Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies (2001) - full transcript

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] Hollywood, California,

(group chattering)

a small theater company readies for the performance

of an ambitious new work based on a classic text.

Is it Shakespeare or Sophocles?

- [Man] Line backstage, please.

- [Narrator] None of the above.

- It's reefer madness!

Reefer madness!

- [Narrator] It's "Reefer Madness."



- No!

We're all gonna die.

(thunder rumbling)

- [Narrator] In it's original incarnation

as a theatrical film,

"Reefer Madness" was an early prototype

for a sensationalistic brand of filmmaking

that flourished in America for decades.

♪ Reefer madness

♪ Reefer madness

"Reefer Madness: The Musical"

was just one example of how the controversial

and misfit movies of yesterday

can become the mainstream entertainments of today.



♪ Till the devil

♪ Reefer madness

What follows is the story of that strange

alchemical process of a secret cinema

and the men and women who brought it to life.

(women screaming)

(audience applauding and cheering)

Question, what is an exploitation movie?

- There has never been a good answer

to what is an exploitation movie.

Some people would say it's something

that exploits the subject matter,

other people would say it's something

that exploits the audience.

I would say it's probably somewhere in between

or a combination of both.

(suspenseful music)

- Anything was permissible for an exploitation picture,

as long as it was in bad taste.

(woman laughing ominously)

- It was just unheard of.

Society was alarmed and delighted.

(suspenseful music)

- We did make them in six days.

I remember once, later on,

when we got seven or eight days to make a movie, we said,

"What are we gonna do with the extra time?"

(weapon whirring)

- The ideal world for a teenager is a parentless existence.

(motorcycle engines droning)

(dramatic music)

- Now that you bought me, what do you want me to do?

- 'Cause we were making money

while they were dropping dead at the box office.

- You say to me that I made exploitation films

and I say to you that every film is an exploitation film;

because as soon as you advertise something,

you're exploiting it.

Do you agree?

(suspenseful music)

(thunder rumbling)

- Gee whiz.

- [Narrator] The second world war was the great

and transforming event of 20th century American life.

(audience cheering and applauding)

Thanks to wartime mobilization,

the society a generation went overseas to defend

had vanished in its absence.

Returning GIs were ready to invent

a new world for themselves,

and they may even have believed

it would resemble the one that preceded it,

but it couldn't.

They had witnessed too much not to have been changed

by what they saw.

(sorrowful music)

(torpedo fires)

(bomb explodes)

The pent-up sexual energies

of four long bloody years of combat and separation

found immediate expression

in a post-war reproductive frenzy

that came to be called the Baby Boom.

- The period in the '50s and '60s

was a period of unparalleled abundance.

On the whole,

the generation that came back from World War II

came back to a fat country,

and the GI Bill and all these things

allowed a lot of people to become homeowners quick.

So you had this sense of

a kind of paradisiacal sense of entitlement.

- [Narrator] Beneath the general euphoria

of prosperity and plenty,

darker currents circulated as well.

(Maila screaming)

- That wasn't a good one. (laughs)

- [Man] It sounded pretty good to me.

- (laughing) That was the wrong one.

- [Narrator] In 1954,

Los Angeles audiences attuned to the strange new medium

of live television

discovered and even stranger entity

invading their living rooms.

The show was a local sensation,

and its hostess was a necrophiliac's delight

who went by the stage name Vampira.

From its opening shot,

"The Vampira Show" promised audiences

something different.

And Maila Nurmi, the girl behind the ghoul,

made sure it delivered.

- Well, initially the viewer sees a long corridor

with many candelabra and dry ice,

and far away a doorway which opens. (screams)

They can hear it where down at the end of the corridor.

And then far away they see this infanta silhouette

slowly approaching through the mist,

slowly approaching through the mist.

(animal howling)

And as it gets close enough,

the viewer sees that it's a creature

apparently in a trance drifting closer, closer,

closer to the camera.

And when she reaches, almost reaches the viewer,

she suddenly screams a blood-curdling scream, (screams)

and then says, "Screaming relaxes me so,"

as if she's having just had an orgasm.

I mean, that was my thought,

and that was what I was trying to imply

in a lady like manner. (laughs)

- [Narrator] Here, on this small local show

created to showcase bargain basement horror films

in a late night comedy format, sex and death,

two American obsessions often suppressed

from the wider culture of the day,

arrived in one outrageous and alluring package.

- According to a report not yet confirmed,

a beast of seemingly gigantic proportions

has been cited lurking in the hills due northeast of town.

- [Narrator] Television itself was one of several factors

terrorizing the Hollywood movie-making community

in the mid-1950s.

The majors put up a brave front at first,

but as millions of viewers began choosing Uncle Miltie

and "I Love Lucy" over a night at the movies,

a kind of controlled panic began to set in.

- indicating that the monster has some strange power

of rapid growth.

- [Narrator] Though available only locally,

"The Vampira Show" was written up in Newsweek,

pictorialized in Life Magazine,

spawned fan clubs all over the world.

Nurmi's act was imitated on stations

in every city in America.

- Every major city seemed to have one,

and they'd come on first and tell jokes about the movies

and then launch into the picture.

Maybe it was to make it a little more palatable

for those PTA groups and the people who said,

"No, we shouldn't have these kinds of things,

not even in the movies, let alone on television

in everybody's living rooms."

- I know with me, it was just...

I was rebelling.

Intense, it was a violent rebellion.

And I was not alone, obviously.

This whole thing was seething.

People wanted to be unloose,

they wanted some freedom,

freedom of expression, freedom of everything, you know?

Less hairspray. (laughs)

- [Narrator] The question was:

Freedom for whom?

And revolution against what?

(suspenseful music) (animal howling)

Television wasn't Hollywood's only headache by 1954.

Throughout the early '50s,

a late '40s court decision was in the process

of breaking up the studio system's virtual monopoly

on premium American theater space.

For the first time in modern screen history,

finding an audience for large scale,

independent film distribution became a viable possibility.

- There were all of these problems

in the motion picture world,

from the divorcement decrees and all these other things,

that were creating havoc.

And we knew that there was an opportunity.

- [Narrator] American International Pictures

was one of the first production outfits

to recognize the advantages of the situation.

Created as American Releasing in 1954

by a lawyer turned producer,

Samuel Z. Arkoff and his partner,

former exhibitor, Jim Nicholson,

AIP quickly realized that it's cheaply made movies

couldn't compete directly with A-list studio titles.

The answer was simple but transforming.

Service a skew of the market

that was uninterested in the serious minded,

adult themed star vehicles the studios specialized in

and address concerns and subject matters

no supposedly reputable producer would touch.

- We made "I Was a Teenage Werewolf,"

"I Was a Teenage Caveman,"

"I was a Teenage Frankenstein."

The word teenage, to the best of my knowledge,

had never appeared on any picture

throughout the world prior to that time,

because the teenagers had never been recognized

as other than a category of children.

- [Narrator] A key component of the AIP business strategy

was what used to be called ballyhoo.

In a radical departure from standard practice,

film titles and marketing campaigns

were usually devised before a script

or even a premise for a script existed,

often allowing AIP to turn a profit via pre-sales

before a foot of film was shot.

- We didn't have big stars.

We didn't have bestselling books.

We didn't have big plays.

So what did we have?

We had titles

and we had artwork,

and that's what we sold.

- Arkoff and Nicholson we're aided from the first

by a brilliant independent filmmaker named Roger Corman.

- He was, at the time, I thought, a great producer.

I think he went to Stanford and took a business course

and got his money's worth.

- [Narrator] After a brief and disappointing stint

as a script reader at Fox,

Corman set himself up as an independent producer.

That he had virtually no assets with which to make films

seemed to disturb him not at all.

- I rented the reception room of a producer

who didn't really have any money

and couldn't afford his rent.

I paid $25 a month for his reception room

with the understanding

that whenever he had an important meeting,

I would get out of the reception room

so it looked like he had the full office.

(suspenseful music)

(woman screaming)

- [Narrator] Remarkably, a pattern of speed and economy

that would endure for most of Corman's professional life

emerged from the start of his career.

- We did make them in six days.

I remember once, later on,

when we got seven or eight days to make a movie, we said,

"What are we gonna do with the extra time?"

(thunder cracking)

- [Man] From billions of light years away,

I approach your planets.

- [Narrator] The cheapness of '50s exploitation films

has become the stuff of legend,

and even accounts for much of their interest

to a latter day fan base that finds humor

in the occasionally amateurish performances,

the almost always ragged production values.

- Roger Corman contacted me, he said,

"I'm making a film called 'A beast With 1,000,000 Eyes,'

and I need the beast.

Is there anybody you could recommend to me?"

And I immediately thought of Ray Harryhausen,

the great animator, and he said,

"Oh my God, I couldn't afford him.

Why, he charges $10,000, a tentacle!"

(creature screaming)

(weapon whirring)

- [Narrator] But if short production schedules

and limited resources where liability in one sense,

they could also be an asset.

- Darryl Zanuck once said that the best way

to find ideas for movies was just read the front page

of your newspaper.

They would call these movies ripped from the pages

of the paper, ripped from today's headlines.

And that tradition had kind of died out

in the mainstream Hollywood,

but it was kept up by Corman

and other low budget filmmakers

who could respond very quickly.

- [Narrator] Corman second feature as a producer

brought him into contact with Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson,

in a teaming that would change the course

of all three men's lives.

- I did a road racing picture

called "The Fast and the Furious"

with John Ireland and Dorothy Malone.

Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff,

who were starting American Releasing at the time,

talked to me and asked if they could take the film

and I said, "Yes, if you can give me a three picture deal."

They agreed to that because they really had no company.

- [Narrator] By his third production,

Corman had taken the next logical step

by moving into direction,

it was a role he would take with increasing seriousness,

in which he would eventually become a recognized master

of the exploitation form.

- I started as a writer, then became a writer/producer,

then became a producer/director,

and then I really thought of myself as primarily a director

who also produced.

- I think Roger basically is a producer,

and the reason he became a director

is because he could never get a director

to bring a picture in as cheap as he could do it himself.

(bouncy music)

- [Narrator] The major exploiteers of the era

soon found themselves on the teenage side

of a widening cultural divide.

With the teens' eye view

came a kind of commercially mandated paranoia

about the adult generation,

a worldview where governments lie,

parents stifle and underestimate their children,

and where only the young see life for what it is.

(alien shrieking)

- The ideal world for a teenager is a parentless existence,

no parents to shouted at them,

no parents to lecture at them,

no adults to rule them,

to teach them,

to mock them, to jail them,

that was really what it was on about.

- Five, four, three, two, one,

fire!

(bomb explodes)

- [Narrator] At the same time,

the silver lining of post-war prosperity

came with its own dark technological cloud.

Though mainly an underground literary form before the 1950s,

science fiction seemed suddenly to make a lot more sense

as mass entertainment given the unprecedented predicament

the world had to live with after 1945,

the possibility of absolute annihilation.

- I was the resident crazy in high school.

Everybody ridiculed young Forree Ackerman

who thought men were going to the moon

and someday there will be atomic power and television.

And the world's eyes had to be opened

when the two atomic bombs fell,

one of the great predictions of science fiction.

- [Narrator] In a misguided effort at military preparedness,

a whole generation of American school children

was traumatized by such government propaganda efforts

as "Duck and Cover,"

which encouraged its young audience

to remain aware at all times

that their entire world might vanish

in a radioactive flash.

♪ He'd duck and cover

♪ Duck and cover

- [Narrator] That signal means

to stop whatever you are doing

and get to the nearest safe fast.

Always remember,

the flash of an atomic bomb can come at any time,

no matter where you may be.

Betty is asking her teacher,

"How can we tell when the atomic bomb may explode?"

and her teacher is explaining

that there are two kinds of attack,

with warning and without any warning.

If you were not ready and did not know what to do,

it could hurt you in different ways.

It could knock you down hard,

or throw you against a tree or a wall.

It is such a big explosion,

it can smash in buildings, and knock signboards over,

and break windows all over town.

(man screaming)

(music drowns out speaker)

- [Narrator] Is it any wonder

that when '50s exploiteers

projected that same young audiences dreams

back at it a few years later,

they often created nightmares.

- [Narrator] What happens to our world if massive,

monstrous man bests like this invade us?

- The low budget films tapped into the fears

of most of the population.

And we were very fearful at the time.

I remember in 1953,

I was watching Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin on TV

making jokes about atomic bombs,

and I was so terrified I ran upstairs

and pulled a blanket over my head.

- Get over here. It crept into the yard once.

- [Narrator] Clearly,

the exploitation film could hold a certain segment

of America's attention.

But given the constraints of time

and money exploiteers work with,

and the relative inexperience

of the average exploitation filmmaker,

the question can be fairly asked:

Was meaningful work of enduring quality possible

within the exploitation format?

- Meaningful is...

Well, that's deep, see?

You're looking for something that may not exist there.

- [Narrator] Then the answer depends on your point of view.

- What's locked behind that door?

- [Narrator] Case in point,

"The Brain That Wouldn't Die."

To a certain type of movie fan,

director Joseph Green's underfunded 1959 feature

is simply a sublime example

of the so-bad-it's-good aesthetic.

Undeniably amateurish in many respects,

the film is a shoe string rehashing

of the Frankenstein paradigm

in which a mad scientist wrecks a car, kills this fiance,

and then keeps her severed head alive

while he tries to find it a new body.

- Let me die.

Let me die.

- I've had success with transplants,

now I can do it for her.

- [Narrator] Yet in its own weird way,

"The Brain That Wouldn't Die" can be interpreted

as bizarre feminist allegory today.

As the evil and obsessed Herb Evers

cruises strip bars and beauty pageants

looking for the body he'd like to drug, murder,

and then spend the rest of his life with,

it is the objectification of women

which the film itself revels in

that also supplies its horror.

- She has the second nicest body I've ever seen.

- Second to you?

- No, another girl, a figure model.

You remember that one in school years ago?

- [Man] Figure model.

Poses for art classes.

The nicest body she's ever seen.

The nicest body.

- Bill,

you put something in my drink,

didn't you?

- Could "The Brain That Wouldn't Die's" makers

have meant for such abstract ideas

to be drawn from their work?

Almost surely not.

Does that negate the possibility

that they're present anyway?

Not necessarily.

- Here are these films that are being popped out

in three days, five days, six days,

ridiculous speeds when you think about it.

(thrilling music)

The furious energy of that, among other things,

forbids the maker to judge what he or she is making.

All you can do is let it straight up from your unconscious.

(thrilling music)

- I told you to let me die.

- Don't you want to join in the things that other people do?

- I don't seem capable of being very close to people.

(organ music)

- [Narrator] More self-consciously artful films

were also possible in the exploitation format.

In 1962, industrial filmmaker named Herk Harvey

made his first and only feature,

an allegorical ghost story

about a disaffected church organist

who mysteriously survives an auto accident.

In Harvey's hands,

"Carnival of Souls" became an eerily beautiful

and sustained metaphor for solitude and loneliness;

as caught in some uncertain borderland

between life and death,

it's alienated protagonist reaches out

too late for human contact.

- Why can't anybody hear me?

- [Narrator] If a European director like Alain Resnais

had made "Carnival of Souls,"

it might've been praised for its eerie existential imagery,

lauded for its literate screenplay,

perhaps received multiple awards.

Because the film was nominally an exploitation title,

it instead played out of the way drive-ins,

barely returning on Harvey's investment.

(ominous music)

(wind whooshing)

(water splashes)

"Carnival of Souls" languished for over two decades

as a neglected and forgotten work

before a revival of interest in the late 1980s

crowned it an unsung masterpiece.

- I, I got a new one.

- Crazy. What is it called?

- Um, "Murdered Man."

- [Narrator] One of the most interesting Corman titles

of the period can also hold up under serious analysis.

(dramatic music)

A black comedy scripted by frequent Corman collaborator,

Charles B. Griffith,

1959's "A Bucket of Blood,"

concerns the misadventures of Walter Paisley,

a nebbishy waiter with no creative ability,

who yearns for acceptance from the in-crowd

at the beatnik coffee house where he works.

- (laughs) Nobody asked for your opinion, Walter.

You're just a simple little farm boy

and the rest of us are all sophisticated dignits.

- Walter has a clear mind.

One day something will enter it, feel lonely,

and leave again.

- [Narrator] An accidental murderer,

Paisley literally covers up his crimes

by encasing them in clay,

and finds the disturbing sculptures that result

praised by the same artistic snobs

who formerly rejected him.

- And I think "Bucket of Blood" is, in coded form,

Roger's spiritual autobiography.

Here you have a fellow who the whole world thinks is a geek,

he has a passion to create that will not be stopped,

and it consumes a lot of the snobs

that would otherwise dismiss him,

and at the same time it's received

as very powerful art,

and he lives in fear of being unmasked

as a fraud throughout.

(dramatic music)

- Where are you going, Carla?

What's the matter?

- Walter, there's a body inside that statue.

- Oh, well, that's Alice.

- [F. X.] These are, I think,

primal fears that any director could relate to.

- Let them become clay in his hands that he might mold them.

- I had heard this before that there had been a review

of a rerelease of "Bucket of Blood" up in San Francisco,

and they try to compare the character, my character,

and Roger's career.

- When did you do this, Walter?

- Last night. It doesn't take me very long.

- I don't think that's what it was though.

I don't think it was that at all.

- It's very possible that "Bucket of Blood,"

on an unconscious level,

is somewhat autobiographical.

The young artist who exploits violence

and then becomes fearful

that he's being recognized for the exploitation

rather than for his own true artistic ability.

- I'll hide where they'll never find me.

- I do think that anybody who's working

in a creative medium

is working partially out of their conscious mind

and partially out of their unconscious mind.

- [Narrator] By the end of the 1950s,

the teenage exploitation film

had unquestionably come of age.

It had also become an intensely competitive field

to work in,

a fact both Corman and AIP took note of.

(sorrowful music)

- [Man] I suppose he would have called it "Hanging Man,"

his greatest work.

- Well, we began to get a lot of competition

in those cheap black and white pictures.

So we finally said,

"Look, let's make one picture

for the money we were otherwise spending for two pictures.

So let's take the 200 to $300,000

and let's make a picture that will play top of the bill;

and then we'll sell, again, for a flat price,

one of our pictures that had already played off."

- So I said,

"Why don't you let me have 15 days.

I'll shoot in color.

And I'll do one film,

and it will stand on its own."

And they asked me what I wanted to do,

and I said "The fall of the House of Usher."

And after a little bit of discussion,

I think they were ready to gamble

on a slightly bigger picture, too.

- [Narrator] The first in a series of popular films

based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

1960's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

marked a turning point for both AIP and Corman,

a lush period film shot in color.

And with a name actor in Vincent Price,

it was also arguably a move

beyond the strict exploitation formula

AIP helped pioneer,

the proof that Arkoff, Nicholson,

and Corman had mastered their craft and their business

and were now capable of creating works

that could compete directly in the mainstream.

(dramatic music)

(woman screaming)

The victory was an earned one;

and the away from more topical subjects, temporary.

But elsewhere on the exploitation scene,

the same combustible elements of ambition and opportunism

that defined exploitation's teenage era

were poised to shake things up all over again.

(ominous music)

(thunder cracking)

- I have some pictures here

that were made just for folks like you.

You're going to sit quietly and look at them,

and never again will you ever think of sex

as anything but something wonderful, miraculous,

almost divine.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] By 1960,

American International Pictures

loomed over the world of exploitation

like an indie Colossus.

But for all the social fireworks

their movies occasionally ignited,

there were certain areas of content

which AIP and its competitors simply could not address,

chief among these were nudity and sex.

As always, exploitation abhorred a commercial vacuum.

For a new breed of exploiteer

whose roots stretched all the way back

to the erotic peep shows of the silent era,

the fact that there was a topic of great public fascination

no one else was dealing with

made for an irresistible opportunity.

- The sex would be the one thing

that wasn't being exploited quite so heavily

by the main Hollywood studios,

and so that was the one thing they had to sell.

- [Narrator] And in guessing that the frank treatment of sex

held enormous profit potential,

the next wave of exploitation filmmakers

wasn't exactly shooting in the dark.

(film roll rattling)

By the late 1950s,

cinematic sex had been officially marginalized

for close to three decades.

In 1921,

the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America

was formed by the major Hollywood studios

to avoid outside censorship.

In 1930,

the MPPDA's production code

began barring mainstream Hollywood

from dealing with topics including venereal disease,

prostitution, sexual perversion,

adultery, nudity, drug trafficking,

profanity, suggestive dancing,

and the ridiculing of religion.

Since only major studios were constrained

by the code's restrictions,

the reaction from the independence was instantaneous.

Cheap, sensationalistic movies began circulating

from town to town, territory to territory,

offering audiences titillating subject matters

the studios had grown too timid to show.

- Subjects such as, oh, a birth of a baby,

venereal disease, miscegenation,

dope, alcoholism,

all of the no-no subjects,

anything was permissible for an exploitation picture

as long as it was in bad taste.

- [Narrator] Distributors of such product

were necessarily gypsies,

ready to skip town at the flash of a sheriff's badge.

A term was coined to describe their vagabond lifestyle,

the road showman had been.

- Road showing was the supreme example of exploitation.

You came into town like a carnival,

you stayed a couple of days and you got out of town,

just like a traveling carnival.

- [Man] Smoke, Mary.

- [Mary] Thanks. (laughs)

- [Narrator] The explosion of American drug use in the 1960s

made cult classics out of cautionary tales

of narcotic excess like Dwayne Espers "Reefer Madness,"

originally produced as a church sponsored anti-drug film

entitled "Tell Your Children."

Audiences far more informed than the film's makers

about the effects of marijuana

laugh at "Reefer Madness" today.

- Naturally they're laughing at them today

because they're so corny,

but they weren't laughing at them back in the '30s.

A lot of people of my generation never tried marijuana

because we had seen these pictures.

- [Narrator] This is the wonder story of life.

- [Narrator] A less well remembered roadshow genre

kept sex before the public through the '30s and '40.

Sex hygiene pictures, also called clap operas,

were a bizarre hybrid of fiscal opportunism

and genuine reformers concerns over social ills

like unwed motherhood and venereal disease.

In the guise of sex education,

audiences might see anything from partial

and/or full frontal nudity

to closeups of syphilitic sex organs,

with natural and surgically induced childbirth

often supplied as a chaser.

- The birth of a baby film was perfect road showing.

It wasn't just a matter of showing them a picture.

We'd have nurses in uniforms.

We'd have an ambulance out front.

We didn't just give them a picture,

we gave them a show.

At a certain point,

we show them the birth of a baby,

both a normal birth and then a ceasarean section.

And guys passed out like flies

watching the ceasarean section.

And then we showed them something,

we showed them a VD reel,

and that, that got to all of them.

- [Narrator] To confuse local censors,

the tone was both high moral and relentlessly clinical,

which makes the erotic appeal of such films

difficult to determine today.

- Are we healthy enough to get married.

- You're both as solid as a new dollar.

Sally, that first baby didn't hurt you a bit,

you can have a dozen more if you want to.

And, Bob, you'll be pleased to know

that there's no trace of your old VD,

100% cured.

What did you say about a first baby?

- David F. Friedman had a hand in distributing

several of the most well-known sex hygiene titles

in the 1950s.

He describes the sex hygiene genre

as something of a bait and switch.

- They all thought they were gonna come in

and see beautiful nude people,

but they saw the results of sex,

and they came out a little shaken up,

but nobody ever asked for their money back.

How do you sell sex anyway?

I don't care what you...

It's the curiosity factor.

No one has ever had their curiosity totally satisfied

when it comes to sex.

- [Narrator] By the 1950s,

America's curiosity about sex was at an all time high.

The advent of the inexpensive paperback book

meant that furtively distributed adults only novels

were beginning to circulate,

serving a function not unlike pornographic videos today

by bringing sex-based storylines

into a certain kind of American home.

- The whole notion of a sexual revolution,

this isn't something it started with the Summer of Love,

and peace and love, and hippies, and that sort of notion;

in fact, that's sort of the terminal point.

That's when people's kids found out

about the sexual revolution.

I sometimes call it a bachelors' revolution

or a swingers' revolution that was happening

in the early to mid '50s, really.

It's that Second World War generation,

particularly men of very homosocial sensibility

that started this revolution.

And things like Playboy Magazine, for instance,

which are a phenomenon of the '50s,

this is the beginning.

- [Narrator] There were other raw forms of sexual content

available to magazine readers of the era as well.

Some, like the fetish minded Bizarre,

or the erotic literary review "American Aphrodite,"

even attempted to pass themselves off

as journals of ideas,

albeit within a narrow range.

(dramatic music)

By contrast, movies were lagging way behind.

Europe came to the rescue in the form of Brigitte Bardot.

Building on a string of U.S. court decisions

permitting the exhibition of such high-minded

but centrally charged European product as "Bitter Rice"

and Roberto Rossellini's "The Miracle,"

Bardot arrived as the young,

briefly unclad star

of Frenchmen Roger Vadim's

"And God Created Woman."

In the art house cinemas, all hell broke loose.

- This was the picture

that changed all of those so-called art theaters

into adult theaters.

You remember we had an art theater,

it was those theaters where all the intellectuals

and the pseudo-intellectuals went in

and they drank lousy instant coffee in the lobby,

and they talked about all these esoteric things.

And then suddenly in comes this picture

with this little French cupcake

with this beautiful bear derriere;

and suddenly, all day long,

guys are drifting into the theater, the raincoat crowd,

they cloak and suit crow, the briefcase...

And the exhibitors saying,

"My God, how long has this been going on?"

- [Narrator] With the exploiteers' penchant for extremes,

the groundwork for a far more excessive

and uniquely American use of nudity was already being laid,

courtesy of Walter Bibo,

a New York based producer of burlesque short subjects.

In 1954,

Bibo shot a film called "Garden of Eden"

set in a Florida nudist camp.

When the film was banned in New York,

he won a 1957 court battle based on a narrow ruling

that boiled down to the fact

that since nudist camps existed,

simply depicting them could not be construed as obscene.

(dramatic music)

New York, the most significant movie market in America

was suddenly awash in cinematic tributes

to the wholesome,

recreational joys of the nudist way of life.

The sexploitation film had arrived.

(jazzy music)

We pause here upon the first incline

of what some still view as a slippery slope.

Decades after their demise,

sexploitation films remain a subject of controversy.

(jazzy music)

To the makers of this documentary,

criticizing sexploitation for featuring nudity

is akin to criticizing a musical for bursting into song.

Nudity was the sexploitation film's commercial reason

for being,

the saleable commodity

that enabled latter day adults only pictures

to draw a mostly male,

mostly middle-aged audience to cheap,

quickly made productions,

and thereby to return a predictable profit.

(jazzy music)

While sex was therefore

undeniably the sexploitation films' great theme,

what sexploitation had to say on the subject

was as varied as the companies

producing the films themselves

and the personalities making them.

(jazzy music)

If the attitudes the films reflect

may in some cases no longer be fashionable,

it could be argued this makes them all the more valuable

as cultural artifacts.

(jazzy music)

So shudder if you will, turn away if you must,

but keep in mind as you do so

that the films we now turn to

were made and seen by the hundreds, week by week,

month by month,

for 15 of the most tumultuous years

in American movie history.

They need no more strident defense

than to say that they exist,

and to move on from there.

(jazzy music)

That the truth of the matter is more complex

than meets the eye,

is demonstrated by the fact that one of the earliest

and most dedicated followers of Bibo's lead

was a New York based filmmaker named Doris Wishman.

- And I was a frustrated actress, which is...

I suppose I still am, you know,

it never really leaves you.

I went to drama school with Shelley Winters,

and I was far better than she, I really was;

however, she pursued her career and I didn't,

and that's the difference, so here I am.

- [Narrator] Prior to turning to filmmaking,

Wishman had worked on the distribution

of Bibo's "Garden of Eden"

and seen it firsthand how profitable the movie had been.

But it wasn't a chance for a quick buck

that was her primary motivation for moving into filmmaking,

it was the aftermath of personal tragedy.

- My first film was "Hideout in the Sun,"

and that was produced almost 40 years ago.

I didn't really know what I was doing,

and that's the truth.

I guess I still don't;

but, in any event, I didn't then.

It was after my husband died

that I decided to make a film

'cause I felt that it would keep me so busy

'cause I would go to bed at night

and pretend I had a date with...

You know, sick thinking!

I had a guilt complex, you know, the usual.

And so my sister gave me the $10,000, and I shot,

and it was bad.

But when I went to bed at night,

instead of thinking that I had a date with my husband,

I would think,

"Well, if I pay Pearl back $10 a week

for the rest of my life,

I'll return the money."

- According to Wishman biographer, Michael Bowen,

the therapeutic impulse behind Whitman's nudist camp films

makes them thematically unique.

- Doris's a husband, as I understand,

had passed away in 1959.

And she made nudist camp films, of course,

for the first five years,

six years after he had passed away.

These films express a very different desire;

a desire, I would say, for the return of that husband,

'cause all these films were love stories

about people meeting their love partner.

- Nudist films have no sex in them,

at least they shouldn't, and they're not supposed to,

and they didn't, none that I saw.

Do you have to show sex to be in love?

I mean, somebody gives you a flower because he loves you,

that's just much more exciting than sex.

I'm giving everybody the wrong impression.

I'm normal.

I've had my quota, let's put it that way.

Hey, that's a good title, Michael.

"I've Had My Quota," isn't it?

- She wanted to make these love stories,

but she needed to in a way that was commercial.

So what she did is she figured,

"Well, the gimmick will be

that it will all be happening in the nude."

But it really didn't have to happen in the nude,

it could have happened anywhere.

Now, I think that's very different from what motivated

most of the other people who made these films;

as far as I know, they were all men by and large.

And so I think that's very significant.

- "Hideout in the Sun" proved profitable enough

to encourage Wishman in what even she acknowledges

were fledgling efforts,

and she quickly moved forward with a second film.

Science fiction was still a mainstream exploitation staple,

and topical curiosity

about the brand new American space program

had raised interest in space exploration

to an all time high.

- We choose to go to the moon in this decade

and do the other this-

- [Narrator] John F. Kennedy

would momentarily make it a matter

of official national policy

that America would be the first country

to put a man on the moon;

but nobody had gone there yet,

which meant the possibilities were endless.

(suspenseful music)

For all anyone knew,

the moon's surface might look like just about anything,

including Sunny Palms,

a sun dappled nudist camp located near Miami, Florida.

- [Woman] I have someone do all ear

for a most important matter.

♪ I'm mooning over you

♪ My little moon doll

- [Narrator] Erotic space fantasies were nothing new.

Straight exploitation had already given the world

"Queen of Outer space," "Cat-women of the Moon,"

and countless variations on the theme back in the 1950s.

But by blending interstellar sirens

with a nudist camp plot line;

Wishman, perhaps inadvertently,

took a science fiction motif

that dated all the way back to the earliest pulp magazines

and exploded its sexual subtext for all the world to see.

As with many exploitation films,

"Nude on the Moon's" following

breaks down into those who choose to laugh

at the filmmaker's perceived ineptitude

and those who find a kind of cock-eyed primal poetry

in an unschooled,

but heartfelt approach to a medium

that often seems to be suffocating

under the weight of faceless craftsmanship.

As with most of her features,

Wishman produced, wrote, directed,

and designed the promotion for "Nude on the Moon,"

it was her film all the way.

And its central preoccupation,

as in all nudist camp features,

was nudity as a metaphor for true love.

♪ A nymph in the pale moonlight ♪

♪ I pine for you, my little moon doll ♪

So who's to say that, on its own terms,

what she gave us wasn't beautiful?

- I can't believe it.

You are here on earth.

I didn't lose you after all.

♪ For it's you who makes the moon so bright ♪

- [Narrator] Wishman stuck with nudist camp pictures

for eight films before trying her hand at other things.

Other sexploiteers were a lot less devoted to the form.

- The so-called nudist colony films

were not really entertainment, per se,

they were just nudity for the sake of nudity.

It was just a lot of people running around naked,

so I never considered them to be competitive

to our products.

- Going through a nudist colony

is about as erotic as walking through the cold storage room

of Swift and Company in the Chicago stockyards.

Anytime you were making a nudist camp picture,

you had better bring your own nudists. (laughs)

- [Narrator] Dave Friedman, like Wishman,

was in the process of coming into his own.

A product of the Hollywood studio system,

Friedman had turned his back on a major promotion

in the Exploitation Division at paramount pictures

to throw in his lot with a road showman

named Kroger Babb,

whose "Mom and Dad"

was one of the most successful exploitation movies

ever made.

- Kroger Babb as one of those few geniuses

that knew how to get to Mr. and Mrs. Average-American.

He could write copy...

Yeah, I know today all of the ad agencies say,

"Oh, what cornball stuff this is."

But people read that copy

and they went out to see what Krog had to offer.

- [Narrator] Accounts vary,

but it's estimated by some that the combined grosses

for film admissions and a sexually explicit medical pamphlet

hawked by bogus physicians at "Mom and Dad's" screenings

exceeded $100 million during the 25 year life of the film.

- And the other thing he did, more so than anything else,

that picture was a prime target of the Legion of Decency,

which was an agency of the Catholic Church.

Mr. Babb fought them tooth and nail

440 some odd times in court,

and in that way was one of the very early leaders

in making motion pictures have the same freedom of the press

as the printed word.

He was in pioneer in first amendment rights for film.

That's why you should care about Kroger Babb.

- [Narrator] Friedman,

who had relocated to Chicago from Los Angeles,

outlasted his mentors prime,

and had into independent production by the early 1960s

in partnership with a novice filmmaker

named Herschell Gordon Lewis.

It was a teaming which,

for impact and influence in the exploitation field,

can withstand a certain kind of comparison

to AIP's Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson.

- Herschell and I were...

If we weren't the Barnum and Bailey of film,

we were the Hagenbeck and Wallace,

or the Sells and Floto,

those were smaller circuses

that existed in the time of Barnum and Bailey.

We were a team, we did everything together.

- [Narrator] After two marginally profitable collaborations

called the "Prime Time" and "Leaving Venus,"

Friedman and Lewis came into their own

with a movie and a new sexploitation genre

called the nudie-cutie,

its title was "The Adventures of Lucky Pierre."

- And for $7,500,

we made "The Adventures of Lucky Pierre,"

35 millimeter color.

And Herschell was the director and the camera man,

I was the producer and the sound man,

and we parlayed that 7,500 plus another 20,000 for prints

and advertising into about $250,000,

and we were in business.

- [Narrator] The nudie-cutie had been pioneered

by a maverick Playboy photographer

and sometime industrial filmmaker named Russ Meyer,

whose first feature, "The Immoral Mr Teas,"

had grossed an amazing $3.5 million

off a budget of 24,000 beginning in 1959.

- Russ Meyer's movies are Molotov cocktails

in the sexual revolution,

they detonated the barriers

of what movies could show sexually.

- [Narrator] And like the sex hygiene films before them,

nudie-cuties were even capable

of performing a certain educational function.

- And Meyer brought the whole nudie-cutie genre into being

with "The Immoral Mr. Teas,"

which I think I snuck into when I was about 14.

And when you were going through puberty,

this was really interesting

to see little flashes of nudity here and there.

It was very mild,

and people today would think it was not much;

but back then,

it was very hard for kids to get any sense

of what the human body was like.

- [Announcer] See "The Wonderful World of Girls."

- [Narrator] The first nudie-cuties had roots

in a number of pop culture artifacts,

including Mack Sennett's silent bathing beauty comedies,

and that salacious form of live American theater

called burlesque.

(playful jazz music)

The cheesecake men's magazines of the '40s,

though devoid of nudity,

had showcased young women

in a variety of comedic photo narratives

after the style of European fumetti.

The nudie-cutie formula reflected the same priorities,

concerned mainly with maneuvering female flesh

into the most pleasing arrangements

their makers could devise.

- Even Francis Ford Coppola,

while he was still in school at UCLA,

made one call "Tonight for Sure."

Now, that was actually his first movie.

- [Narrator] On the West Coast,

the commercial impact of Meyer

and his rapidly expanding host of imitators

was drawing others into the fold,

among them was one Harry H. Novak who, like Friedman,

was a product of the studio system.

Novak had worked for RKO under Howard Hughes,

whose distinguishing characteristics as a mogul

had been as censorship battles

over Jane Russell's cleavage

and the casting in legitimate roles of a famous stripper

named Lili St. Cyr.

When RKO crumbled into dust in the mid 1950s,

Novak was temporarily given the custodianship

of the studio's franchise on Walt Disney product.

He used his sizeable sales commissions

for a purpose Hughes would have loved,

but which Disney must've frowned upon.

- [Harry] I made a lot of money doing that,

and that helped me so that I was able to have money

to make my first picture.

- [Narrator] Novak's first release

was "Girls Without Rooms,"

a revamped Swedish prostitution expose

originally entitled "The Flame."

- Kiss me quick.

- [Narrator] In partnership with a brilliant sexploiteer

named Pete Perry,

Novak knocked one into the nudie-cutie bleachers

with one of his earliest attempts at production,

a campy pastiche of horror, science fiction,

and toplessness entitled "Kiss Me Quick,"

made in 1965.

- "Kiss Me Quick" is a comedy.

It had all the basic elements.

It had Frankenstein, it had spacemen,

and it had the TNA in it;

put it all together,

and you have a big picture all rolled up into one.

- [Narrator] Like "Nude on the Moon,

"Kiss Me Quick" stood out from other sexploitation titles

of its era by echoing aspects

of mainstream exploitation filmmaking,

only this time with tongue

firmly and intentionally planted in cheek.

At moments,

it's possible to imagine the makers

of the durable "Rocky Horror Picture Show"

using "Kiss Me Quick" as a primary point of reference.

- To study them.

- Study them?

Do you mean to tell them you have no women

on the planet Butlers.

- No.

- And we got to try to beat the Russians to outer space.

- It did exceptionally very big for me in the marketplace.

It was my first major production,

and it bought me everything I have today.

So it was my lucky piece.

It's still earning to this day, very well.

- [Narrator] "Kiss Me Quick's" returns

launched Novak into one of the most sustained careers

in independent film distribution of any sexploiteer.

By the 1970s,

Novak would release over 200 mostly adults only titles

into the marketplace.

- Every film I put my hands on,

I exploited it to the best of my ability,

and I gave it a lot of ballyhoo and cornball,

and it worked.

- [Narrator] Ironically,

one of the first casualties of the nudist camp

and nudie-cutie revolution was the burlesque circuit

the films drew on for inspiration.

- They'd order for burlesque houses.

You sent him a can of film.

He'd put it on a screen 40 foot wide, 20 feet high.

It didn't ask for any overtime

if he ran it 13 times or 20 times that week.

It was always on time.

It did everything he told it to do,

and no backtalk.

So he said, "Who needs burlesque?

Just send us film."

- The burlesque houses started to go out

and "The Wonderful World of Girls" started to come in.

- [Narrator] Back in Chicago,

Friedman and Lewis were in the process

of immortalizing a historical moment

with the first of what for Friedman

would become a string of movies

reflecting his love of the exploitation game itself.

In self satirizing "Boin-n-g,"

two nebbishy amateurs decide to break

into the nudie business.

- [Both] You're hired!

- [Narrator] Their inspiration,

the mediocrity of every single sexploitation film

Lewis and Friedman collaborated on up to that time.

- A great picture!

One of the worst I've ever seen!

- Yeah, sensational.

I don't know when I've seen such lousy acting

or more phony scenery.

- [Narrator] "Boin-n-g's" behind the scene sequences

were straight keystone comedy,

seasoned liberally with the requisite pauses

for lingering closeups of naked flesh,

and presented with a satiric emphasis

on our hapless heroes' inability to do anything

involved with movie-making correctly.

(platform crashes)

As filmmakers who had learned by doing,

Lewis and Friedman were celebrating their own apprenticeship

and that of every single novice writer, director,

or producer who'd joined them

in this new frontier of independent endeavor.

- All right, buster. Cut!

- [Narrator] The kicker was a send-up

of the entire nudie genre

in the person of a cartoon sexploitation mogul

reacting to a private screening of the film within the film.

- You couldn't stand it, huh?

Well, it was just bad enough, boys!

I'll take it.

- You'll what?

- I'll take it.

It was the worst picture I ever seen.

It'll be a smash at the box office.

- [Narrator] It's been said that self satire

is the first sign of the end of the genre.

After "Boin-n-g" and two last nudist camp efforts,

the restless team of Friedman and Lewis

were ready to move on to other things.

- We had been making nudist camp pictures and nudie-cuties,

and it was boring.

(playful music)

And Herschell said one day,

"What can we do that nobody else has done,

and that we don't have to have them

taking off all their clothes

and running around playing volleyball

or thinking of gags?"

So we started putting down a list of things.

Finally, Herschell said,

"Could you think of one idea where torture

could become a legitimate subject?"

and I said, "Yeah. Nazi death camp,"

he said, "Okay."

From that, suddenly, one word hit us, gore.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] As it turned out,

the Hagenbeck and Wallace of movie-making

were about to take both the straight exploitation genre

and the sexploitation film on a very wild ride.

(group screaming)

- Well, you listen, and you listen well!

You're damaged merchandise and this is a fire sale.

And you walk out of here

and your reputation won't be worth 15 cents.

You do as I tell you!

Do you hear?

You do as I tell you!

- [Narrator] As the mid 1960s approached,

strange days came to America.

(siren wailing)

(dogs barking)

- [Announcer] It appears as though something has happened

in the motorcade group.

- Jack Kennedy, the decade's symbol of youthful optimism,

was assassinated before hundreds of witnesses

in Dealey Plaza.

Less than 48 hours later,

his presumed killer was gunned down on live TV.

- I have not been charged with that.

In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.

The first thing I heard about it

was when the newspaper reporters in the hall

asked me that question.

- [Narrator] A world away in Vietnam,

an undeclared war was in the early stages

of claiming over 50,000 American

and upwards of 1 million Vietnamese lives.

(gun fires)

(siren wailing)

Increasingly, American streets rang with protest

and ran was American blood.

- [Woman] Is there a doctor in the house?

I wanna see him right here.

- [Man] Everybody else, please stay back!

Please stay back!

Everybody else, just please stay back!

(sorrowful music)

- Now, oh, Ishtar,

the feast has begun.

(dramatic music)

- Tony!

- [Narrator] As times changed,

the opportunists of exploitation changed along with them.

- Nobody had ever made a picture that showed blood.

Nobody had ever died with their eyes open.

- [Narrator] In the most notorious

Lewis and Friedman collaboration,

there was no nakedness and no sex;

in their place,

1963's "Blood Feast" substituted graphic violence so extreme

that a lab technician is said to him vomited

while processing the dailies.

The storyline was ludicrous, penny dreadful stuff.

A crazed Egyptian caterer murderously assembles the menu

for a cannibalistic dinner party.

Reviewers were outraged as were some exhibitors.

Friedman's sometime competitor,

Harry Novak was moonlighting for a company

that handled "Blood Feast" in 1964.

- The civic drive-ins did not want to release the picture

in its original form.

The picture had to be cut, cut, and more cuts.

And it was all cut up, mumble jumble.

Right up to hours before playtime,

that picture had to be cut.

- [Narrator] For Friedman and Lewis,

extreme violence was just another area

of audience fascination the studios were afraid to explore.

"Blood Feast" wasn't to be taken seriously,

it was all in good fun.

- The biggest thing was,

was to keep these crazy girls from laughing.

While we've got them pinned up

and we're peeling the skin off of them,

or cutting their hearts out, they're giggling.

(woman screams)

- [Narrator] But "Blood Feast"

and the two Lewis and Friedman gore films that followed it

opened up a Pandora's box

by becoming among the most influential exploitation films

ever made.

By decade's end,

next generation directors like George Romero

were creating graphic depictions of murder and cannibalism,

and midnight favorites like "Night of the Living Dead."

Meanwhile, beginning in 1967,

mainstream fair,

like "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Wild Bunch,"

brought realistic carnage onto the studio backlots.

- The same people that went to see "Blood Feast"

went to see "Bonnie and Clyde"

and went to see "The Wild Bunch."

Again, is it art imitating life or life imitating art?

Most of the innovations when it came to changes,

particularly when it came, for better or for worse,

in so far as frankness and some form of sex and/or violence,

started with the independents,

and the majors jumped in on the bandwagon afterwards.

(bird squawking)

- [Narrator] Like a vampire in an AIP horror movie,

once a certain segment of the audience

got the taste of blood in its mouth,

it became insatiable.

(dramatic music)

Some observers have been shaking their heads ever since.

I wonder if you can tell me anything

about your opinion of the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

- I'd really rather not. (laughs)

I don't care for such god-awful gory things. (laughs)

- Yeah, it's our stupid little $24,000 movie

that was made in five days

and brought back something like $6 million

and is still being seen all over the world on video.

But Herschell Lewis put it all

in one very succinct sentence.

"It's like a Walt Whitman poem.

It's no good but it's the first of its kind,

therefore it deserves some consideration."

- You act like little Miss Muffet

and down inside you're dirty.

Do you hear me?

Dirty!

- [Narrator] The sexploitation film

was turning toward dark subjects as well,

and Friedman and Lewis had already anticipated the trend.

1962's "Scum of the Earth" was a tabloid style expos

a of two-bit smut peddlers,

combining sexual subjects and gratuitous violence

with the production values of an underground stag movie.

(jazz music)

As in "Boin-n-g,"

any self-parody was purely intentional.

- Okay, Sandy, come on,

let's shoot something interesting,

you know, the stuff that sells.

- All right.

But remember, I'm not double jointed.

The high school kids who buy these pictures

think you are.

- [Narrator] By September of 1964,

Lewis and Friedman had dissolved their partnership.

Friedman hooked up with Dan Sonney,

a producer with roots that stretched

all the way back to the roadshow era,

and returned to Los Angeles

where a bonafide sexploitation industry

was taking shape.

- In the meanwhile,

this whole nudie business was burgeoning here.

It was like a fraternity or a lodge.

We had no secrets among each other.

I mean, we've pooled our information for the common good.

- So baby wants to play the scene rough.

Alright. That's okay.

'Cause Carl, he likes to rough house, himself.

- [Woman] Oh, no, no!

- [Narrator] Friedman's first post Lewis production

became a prototype for a controversial new genre,

the roughy.

In "The Defilers," directed by Lee frost,

two jaded beatniks kidnap a randomly selected young woman

and then physically and sexually assault her

over a period of several days.

- Look at her.

If I don't feed her,

she goes hungry.

(jazz music)

She belongs to me

like a slave.

- [Narrator] Dark, downbeat, almost masochistically bleak,

roughies trafficked in behaviors

that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier.

According to the filmmakers themselves,

sexploitation's sudden fascination with human perversity

was commercially motivated,

and nothing more.

- The nudist films were gone,

they were no longer ventures,

they were no longer commercial,

and it's understandable.

How much nudity can you see?

It becomes boring after a while.

So you want a real story.

People wanted more for their money,

so you gave them a regular feature film.

So I sat down and wrote "Sex Peris of Paulette,"

and so on, and so on, and so on.

- As I say, it was just an attempt to get away

from what you were doing.

The shear on weight of making nudist camp pictures

and nudie-cuties was horrendous.

- [Narrator] The roughies seemed like a startling departure

from the coy comedies that preceded them.

(dramatic music)

But even the nudist camp pictures and nudie-cuties

had been films about frustration.

Out of a fear of prosecution,

the filmmakers kept any object of male desire

just out of reach.

In the roughies,

this latent sexual frustration erupted to the surface

in an orgy of brutality

unlike anything adult movies had seen.

What the brooding films of Orson Welles,

Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock were

to the MGM musicals of a previous era,

roughies were to the nudie-cuties,

the monster in the closet,

the shadows cast by all that artificial light.

(ominous music) (women screaming)

As always in the adults only field,

the looming threat of censorship also played its part.

- It was not possible to show explicit sexual situations.

I'm not saying it wasn't possible to show explicit sex.

Nobody even dreamed of that in 1964

outside of people who were selling

eight millimeter stag loops out of the trunk of a car.

That's why the roughie, in my estimation,

substituted violence all the time.

At least it was some kind of physical action,

an action of the body;

an eruptive,

climactic activity that you could have in the film.

- You be my mama.

- [Narrator] Censorship worries and market realities

may explain the motives of the filmmakers,

but what about the motives of the audience?

What drew thousands of outwardly respectable men

to back alley theaters and drive-ins

for a whole category of movies that wallowed in degradation.

(man screaming)

A look at wider social trends offers a clue.

In 1948 and 1953,

an academic named Alfred Charles Kinsey

had published two heavily researched reports

demonstrating a wide disparity

between American sexual practice and social preachment.

According to Kinsey's first volume,

70% of pre-war American men

had indulged in premarital intercourse,

and 50% in post-marital adultery.

Over half had frequented prostitutes.

One-third had engaged in a homosexual sex act.

In Kinsey part two,

over 30% of American women

were shown to have experienced sex

outside the confines of marriage.

The "Kinsey Report," as the two volumes came to be known,

were unexpected best-sellers.

Spawning hundreds of imitators,

books of increasingly dubious scientific value

were sold as more personal than Kinsey

or newer than Kinsey and more daring.

The cumulative impact was staggering.

A country that fetishized chastity and monogamy

stood revealed this practicing little of either.

- As you say, it's all in the interest of science.

But I've never seen a weirdo in action before,

and I might learn something that's not in my Kinsey books.

- [Narrator] As the idea of a sexual revolution took hold,

sexploiteers, who were used to staying ahead of the curve,

were hard pressed to keep up with current events.

Perhaps the harrowing world of the roughies

reflected the anxieties of a generation of men

newfangled enough to be titillated

by the carnal possibilities

of a broadening sexual revolution,

but old fashioned enough to expect blood, thunder,

and punishment as the wages of erotic sin.

- Do you feel you deserve the punishment?

- [Narrator] Or then again, maybe not.

- I don't like to destroy anybody's series;

but, believe it or not,

we weren't paying too much attention back then.

We were just making movies.

We weren't plotting out

any great psychological warfare there.

In these theaters,

when that customer came out of the joint,

believe it or not,

he told the manager what he liked about our picture.

So you had a pretty good feedback, believe it or not,

from these characters that went in to see these picture.

- [Interviewer] So in a way,

the market is one of the makers of the film, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- [Narrator] Friedman's "The Defilers"

became an influential hit,

and other producers took notice.

At Box Office International,

the roughies' quick turnaround and minimal production values

meshed perfectly with Harry Novak's commitment

to keeping costs low and distribution volume high.

- Do it.

Do it.

Hurt me.

Dirty me.

- What?

- Just do it.

- [Narrator] Novak's emerging marketing philosophy

could have come straight from the pages of Kinsey.

- Everybody wants to know

whose wife is doing what with whom.

You give it that sort of secret element to it.

Like "Free Love Confidential, "Motel Confidential,"

It gives the connotation that something is going on

behind the doors, under the sheets.

People wanna see what took place,

and that's what brings them in.

- Now that you've bought me,

what do you want me to do?

- Could we, uh-

- [Narrator] Perhaps Novak's finest effort

along these lines was "The Agony of Love,"

a seamy psychodrama about an affluent housewife,

played by Pat Barrington,

who rebels against the gilded boredom of her marriage

by leading a double life as a prostitute.

(jazzy music)

The squalid premise was redeemed

by talented writer/director,

William Rotsler's unwavering sympathy

for the stifling predicament of a middle-class wife.

- I don't know what a genius is,

but I think Bill Rotsler might've been a genius,

and in a lot of fields.

He was a sculptor.

He was a cartoonist,

he wrote a lot of science fiction.

He directed twenty-five motion pictures.

And I think all but two of the pictures that he directed,

he also wrote.

He had an active mind.

- [Narrator] "Agony" was as close

to a stylistic and thematic tour de force

as a feature shot in five days is ever likely to come.

Students of the genre have noted

the almost scene by scene resemblance of "Agony of Love"

to surrealist director Luis Bunuel's "Belle de Jour,"

which Rotsler's scenario matches

right down to its eerie dream sequences.

(man laughing ominously)

Exploitation was never above ripping off the masters,

but if plagiarism occurred in this case,

it was on Bunuel's part.

Rotsler and Novak's agony was released in 1966,

a full year before Bunuel's more renowned work.

As the only major female figure in a field dominated by men,

Doris Wishman might have been expected to recoil

from a genre predicated on violence against women.

In fact, many of her most noteworthy and personal films

were roughies.

- Doris's mid to late '60s films reflected a shift

that's difficult to explain.

She's not necessarily the first person

to have pioneered the look of the roughy,

but jumped into it pretty quickly.

(suspenseful music) (woman panting)

And it obviously spoke to something

that she felt deeply and personally in her own experience

as a woman, I would say.

- [Interviewer] Do you think that people,

when they watch your films,

can tell that they're made by a woman?

- Oh, I don't think so, do you?

How can you tell?

- A film like "Bad Girls Go to Hell"

is very interesting from the point of view

of female sexuality also

because of the young woman, the star of the film,

she encounters a landscape

of terrifying sexual perversities, deformities,

overwhelming desires;

a "lesbian."

(dramatic music)

- Why are you leaving?

You know that I love you.

- I know. I love you too.

- A loner masochist who beats her,

who I think in the code of the 1960s

might be considered a repressed homosexual.

- Cut it!

(pottery smashes)

- Also then, a married man who rapes her.

(woman gasps) (thrilling music)

All these things happen as part of a dream

after her husband basically has denied her

erotic satisfaction.

- Hold me close.

- Now, what's wrong?

- Uh, I h...

I had the most horrible dream.

- Shh. - And, again,

we see Doris making a very similar comment

in these roughies on the catch 22

that women find themselves in,

in the mid to late sixties or before feminism.

They are asked to be erotic beings

by this bachelor swinger culture,

but at the same time must be able

to immediately convert themselves back into virgins

and acceptable spouses,

and things like that.

- I just felt that this was it,

this was what I had to do,

and it was gonna be great.

(thunder cracking)

(woman screams)

- [Narrator] The adult filmmakers

weren't the only exploiteers

who found the chaos of the mid to late 1960s

fertile ground for growth and experimentation.

From the start of the decade,

the prolific Roger Corman was hitting his creative stride.

As the AIP Poe films continued to rack up

impressive grosses,

their director was living a double

and, in some ways, a triple life.

By the late 1950s,

Corman and his brother Gene had founded Film Group,

an independent production and distribution outlet

designed to both supply product to and compete against AIP.

(waves crashing)

To fill Film Group's production pipeline,

Corman began scouting for young and often untried talent.

In no time at all,

his track record was little short of amazing.

- You think I'm mad, don't you?

- Right now, Baron, I'm not sure just what I think.

- Roger realized very early on that scripts and actors

were for free.

It didn't matter,

you could pay $1,000 for a script

or you could pay $1 million for a script,

you got the same script.

Your actors were the same thing.

It doesn't matter.

You don't have to buy cheap actors who couldn't act,

you'd buy expensive actors and get them cheap.

- Corman Was virtually a one man film school operation,

giving people a break

in exchange for paying them almost nothing.

It gives you credit and some visibility,

and you can use that to make more films.

- The waste-not-want-not production philosophy

at Film Group took low budget cost consciousness

to unprecedented levels.

(scary music)

1963's "The Terror" is a noteworthy case in point.

Co-directed by Corman and a young Film Group employee

named Francis Coppola, among others,

"The Terror" starred an unknown named Jack Nicholson

opposite horror great, Boris Karloff,

with "Bucket of Blood Star," Dick Miller,

in a prominent supporting role.

The entire project was conceived over a rainy weekend

to exploit Corman's access

to the Gothic sets for "The Raven"

a Poe film Corman had just directed for AIP.

- See, what Roger would do was he would use

all of our stuff;

and then when he was done with our picture,

he would make another one for himself, see.

Using the same sets,

we finally would get him to change them a little

so they wouldn't look completely identical, see.

And then generally speaking,

he would bring it to us for distribution.

(dramatic music)

- Where's the baron?

- We must get to him.

He's locked himself in the crypt.

- And we shot three days of non-sequitur scenes

that had no meaning,

just a lot of great lines by Boris Karloff

that made no sense.

- What you see, new tenant,

are the remains of a noble house.

- See, even he didn't understand what he was saying.

- [Narrator] They're not up to the standards

of Corman's best Poe films,

"The Terror" is a fascinating artifact

in that so many talents of tomorrow converged on it.

- One by one,

just about everybody I knew directed

portions of this picture,

until the last day of shooting Jack Nicholson said,

"Roger, every idiot in town

has directed part of this picture,

let me direct the last day,"

and I said, "Sure, Jack,

you're the director of the last day of shooting."

- [Narrator] "The Terror" was released through AIP in 1963.

But even then,

the film's unique history wasn't quite complete.

- You're safe now.

It's over.

- [Narrator] When journalist and aspiring filmmaker,

Peter Bogdanovich came to work for Corman a few years later,

a precondition of Bogdanovich's directorial debut

was that he devise a way

to incorporate 20 minutes of pre-existing "Terror" footage

into "Targets," his striking first feature.

- And I couldn't see taking 20 minutes

of Karloff footage out of it.

I couldn't find 20 minutes to take out of it

that I would know what to do with.

- And Peter has solved the problem, I think, brilliantly.

He had Boris play an actor in 20th century Hollywood,

who was making a historical horror film.

And the present day stuff was the new footage

that Peter shot for "Targets."

- Bogdanovich's "Targets" was deemed so good

the Corman sold it to Paramount Pictures,

an establishment studio

which gave the film a limited 1968 release.

In 1971,

Bogdanovich would make the last picture show for Columbia

and emerge as the hottest director in Hollywood,

a summit he would be joined on by fellow Corman alumnus,

Francis Coppola,

who directed Paramount's "The Godfather" in 1972.

Bogdanovich and Coppola were the leading edge of a hip,

young invasion force that would transform the studio system,

a surprising number of which cut their teeth with Corman

or at AIP.

- I think Roger Corman was one of the most important figures

of the modern age,

I mean, the modern screen.

If you subtract, from modern American cinema,

all those people that Roger brought into the movies,

you're gonna be very impoverished,

because it's Coppola, and Scorsese,

and Jonathan Demme, and Paul Bartel.

You turn around and somebody else was started by Corman.

- [Narrator] The very fact

that various exploitation proteges

were able to move from independent filmmaking

into the Hollywood mainstream

demonstrated how tastes were changing.

At AIP, Corman both catered to

and commented on the emerging youth culture

with "The wild Angels,"

a nihilistic look at an outlaw biker gang,

and "The Trip,"

one of the first exploitation films

to deal with a powerful new recreational hallucinogen

called LSD.

(mellow rock music)

- Both subjects were highly controversial.

I couldn't very well come out saying "The Trip"

in favor of "Dope,"

yet at the same time I was smoking a little marijuana,

as well as most of my friends.

So I felt the way to do that,

and "The Wild Angels" as well,

was to tell as honestly and as objectively as we could

what the scene was like,

and leave the judgment to the audience.

- [Narrator] Both films were almost unbelievably successful

by the standards of the day.

AIP found itself awash and profits and controversy.

- You can't really overestimate the effect

that the '60s had;

and that is why when they older people

would see some of our pictures, they were horrified,

as though we had started this, which is nonsense.

We didn't start anything.

We may have helped them along, we may have given it a voice,

but we didn't start anything,

it was there, it was burning inside young people.

- [Narrator] Other exploiteers quickly staked their claim

to the new terrain AIP had opened up.

Dave Friedman brought the world "The Acid Eaters,"

memorable for its vaudeville surrealism

and depiction of a 50 foot high pyramid of LSD.

(mellow rock music)

Producer Harry Novak financed an omnibus documentary

of the era's fads and fashions called "Mondo Mod."

(discordant rock music)

Meanwhile, the studios were becoming increasingly desperate

to connect with audiences the exploiteers

had been speaking to for a long, long time.

- The studios realized that there was such a sea change

that they didn't have to answer to religious organizations.

So you have a several year period

before the NPAA sets up its rating system

where anything went,

and anything did.

- [Narrator] In October of 1968,

the motion Picture Production Code,

which had been teetering under the burden

of defending itself against new types of content

collapsed completely,

to be replaced by a voluntary rating system.

It was a major victory for free speech and filmmaking,

one various exploiteers had been fighting for for decades.

Ironically, the creation of the rating system

also marked the beginning

of exploitation's ultimate decline.

- Hollywood was opening up to profanity, and nudity,

and extreme violence, and things like that,

so the major studio films became more and more explicit,

and they took over the subject matter.

- [Narrator] By 1969,

exploitation proteges we're reinventing studio filmmaking

with movies like the Dennis Hopper,

Peter Fonda biker epic, "Easy Rider,"

a direct descendant

of Corman's "Wild Angels" and "The Trip,"

and a film which was originally developed

by Hopper and Fonda for Corman to produce at AIP.

Meanwhile, a new rating that was created

to stigmatize adults only fair

was being flaunted in ads like a badge of honor.

Sexploiteers trumpeted important court victories

without necessarily recognizing

that the rules were changing for everyone.

In 1969, an X-rated studio feature called "Midnight Cowboy"

became a critical and commercial favorite

for its daring and supposedly groundbreaking treatment

of raw sex, homosexual themes, and prostitution,

subjects exploiteers like Friedman,

Wishman and Novak had been trafficking in for years.

- My pictures set the groundwork

for many of the major studios

to come in with stories similar to ours,

'cause we were making money while they were dropping dead

at the box office.

- [Narrator] With the release of "Easy Rider"

and the triumph of the X-rated "Midnight Cowboy"

at the 1969 Academy Awards,

both the youth exploitation film

and the adults only movie had moved

into the commercial mainstream.

The process would take over two decades to complete,

but the exploiteers' very success

in shattering the old taboos had doomed them

to eventual extinction.

For the instinctive outsiders of exploitation,

they would increasingly no longer be an outside.

- [Man] Here we go.

(board crashing)

- [Narrator] So what, in the final analysis,

did the exploiteers achieve?

The individual statistics give some idea

of the scale of their accomplishment.

- If we did anything,

it was that we opened a way for the independents.

- [Narrator] AIP launched dozens of major film careers

and distributed approximately 500 titles

during the 27 years between 1954 and 1980.

- What happened all the pens?

- [Narrator] As this documentary neared completion,

Sam Arkoff was still an active Hollywood producer

at the age of 81.

- There were no road signs specifically pointing the way,

but the roads themselves were there.

- [Narrator] Roger Corman

founded two post film group production companies,

New World Pictures and Concord New Horizons,

whose California soundstages are shown here.

Corman's resume includes the production and/or distribution

of over 300 film titles,

over 50 of which Roger Corman directed himself.

- I have a high school education in how pictures are made,

but I got a PhD in how pictures are sold.

- [Narrator] Between 1960 and 1985,

Dave Friedman was involved with the creation

of over 50 theatrical features,

most of which he produced,

many of which he also scripted.

Currently, Freedman owns and operates a traveling carnival.

- All the pictures I've made her like my children.

I love them all.

They all play their own part in my life.

- [Narrator] Harry Novak was still actively distributing

his enormous library of over 200 exploitation titles

at the time of this documentary's production.

- You say to me that I made exploitation films

and I say to you that every film was an exploitation film;

because as soon as you advertise something,

you're exploiting it.

Do you agree?

- [Narrator] Doris Wishman has produced, written,

and/or directed some 25 films,

making her the most prolific female director

of the American sound era.

(man laughing laughing ominously)

- Faster, Sally, faster!

- [Narrator] As for the rest of us,

we live in a world the exploiteers made for us,

one rife with outcast images which moved in from the margins

and took over the commercial mainstream.

(woman screaming)

- Faster, sally, faster!

(man laughing frantically)

- [Narrator] The question that's still debated is this:

Are we collectively better off for the new realms of content

exploitation opened up,

or did the exploiteers' ultimate victory

represent the triumph of the sordid

and lurid over some imagined era of civility and taste?

The shocking facts have all been laid before you,

some of them frightening, many of them less than refined,

so you decide.

- [Interviewer] You said before,

there would always be independent films,

will there always be exploitation films?

- What the devil do we have but exploitation films?

All you have to do is look at those big pictures every week.

They go out, they are covered with advertising,

with TV commercials, with everything, for God's sakes.

And this year we've seen, and in many cases,

the first week is their best week,

and then they tail off

and the next one comes along.

What do you think that's sold then?

It's the exploitation that's sold.

It's not the picture that's sold,

it's the exploitation.

And that's basically why we have our exploitation pictures,

even though our arty-farties and pseudo intellectuals

refuse to admit it, you see?

And interesting thing about all arty-farties

is they want all the accolades

and they want all the wealth,

but they really wanna be able to sneer

at their lesser men,

the audience in the theaters.

We never sneered at them,

we recognize that was our blood.

(bouncy music)

♪ I went to see doctor

♪ To figure out just what I had ♪

♪ I was all bottled up

♪ Deeply frustrated and sad

♪ I said my dear old mama medieval mom raised me ♪

♪ To be right thinking, straight-arrow boy ♪

♪ But I can't measure up

♪ And I'm feeling so bad

♪ And he said

♪ Oh, no, that's just your lizard brain ♪

♪ It's my diagnosis

♪ That you're mired in mud

♪ Thanks to your one and only original lizard brain ♪

♪ Your sex and violence, semen and blood ♪

♪ I went out to a feature-film

♪ Trying to set my mind at rest ♪

♪ Till the girl in the picture

♪ Suddenly fell out of her dress ♪

♪ The bad guy pulled a gun out

♪ Waved it, firing at his enemies ♪

♪ When the hero fought back

♪ It was red, running mess

♪ And I thought

♪ Oh, no, my lizard brain

♪ Has learned to make movies

♪ How to write for TV

♪ He can offer those ad fueled dramas ♪

♪ That go straight for the jugular ♪

♪ Your heavy breathing

♪ At generous fees

♪ And when I die

♪ Please shine a light on me

♪ And in the cold glow of heaven ♪

♪ It seemed to sink down into hell ♪

♪ Will I arrive with amphibious motion as I thought ♪

♪ Or wriggle like tadpole

♪ You never can tell

♪ He should have said oh no to his lizard brain ♪

♪ Everyone has one

♪ It's like semen and blood

♪ That reptile pulse line

♪ Pounding in our blood

♪ The primary mover up from the mud ♪

(dramatic music)

- So there.

(bouncy music)