver and Robert A...
(1977), and The Brood
The Brood
The Brood is a 1979 Canadian horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg, starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar and Art Hindle.The film depicts a series of murders committed by what seems at first to be a group of children...
(1979) all involve a degree of self-reflexiveness
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding...
that, as William Paul points out, "makes Cronenberg's status as a genre director somewhat odd.... His works foreground their meaningfulness in a way that is unusual for the horror film." An Easy Rider with conceptual rigor, the movie that most clearly presaged the way in which exploitation content and artistic treatment would be combined in modestly budgeted films of later years was the biker-themed Electra Glide in Blue
Electra Glide in Blue
Electra Glide in Blue is a 1973 film starring Robert Blake as a motorcycle cop in Arizona and Billy Green Bush as his partner. The name stems from the Harley-Davidson Electra Glide motorcycle issued to traffic cops....
(1973), a United Artists release directed by James William Guercio. Critical admiration was hardly universal at the time: Roger Greenspun of the New York Times wrote, "Under different intentions, it might have made a decent grade-C Roger Corman bike movie—though Corman has generally used more interesting directors than Guercio."
The horror field continued to attract young, independent American directors whose work would prove especially influential. As critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
explained in one 1974 movie review, "Horror and exploitation films almost always turn a profit if they're brought in at the right price. So they provide a good starting place for ambitious would-be filmmakers who can't get more conventional projects off the ground." The particular movie under consideration was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 1974 American independent horror film directed and produced by Tobe Hooper, who cowrote it with Kim Henkel. It stars Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, and Gunnar Hansen, who respectively portray Sally Hardesty, Franklin Hardesty, the...
. Written and directed by Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper is an American film director and screenwriter, best known for his work in the horror film genre. His works include the cult classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , along with its first sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 ; the three-time Emmy-nominated Stephen King film adaptation...
, it was made on a budget of somewhere between $93,000 and $250,000. It would earn $14.4 million in domestic rentals and become one of the most influential horror films of the decade. John Carpenter
John Carpenter
John Howard Carpenter is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.- Early life :Carpenter was born...
, whose debut feature, the $60,000 sci-fi comedy Dark Star
Dark Star (film)
Dark Star is a 1974 American comedic science fiction motion picture directed by John Carpenter and co-written with Dan O'Bannon.-Backstory and plot:...
(1974), had become a cult classic, made his lasting mark four years later. Halloween
Halloween (1978 film)
Halloween is a 1978 American independent horror film directed, produced, and scored by John Carpenter, co-written with Debra Hill, and starring Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut and the first installment in the Halloween franchise. The film is set in the fictional midwestern...
(1978), produced for $320,000, grossed over $80 million at the box-office worldwide, making it "the most successful 'indie' movie ever released." The film effectively established the slasher mode as the primary expression of the horror genre for the next decade. Just as Hooper had learned from Romero's landmark Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, in turn, largely followed the model of Black Christmas
Black Christmas (1974 film)
Black Christmas is a 1974 Canadian slasher film directed by Bob Clark and written by A. Roy Moore, and largely based on a series of murders that took place in Quebec, Canada around Christmas time. The film's score is by Carl Zittrer. It was distributed by Ambassador Film Distributors in Canada and...
, directed by Deathdreams Bob Clark.
The impact of these films still echoes through such movies as the Saw
Saw (film)
Saw is a 2004 American independent horror film directed by James Wan. The screenplay, written by Leigh Whannell, is based on a story by Wan and Whannell. The film stars Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter, Michael Emerson, Ken Leung, Whannell and Tobin Bell...
series, including 2006's Saw III
Saw III
Saw III is a 2006 Canadian-American horror film directed by Darren Lynn Bousman from a screenplay by Leigh Whannell and story by James Wan and Whannell. Wan and Whannell directed and wrote Saw and Bousman wrote and directed Saw II. It is the third film in the seven-part Saw film series and stars...
, a mainstream, $10 million production—far below the current Hollywood average, but more than a hundred times Hooper's budget and well out of any true independent's league.
In various ways, the B movies of the era have inspired later filmmakers blessed with much better financial backing. Almost all the works of Quentin Tarantino—in particular, Jackie Brown
Jackie Brown (film)
Jackie Brown is a 1997 American crime drama film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It is an adaptation of the novel Rum Punch by American novelist Elmore Leonard and pays homage to 1970s blaxploitation films....
(1997), the Kill Bill
Kill Bill
Kill Bill Volume 1 is a 2003 action thriller film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It is the first of two volumes that were theatrically released several months apart, the second volume being Kill Bill Volume 2....
movies (2003–4), and his Death Proof segment of Grindhouse (2007)—pay explicit tribute to classic exploitation cinema. Blaxploitation is directly homaged by the former, while the Kill Bill pictures reference a wide variety of Asian martial arts films, which appeared as imports in U.S. theaters regularly during the 1970s. These "kung fu" films as they were often called, whatever specific martial art was featured, were popularized in the United States by the Hong Kong–produced movies of Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee was a Chinese American, Hong Kong actor, martial arts instructor, philosopher, film director, film producer, screenwriter, and founder of the Jeet Kune Do martial arts movement...
. His films and later ones with such stars as Hong Kong's Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan, SBS, MBE is a Hong Kong actor, action choreographer, comedian, director, producer, martial artist, screenwriter, entrepreneur, singer and stunt performer. In his movies, he is known for his acrobatic fighting style, comic timing, use of improvised weapons, and innovative stunts...
and Japan's Sonny Chiba
Sonny Chiba
, also known as Sonny Chiba, is a Japanese actor, singer, film producer, film director and martial artist.Chiba was one of the first actors to achieve stardom through his skills in martial arts, initially in Japan and later before an international audience.- Early life :Born in Fukuoka, Fukuoka,...
were marketed to the same genre/exploitation audience targeted by AIP and New World. Death Proof is inspired by a range of exploitation styles, particularly giallo/slasher pictures and car-chase movies like 20th Century-Fox's Vanishing Point
Vanishing Point
Vanishing Point is a 1971 American action-road movie directed by Richard C. Sarafian; starring Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, and Dean Jagger....
(1971) and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is a cult 1974 car chase film starring Peter Fonda, Susan George, Adam Roarke, and Vic Morrow. The film was directed by John Hough...
(1974) and New World's Cannonball
Cannonball (film)
Cannonball, also known as Carquake, is a 1976 film starring David Carradine. The film is one of two released in 1976 that were based on a real illegal cross-continent road race that took place for a number of years in the United States...
(1976) and Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto (film)
Grand Theft Auto is a 1977 American comedy chase film directed by Ron Howard. It was Howard's directorial debut and features himself as Sam Freeman and Nancy Morgan as Paula Powers in the leading roles...
(1977).
New markets for the B
In the early 1970s, the growing practice of screening nonmainstream motion pictures as late shows, with the goal of building a cult filmCult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
audience, made the midnight movie a significant new mode of cinematic exhibition, with transgressive connotations. Socializing in a countercultural
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
milieu was part of the original attraction of the midnight filmgoing experience, something like a drive-in movie for the hip
Hip (slang)
Hip is a slang term meaning fashionably current and in the know. Hip is the opposite of square or prude.Hip, like cool, does not refer to one specific quality. What is considered hip is continuously changing. The term hip is said to have originated in African American Vernacular English in the...
. One of the first films adopted by the new midnight movie circuit in 1971 was the three-year-old Night of the Living Dead. The midnight movie success of low-budget pictures made entirely outside of the studio system, like John Waters
John Waters (filmmaker)
John Samuel Waters, Jr. is an American filmmaker, actor, stand-up comedian, writer, journalist, visual artist, and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films...
' Pink Flamingos
Pink Flamingos
Pink Flamingos is a 1972 transgressive black comedy film written, produced, composed, shot, edited, and directed by John Waters. When the film was initially released, it caused a huge degree of controversy and thus became one of the most notorious cult films ever made. It made an underground star...
(1972), with its campy spin on exploitation, spurred the development of the independent film movement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the 1975 film adaptation of the British rock musical stageplay, The Rocky Horror Show, written by Richard O'Brien. The film is a parody of B-movie, science fiction and horror films of the late 1940s through early 1970s. Director Jim Sharman collaborated on the...
(1975), an inexpensive film from 20th Century-Fox that spoofed all manner of classic B-picture clichés, became an unparalleled hit when it was relaunched as a late show feature the year after its initial, unprofitable release. Even as Rocky Horror generated its own subcultural
Subculture
In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...
phenomenon, it contributed to the mainstreaming of the theatrical midnight movie.
On television, the parallels between the weekly series that became the mainstay of prime-time programming and the Hollywood series films of an earlier day had long been clear. In the 1970s, original feature-length programming increasingly began to echo the B movie as well. While there had been dramatic feature presentations made especially for TV since the beginning of the medium's mass commercialization in the late 1940s, they had by and large not crossed over with the realm of the B movie. In the 1950s, the live television drama—a unique amalgam of cinematic and theatrical elements exemplified by Playhouse 90
Playhouse 90
Playhouse 90 is an American television anthology series that was telecast on CBS from 1956 to 1960 for a total of 133 episodes. It originated from CBS Television City in Los Angeles, California...
(1956–1961)—had predominated. Over the course of the 1960s, there was a transition to prerecorded features; most of those produced by the major networks either aspired to the prestige of major motion pictures (e.g., CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
's 1965 Cinderella
Cinderella (TV)
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella is a musical written for television, with music by Richard Rodgers and a book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It is based upon the fairy tale Cinderella, particularly the French version Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Vair, by Charles Perrault...
) or were intended as pilots for projected series. During this period, AIP produced a number of low-grade genre pictures such as Zontar, The Thing from Venus (1966) intended for the first-run TV syndication
Television syndication
In broadcasting, syndication is the sale of the right to broadcast radio shows and television shows by multiple radio stations and television stations, without going through a broadcast network, though the process of syndication may conjure up structures like those of a network itself, by its very...
market.
ABC Movie of the Week
The ABC Movie of the Week is a weekly television anthology series, featuring made-for-TV movies, that aired on the ABC network in various permutations from 1969 to 1975.-History:...
in 1969, soon followed by the dedication of other network slots to original feature presentations, time and financial factors shifted the medium progressively into B-picture territory. In a 1974 Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
article, "The New B Movies," Richard Schickel
Richard Schickel
Richard Warren Schickel is an American author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He is a film critic for Time magazine, having also written for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review....
begins by discussing a few recent high-priced TV features, only to argue that
as with the old films, so with TV movies: the quick, deft westerns, mysteries and action melodramas that depend on well-established conventions may in the end exert a larger claim on our attention than their more pretentiously publicized rivals.... Convenient to turn on, easy to flick off, movies made for TV approximate the conditions under which all movies used to be chanced by audiences years ago...when at least half the pleasure of moviegoing derived precisely from the fact that no sense of cultural occasion was attached to that simple, inexpensive act.
While many TV films of the 1970s were action-oriented genre pictures of a type familiar from contemporary cinematic B production, the small screen also saw a revival of the B melodrama. Television films inspired by recent scandals—such as ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
's The Ordeal of Patty Hearst
Patty Hearst
Patricia Campbell Hearst , now known as Patricia Campbell Hearst Shaw, is an American newspaper heiress, socialite, actress, kidnap victim, and convicted bank robber....
, which premiered a month after her release from prison in 1979—harkened all the way back to the 1920s and such movies as Human Wreckage and When Love Grows Cold, pictures from low-budget studio FBO made swiftly in the wake of celebrity misfortunes. Some TV movies, such as Nightmare in Badham County (ABC; 1976), headed straight into the realm of road-tripping-girls-in-redneck-bondage exploitation.
The reverberations of Easy Rider could be felt in Nightmare in Badham County, as well as in a host of big-screen exploitation films of the era. But perhaps its greatest influence on the fate of the B movie was less direct. By 1973, the major studios were clearly catching on to the commercial potential of genres that had once been consigned to the bargain basement. Rosemary's Baby had shown that a well-packaged horror "special" could be a box-office hit, but it had little in common with the exploitation style. Warner Bros.' The Exorcist
The Exorcist (film)
The Exorcist is a 1973 American horror film directed by William Friedkin, adapted from the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty and based on the exorcism case of Robbie Mannheim, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her...
, directed by William Friedkin
William Friedkin
William Friedkin is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director...
, was a different story. It showed that a heavily promoted and distributed film in the genre could be an absolute blockbuster. And more: In William Paul's description, "it is the film that really established gross-out as a mode of expression for mainstream cinema.... [P]ast exploitation films managed to exploit their cruelties by virtue of their marginality. The Exorcist made cruelty respectable. By the end of the decade, the exploitation booking strategy of opening films simultaneously in hundreds to thousands of theaters became standard industry practice." It was the biggest movie of the year and by far the highest-earning horror movie yet made. On behalf of its genre, Universal
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
's American Graffiti
American Graffiti
American Graffiti is a 1973 coming of age film co-written/directed by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford...
did something similar. Released when writer-director George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
was twenty-nine years old, it is described by Paul as "essentially an American-International teenybopper pic with a lot more spit and polish"—a combination that made it the third biggest movie of 1973 and, likewise, by far the highest-earning teen-themed movie yet made. A-budgeted B-themed movies of even greater historical import would follow in their wake.
Sources
- Archer, Eugene (1960). "'House of Usher': Poe Story on Bill With 'Why Must I Die?'" New York Times, September 15 (available online).
- Biskind, Peter (1998). Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684809966
- Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray (1984). Hollywood Films of the Seventies. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0060911174
- Canby, Vincent (1969). "By Russ Meyer," New York Times, September 6 (available online).
- Cook, David A. (2000). Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press). ISBN 0520232658
- Corliss, Richard (1981). "This Is the Way the World Ends," Time, January 26 (available online).
- Corman, Roger, with Jim Jerome (1998). How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, new ed. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0306808749
- Di Franco, J. Philip, ed. (1979). The Movie World of Roger Corman. New York and London: Chelsea House. ISBN 0877540500
- Ebert, Roger (1974). "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," Chicago Sun-Times, January 1 (available online).
- Epstein, Edward Jay (2005). The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. New York: Random House. ISBN 1400063531
- Finler, Joel W. (2003). The Hollywood Story, 3d ed. London and New York: Wallflower. ISBN 1903364663
- Greenspun, Roger (1973). "Guercio's 'Electra Glide in Blue' Arrives: Director Makes Debut With a Mystery," New York Times, August 20 (available online).
- Grimes, William (2010). "Joseph Sarno, Sexploitation Film Director, Dies at 89," New York Times, May 2 (available online).
- Halperin, James L., ed. (2006). Heritage Signature Vintage Movie Poster Auction #636. Dallas: Heritage Capital. ISBN 1599670607
- Harper, Jim (2004). Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies. Manchester, UK: Headpress. ISBN 1900486393
- Hogan, David J. (1997). Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film. Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland. ISBN 0786404744
- Joiner, Whitney (2007). "Directors Who Go Together, Like Blood and Guts," New York Times, section 2 ("Arts & Leisure"), pp. 13, 22, January 28.
- Kael, Pauline (1976 [1973]). "Un-People," in Reeling. New York: Warner, pp. 263–279. ISBN 0446834203
- Kehr, Dave (2007). "New DVDs: The Mario Bava Collection, Volume 1," New York Times, April 10 (available online).
- McCarthy, Todd, and Charles Flynn, eds. (1975). Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System—An Anthology of Film History and Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton). ISBN 0525473785
- Osgerby, Bill (2003). "Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, "Otherness," and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie," Journal of Popular Film and Television (September 22) (available online).
- Paul, William (1994). Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231084641
- Puchalski, Steven (2002). Slimetime: A Guide to Sleazy, Mindless Movies, rev. ed. Manchester, UK: Headpress/Critical Vision. ISBN 1900486210
- Reid, John Howard (2005). Hollywood 'B' Movies: A Treasury of Spills, Chills & Thrills. Morrisville, N.C.: Lulu. ISBN 1411650654
- Rockoff, Adam (2002). Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986. Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland. ISBN 0786412275
- Reynaud, Bérénice (2006). "Wanda's Shattered Lives" (booklet accompanying Parlour Pictures DVD release of Wanda).
- Rubin, Martin (1999). Thrillers. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521581834
- Sapolsky, Barry S., and Fred Molitor (1996). "Content Trends in Contemporary Horror Films," in Horror Films: Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions, ed. James B. Weaver Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 33–48. ISBN 0805811745
- Schaefer, Eric (1999). "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 0822323745
- Schickel, Richard (1974). "The New B Movies," Time, April 1 (available online).
- Schickel, Richard (2005). Elia Kazan: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0060195797
- Taylor, Paul (1999). "The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover," in Time Out Film Guide, 8th ed., ed. John Pym. London et al.: Penguin, p. 835. ISBN 014028365X
- Van Peebles, Melvin (2003). "The Real Deal: What It
Was...Is! Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" (commentary accompanying Xenon Entertainment DVD release of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song). - Worland, Rick (2007). The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 1405139021
External links
- B-movie Italian-language Wikipedia entry covering the term's use in the Italian film industry
- "What Exactly Is a B-Movie?" essay by B-Movie Central's Duane L. Martin, focusing on 1960s and 1970s exploitation styles