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Here is an overview of a course I taught at a local college<\/p>\n
The Rise of The B Movie
\nFrom their beginnings to the present day, B movies have provided opportunities both for those coming up in the profession and others whose careers are waning. Celebrated filmmakers such
\nas Anthony Mann and Jonathan Demme learned their craft in B movies. B movies are where actors such as John Wayne and Jack Nicholson became established, and the Bs have also
\nprovided work for former A movie actors, such as Vincent Price and Karen Black. Some actors, such as B\u00e9la Lugosi and Pam Grier, worked in B movies for most of their careers.
\nIn the standard Golden Age model, the industry’s top product, its A films, premiered at a select number of first-run houses in major cities, virtually all of them owned by one of the “Big Five.”
\nDouble features were not the rule at these prestigious venues. <\/p>\n
Across North America, there were approximately 450 first-run houses; a 100-screen debut was a grand opening. As described by historian Edward Jay Epstein, “During these first runs,
\nfilms got their reviews, garnered publicity, and generated the word of mouth that served as the principal form of advertising.When it was off to the subsequent-run market where
\nthe double feature prevailed. At the larger local venues controlled by the majors, movies might turn over on a weekly basis. At the thousands of smaller,
\nindependent theaters, programs often changed two or three times a week. To meet the constant demand for new B product, the low end of Poverty Row turned out a stream of micro-budget
\nmovies rarely much more than sixty minutes long; these were known as “quickies” for their tight production schedules-as short as four days.
\nConsiderations beside cost made the line between A and B movies ambiguous. Films shot on Blevel budgets were occasionally marketed as A pictures or emerged as sleeper hits: One of
\n1943’s biggest films was Hitler’s Children, an RKO thriller made for a fraction over $200,000. It earned more than $3 million in rentals, industry language for a distributor’s share of gross box
\noffice receipts.Particularly in the realm of film noir, A pictures sometimes echoed visual styles generally associated with cheaper films. Programmers, with their flexible exhibition role, were
\nambiguous by definition, leading in certain cases to historical confusion. Ronald Reagan, frequently identified as a “B movie star,” in fact often had leading parts not only in programmers
\nbut also run-of-the-mill A movies that were Bs only in the sense of perceived quality. As late as 1948, the double feature remained a popular exhibition mode\u2014it was standard policy at 25
\npercent of theaters and used part-time at an additional 36 percent.The leading Poverty Row firms began to broaden their scope: In 1947, Monogram established a subsidiary, Allied Artists, to
\ndevelop and distribute relatively expensive films, mostly from independent producers. Around the same time, Republic launched a similar effort under the “Premiere” rubric.<\/p>\n
In 1947 as well, PRC was subsumed by Eagle-Lion, a British company seeking entry to the American market. Warners’ former Keeper of the Bs, Brian Foy, was installed as production chief.
\nRaw Deal, a 1948 film noir directed by Anthony Mann and shot by John Alton, was put out by Poverty Row’s Eagle-Lion firm. Such movies were routinely marketed as pure sensationalism, but
\nmany also possessed great visual beauty, “resplendent with velvety blacks, mists, netting, and other expressive accessories of poetic noir decor and lighting.”In the 1940s, RKO stood out
\namong the industry’s Big Five for its focus on B pictures. From a latter-day perspective, the most famous of the major studios’ Golden Age B units is Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO. Lewton
\nproduced such moody, mysterious films as Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Body Snatcher (1945), directed by Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, and others who
\nwould become renowned only later in their careers or entirely in retrospect. The movie now widely described as the first classic film noir\u2014Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a 64-minute B\u2014was
\nproduced at RKO, which would release many additional melodramatic thrillers in a similarly stylish vein. The other major studios also turned out a considerable number of movies now identified
\nas noir during the 1940s. Though many of the best-known film noirs were A-level productions, most 1940s pictures in the mode were either of the ambiguous programmer type or destined straight
\nfor the bottom of the bill. In the decades since, these cheap entertainments, generally dismissed at the time, have become some of the most treasured products of Hollywood’s Golden Age.<\/p>\n
In 1948, a Supreme Court ruling in a federal antitrust suit against the majors outlawed block booking and led to the Big Five divesting their theater chains. With audiences draining away to
\ntelevision and studios scaling back production schedules, the classic double feature vanished from many American theaters during the 1950s. The major studios promoted the benefits of
\nrecycling, offering former headlining movies as second features in the place of traditional B films.With television airing many classic Westerns as well as producing its own original Western
\nseries, the cinematic market for B oaters in particular was drying up. After barely inching forward in the 1930s, the average U.S. feature production cost had essentially doubled over the 1940s,
\nreaching $1 million by the turn of the decade\u2014a 93 percent rise after adjusting for inflation The postwar drive-in theater boom was vital to the expanding independent B movie industry. In
\nJanuary 1945, there were 96 drive-ins in the United States; a decade later, there were more than 3,700.Unpretentious pictures with simple, familiar plots and reliable shock effects were ideally
\nsuited for auto-based film viewing, with all its attendant distractions. The phenomenon of the drive-in movie became one of the defining symbols of American popular culture in the 1950s. At
\nthe same time, many local television stations began showing B genre films in late-night slots, popularizing the notion of the midnight movie.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, American-made genre films were joined by foreign movies acquired at low cost and, where necessary, dubbed for the U.S. market. In 1956, distributor Joseph E. Levine financed the
\nshooting of new footage with American actor Raymond Burr that was edited into the Japanese sci-fi horror film Godzilla. The British Hammer Film Productions made the successful The Curse
\nof Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), major influences on future horror film style. In 1959, Levine’s Embassy Pictures bought the worldwide rights to Hercules, a cheaply made Italian
\nmovie starring American-born bodybuilder Steve Reeves. On top of a $125,000 purchase price, Levine then spent $1.5 million on advertising and publicity, a virtually unprecedented amount.[58]
\nThe New York Times was nonplussed, noting that it would have drawn “little more than yawns in the film market…had it not been [launched] throughout the country with a deafening barrage of
\npublicity.”Levine counted on first-weekend box office for his profits, booking the film “into as many cinemas as he could for a week’s run, then withdrawing it before poor word-of-mouth withdrew it
\nfor him.” Hercules opened at a remarkable 600 theaters, and the strategy was a smashing success: the film earned $4.7 million in domestic rentals. Just as valuable to the bottom line, it
\nwas even more successful overseas.[Within a few decades, Hollywood would be dominated by both movies and an exploitation philosophy very like Levine’s. Despite all the transformations in the industry,
\nby 1961 the average production cost of an American feature film was still only $2 million\u2014after adjusting for inflation, less than 10 percent more than it had been in 1950.The traditional twin bill of
\nB film preceding and balancing a subsequent-run A film had largely disappeared from American theaters. The AIP-style dual genre package was the new model. In July 1960, the latest Joseph E. Levine sword-and-sandals import,
\nHercules Unchained, opened at neighborhood theaters in New York. A suspense film, Terror Is a Man, ran as a “co-feature” with a now familiar sort of exploitation gimmick: “The d\u00e9nouement
\nhelpfully includes a ‘warning bell’ so the sensitive can ‘close their eyes.'”That year, Roger Corman took AIP down a new road: “When they asked me to make two ten-day black-and-white horror
\nfilms to play as a double feature, I convinced them instead to finance one horror film in color.”House of Usher typifies the continuing ambiguities of B picture classification. It was clearly
\nan A film by the standards of both director and studio, with the longest shooting schedule and biggest budget Corman had ever enjoyed. But it is generally seen as a B movie: the schedule
\nwas still a mere fifteen days, the budget just $200,000 (one-tenth the industry average),and its 85-minute running time close to an old thumbnail definition of the B: “Any movie that runs less
\nthan 80 minutes.”<\/p>\n
One of the most influential films of the era, on Bs 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
\n1960. 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
\ndirector 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
\n(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
\ndevelopment of the slasher subgenre that would take off in the late 1970s. Blood Feast (1963), a movie about human dismemberment and culinary preparation made for approximately $24,000 by
\nexperienced nudie-maker Herschell Gordon Lewis, established a new, more immediately successful subgenre, the gore or splatter film. Lewis’s business partner David F. Friedman
\ndrummed up publicity by distributing vomit bags to theatergoers\u2014the sort of gimmick Castle had mastered\u2014and arranging for an injunction against the film in Sarasota, Florida\u2014the sort of
\nproblem exploitation films had long run up against, except Friedman had planned it.This new breed of gross-out movie typifies the emerging sense of “exploitation”\u2014the progressive adoption
\nof traditional exploitation and nudie elements into horror, into other classic B genres, and into the low-budget film industry as a whole. Imports of Hammer’s increasingly explicit horror movies and
\nItalian gialli, highly stylized films mixing sexploitation and ultraviolence, would fuel this trend. The Production Code was officially scrapped in 1968, to be replaced by the first version of the
\nmodern rating system. That year, two horror films came out that heralded directions American cinema would take in the next decade, with major consequences for the B movie. One was a
\nhigh-budget Paramount production, directed by the celebrated Roman Polanski. Produced by B horror veteran William Castle, Rosemary’s Baby “took the genre up-market for the first time since
\nthe 1930s.”It was a critical success and the year’s seventh-biggest hit. The other was George Romero’s now classic Night of the Living Dead, produced on weekends in and around Pittsburgh
\nfor $114,000. Building on the achievement of B genre predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its subtextual exploration of social and political issues, it doubled as a highly
\neffective thriller and an incisive allegory for both the Vietnam War and domestic racial conflicts. Its greatest influence, though, derived from its clever subversion of genre clich\u00e9s and the connection
\nmade between its exploitation-style imagery, low-cost, truly independent means of production, and high profitability.<\/p>\n
In May 1969, the most important of all exploitation movies premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
\nMuch of its significance owes to the fact that it was produced for a respectable, if still modest,
\nbudget and released by a major studio. The project was first taken by one of its cocreators, Peter
\nFonda, to American International. Fonda had become AIP’s top star in the Corman\u2013directed The
\nWild Angels (1966), a biker movie, and The Trip, as in LSD. The idea Fonda pitched would
\ncombine those two proven themes. AIP was intrigued but balked at giving his collaborator, Dennis
\nHopper, also a studio alumnus, free directorial rein. Eventually they arranged a financing and
\ndistribution deal with Columbia, as two more graduates of the Corman\/AIP exploitation mill joined
\nthe project: Jack Nicholson and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. The film (which incorporated
\nanother favorite exploitation theme, the redneck menace, as well as a fair amount of nudity) was
\nbrought in at a cost of $501,000. Easy Rider earned $19.1 million in rentals and became “the
\nseminal film that provided the bridge between all the repressed tendencies represented by
\nschlock\/kitsch\/hack since the dawn of Hollywood and the mainstream cinema of the seventies.”
\nIn the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of low-budget film companies emerged that
\ndrew from all the different lines of exploitation as well as the sci-fi and teen themes that had been
\na mainstay since the 1950s. Operations such as Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, Cannon
\nFilms, and New Line Cinema brought exploitation films to mainstream theaters around the
\ncountry. The major studios’ top product was continuing to inflate in running time\u2014in 1970, the ten
\nbiggest earners averaged 140.1 minutes The Bs were keeping pace: In 1955, Corman had a
\nproducorial hand in five movies averaging 74.8 minutes. He played a similar part in five films
\noriginally released in 1970, two for AIP and three for his own New World: the average length was
\n89.8 minutes.These films could turn a tidy profit. The first New World release, the biker movie
\nAngels Die Hard, cost $117,000 to produce and took in more than $2 million at the box office
\nThe biggest studio in the low-budget field remained a leader in exploitation’s growth. In 1973,
\nAmerican International gave a shot to young director Brian De Palma. Reviewing Sisters, Pauline
\nKael observed that its “limp technique doesn’t seem to matter to the people who want their
\ngratuitous gore…. [H]e can’t get two people talking in order to make a simple expository point
\nwithout its sounding like the drabbest Republic picture of 1938.” Many examples of the so-called
\nblaxploitation genre, featuring stereotype-filled stories revolving around drugs, violent crime, and
\nprostitution, were the product of AIP. One of blaxploitation’s biggest stars was Pam Grier, who
\nbegan her career with a bit part in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Several
\nNew World pictures followed, including The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972),
\nboth directed by Jack Hill. Hill also directed her best-known performances, in two AIP
\nblaxploitation films: Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Grier has the distinction of starring in
\nthe first widely distributed movie to climax with a castration scene.
\nBlaxploitation was the first exploitation genre in which the major studios were central. Indeed, the
\nUnited Artists release Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis, is seen as the
\nfirst significant film of the type. But the movie that truly ignited the blaxploitation phenomenon was
\ncompletely independent: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) is also perhaps the most
\noutrageous example of the form\u2014wildly experimental, borderline pornographic, and essentially a
\nmanifesto for a black American revolution. Melvin Van Peebles wrote, co-produced, directed,
\nstarred in, edited, and composed the music for the film, which was completed with a loan from Bill
\nCosby.[83] Its distributor was small Cinemation Industries, then best known for releasing dubbed
\nversions of the Italian Mondo Cane “shockumentaries” and the Swedish skin flick Fanny Hill, as
\nwell as for its one in-house production, The Man from O.R.G.Y. (1970). These sorts of films
\nplayed in the “grindhouses” of the day\u2014many of them not outright porno theaters, but rather
\nvenues for all manner of exploitation cinema. The days of six quickies for a nickel were gone, but
\na continuity of spirit was evident.
\nPiranha (1978), directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles for Corman’s New World
\nPictures, is a triple threat: an action-filled creature feature; a humorous parody of Jaws; and an
\nenvironmentalist cautionary tale.In 1970, a low-budget crime drama shot in 16 mm by first-time
\nAmerican director Barbara Loden won the international critics’ prize at the Venice Film Festival.
\nWanda is both a seminal event in the independent film movement and a classic B picture. The
\ncrime-based plot and often seedy settings would have suited a straightforward exploitation film or
\nan old-school B noir. The sub-$200,000 production, for which Loden spent six years raising
\nmoney, was praised by Vincent Canby for “the absolute accuracy of its effects, the decency of its
\npoint of view and…purity of technique.” Like Romero and Van Peebles, other filmmakers of the
\nera made pictures that combined the gut-level entertainment of exploitation with biting social
\ncommentary. The first three features directed by Larry Cohen, Bone (1972), Black Caesar (1973),
\nand Hell Up in Harlem (1973), were all nominally blaxploitation movies, but Cohen used them as
\nvehicles for a satirical examination of race relations and the wages of dog-eat-dog capitalism. The
\ngory horror film Deathdream (1974), directed by Bob Clark, is also an agonized protest of the war
\nin Vietnam. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg made serious-minded low-budget horror films
\nwhose implications are not so much ideological as psychological and existential: Shivers (1975),
\nRabid (1977), The Brood (1979). An Easy Rider with conceptual rigor, the movie that most clearly
\npresaged the way in which exploitation content and artistic treatment would be combined in
\nmodestly budgeted films of later years was United Artists’ biker-themed Electra Glide in Blue
\n(1973), directed by James William Guercio.The New York Times reviewer thought little of it:
\n“Under different intentions, it might have made a decent grade-C Roger Corman bike movie\u2014
\nthough Corman has generally used more interesting directors than Guercio.”
\nIn the early 1970s, the growing practice of screening nonmainstream motion pictures as late
\nshows, with the goal of building a cult film audience, brought the midnight movie concept home to
\nthe cinema, now in a countercultural setting\u2014something like a drive-in movie for the hip.One of
\nthe first films adopted by the new circuit in 1971 was the three-year-old Night of the Living Dead.
\nThe midnight movie success of low-budget pictures made entirely outside of the studio system,
\nlike John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), with its campy spin on exploitation, spurred the
\ndevelopment of the independent film movement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), an
\ninexpensive film from 20th Century-Fox that spoofed all manner of classic B picture clich\u00e9s,
\nbecame an unparalleled hit when it was relaunched as a late show feature the year after its initial,
\nunprofitable release. Even as Rocky Horror generated its own subcultural phenomenon, it
\ncontributed to the mainstreaming of the theatrical midnight movie.
\nAsian martial arts films began appearing as imports regularly during the 1970s. These “kung fu”
\nfilms as they were often called, whatever martial art they featured, were popularized in the United
\nStates by the Hong Kong\u2013produced movies of Bruce Lee and marketed to the same audience
\ntargeted by AIP and New World. Horror continued to attract young, independent American
\ndirectors. As Roger Ebert explained in one 1974 review, “Horror and exploitation films almost
\nalways turn a profit if they’re brought in at the right price. So they provide a good starting place for
\nambitious would-be filmmakers who can’t get more conventional projects off the ground.”[88] The
\nmovie under consideration was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Made by Tobe Hooper for no
\nmore than $250,000, it became one of the most influential horror films of the decade.[89] John
\nCarpenter’s Halloween (1978), produced on a $320,000 budget, grossed over $80 million
\nworldwide and effectively established the slasher flick as horror’s primary mode for the next
\ndecade. Just as Hooper had learned from Romero’s work, Halloween, in turn, largely followed the
\nmodel of Black Christmas, directed by Deathdream’s Bob Clark.[90]
\nOn television, the parallels between the weekly series that became the mainstay of prime-time
\nprogramming and the Hollywood series films of an earlier day had long been clear. In the 1970s,
\noriginal feature-length programming increasingly began to echo the B movie as well. As
\nproduction of TV movies expanded with the introduction of the ABC Movie of the Week in 1969,
\nsoon followed by the dedication of other network slots to original features, time and financial
\nfactors shifted the medium progressively into B picture territory. Television films inspired by
\nrecent scandals\u2014such as The Ordeal of Patty Hearst, which premiered a month after her release
\nfrom prison in 1979\u2014harkened all the way back to the 1920s and such movies as Human
\nWreckage and When Love Grows Cold, FBO pictures made swiftly in the wake of celebrity
\nmisfortunes. Many 1970s TV films\u2014such as The California Kid (1974), starring Martin Sheen\u2014
\nwere action-oriented genre pictures of a type familiar from contemporary cinematic B production.
\nNightmare in Badham County (1976), headed straight into the realm of road-tripping-girls-inredneck-
\nbondage exploitation.<\/p>\n