B movie
Fonda had become AIP s top star in the Corman-directed The Wild Angels (1966), a biker movie, and The Trip, as in LSD. Warner Bros. The Exorcist demonstrated that a heavily promoted horror film could be an absolute blockbuster: it was the biggest movie of the year and by far the highest-earning horror movie yet made.The majors clearance rules favoring their affiliated theaters prevented the independents timely access to top-quality films; the second feature allowed them to promote quantity instead. The major studios top product was continuing to inflate in running time—in 1970, the ten biggest earners averaged 140.1 minutes. The biggest studio in the low-budget field remained a leader in exploitation s growth.
distribution by Fine Line Features. 45 (1981), made two works in the early nineties that marry exploitation-worthy depictions of sex, drugs, and general sleaze to complex examinations of honor and redemption: King of New York (1990) was backed by a group of mostly small production companies and the cost of Bad Lieutenant (1992), $1.8 million, was financed totally independently.
Ten true B noirs that year came from Poverty Row s big three—Republic, Monogram, and PRC/Eagle-Lion—and one from tiny Screen Guild. The phenomenon of the drive-in movie became one of the defining symbols of American popular culture in the 1950s.
In its original usage, during the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature. The parallel practice of blind bidding largely freed the majors from worrying about their Bs quality—even when booking in less than seasonal blocks, exhibitors had to buy most pictures sight unseen.
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. In one sample year, 1947, RKO produced in addition to several noir programmers and A pictures, two straight B noirs: Desperate and The Devil Thumbs a Ride. Reviewing Sisters, Pauline Kael observed that its limp technique doesn t seem to matter to the people who want their gratuitous gore..
Financed, like King of New York, by a consortium of production companies, it was picked up for U.S. Calculating in the three hundred or so films made annually by the many Poverty Row firms, approximately 75 percent of Hollywood movies from the decade, more than four thousand pictures, are classifiable as Bs. The Western was by far the predominant B genre in both the 1930s and, to a lesser degree, the 1940s. Series of various genres, featuring recurrent, title-worthy characters or name actors in familiar roles, were particularly popular during the first decade of sound film.
The other major studios also turned out a considerable number of movies now identified as noir during the 1940s. In 1935, Monogram, Mascot, and several smaller studios merged to form Republic Pictures.
Hill also directed her best-known performances, in two AIP blaxploitation films: Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). These films were largely relegated to the fringe circuit of adult theaters, while AIP teen movies with wink-wink titles like Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1966), starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, played drive-ins and other reputable venues.
But the tidal shift in the majors focus owed largely to the enormous success of three films: Steven Spielberg s creature feature Jaws (1975) and George Lucas s space opera Star Wars (1977) had each, in turn, become the highest-grossing film in motion picture history. The term retained its earlier suggestion that such movies relied on formulaic plots, stock character types, and simplistic action or unsophisticated comedy.
Several New World pictures followed, including The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972), both directed by Jack Hill. So they provide a good starting place for ambitious would-be filmmakers who can t get more conventional projects off the ground. On television, the parallels between the weekly series that became the mainstay of prime-time programming and the Hollywood series films of an earlier day had long been clear.
However, we are now witnessing a polarisation of film budgets into two tiers: large productions ($120-150m) and niche features ($5-20m).. A talented director, Meyer would gain renown for so-called sexploitation pictures such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Vixen! (1968).
Celebrated filmmakers such as Anthony Mann and Jonathan Demme learned their craft in B movies. American International helped keep the original-release double bill alive through paired packages of its films: these movies were low-budget, but instead of a flat rate, they were rented out on a percentage basis, like A films.
Its $8.5 million in earnings against a production cost of $800,000 made it the most profitable movie of 1960. Films shot on B-level budgets were occasionally marketed as A pictures or emerged as sleeper hits: One of 1943 s biggest films was Hitler s Children, an RKO thriller made for a fraction over $200,000.
In their modest way, the Bs were following suit. Easy Rider earned $19.1 million in rentals and became the seminal film that provided the bridge between all the repressed tendencies represented by schlock/kitsch/hack since the dawn of Hollywood and the mainstream cinema of the seventies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of low-budget film companies emerged that drew from all the different lines of exploitation as well as the sci-fi and teen themes that had been a mainstay since the 1950s.
A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture conceived neither as an arthouse film nor as pornography. Rosemary s Baby had been a big hit, but it had little in common with the exploitation style.
A new programming scheme developed that would soon become standard practice: a newsreel, a short and/or a serial, and a cartoon, followed by a double feature. In later years Corman, both with AIP and as head of his own companies, would help launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Robert Towne, and Robert De Niro, among many others. In the late 1950s, William Castle became known as the great innovator of the B movie publicity gimmick.
Non-series B Westerns continued to appear for a few more years, but Republic Pictures, long associated with cheap sagebrush sagas, was out of the filmmaking business by decade s end. Wanda is both a seminal event in the independent film movement and a classic B picture.
B movies are where actors such as John Wayne and Jack Nicholson became established, and the Bs have also provided work for former A movie actors, such as Vincent Price and Karen Black. Although there have always been economical means with which to shoot movies, including Super 8 and 16 mm film and video cameras recording onto analog videotape, these mediums could hardly rival the image quality of 35 mm film.
Horror was the strongest low-budget genre of the time, particularly in the slasher mode as with The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown. These kung fu films as they were often called, whatever martial art they featured, were popularized in the United States by the Hong Kong–produced movies of Bruce Lee and marketed to the same audience targeted by AIP and New World.
One of the few successful B studio startups of the decade was Rome-based Empire Pictures, whose first production, Ghoulies, reached theaters in 1985. These cheaper films allowed the studios to derive maximum value from facilities and contracted staff in between a studio s more important productions, while also breaking in new personnel. With the widespread arrival of sound film in American theaters in 1929, many independent exhibitors began dropping the then-dominant presentation model, which involved live acts and a broad variety of shorts before a single featured film.
In other genres, Universal kept its Ma and Pa Kettle series going through 1957, while Allied Artists stuck with the Bowery Boys until 1958. In some cases, both are true. In either usage, most B movies represent a particular genre—the Western was a Golden Age B movie staple, while low-budget science-fiction and horror films became more popular in the 1950s.
Early B movies were often part of series in which the star repeatedly played the same character. Intimations of the trend were evident as early as Airport (1969) and especially in the mega-schlock of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1973), and The Towering Inferno (1974).
(1970). Even a comparatively cheap, efficiently made genre picture intended for theatrical release began to cost millions of dollars, as the major movie studios steadily moved into the production of expensive genre movies, raising audience expectations for spectacular action sequences and realistic special effects.
In the era of the traditional double feature, no one would have characterized these graphic exploitation films as B movies. With the majors having exited traditional B production and exploitation-style promotion becoming standard practice at the lower end of the industry, exploitation became a way to refer to the entire field of low-budget genre films. In 1956, distributor Joseph E.
Science fiction, horror, and various hybrids of the two were now of central economic importance to the low-budget end of the business. Much of its significance owes to the fact that it was produced for a respectable, if still modest, budget and released by a major studio.
Even more historically significant movies with B themes and A-level financial backing would follow in their wake. Most of the B movie production houses founded during the exploitation era collapsed or were subsumed by larger companies as the field s financial situation changed in the early 1980s. In January 1945, there were 96 drive-ins in the United States; a decade later, there were more than 3,700.
The Meyer and Corman lines were drawing closer. One of the most influential films of the era, on Bs and beyond, was Paramount s Psycho. Produced by B horror veteran William Castle, Rosemary s Baby took the genre up-market for the first time since the 1930s. Soon, Corman would be putting out nudity-filled sexploitation pictures such as Private Duty Nurses (1971) and Women in Cages (1971). In May 1969, the most important of all exploitation movies premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Into the 1950s, most Republic and Monogram product was roughly on par with the low end of the majors output. In its current usage, the term has two primary and somewhat contradictory connotations: it may signal an opinion that a certain movie is (a) a genre film with minimal artistic ambitions or (b) a lively, energetic film uninhibited by the constraints imposed on more expensive projects and unburdened by the conventions of putatively serious independent film.
Director Abel Ferrara, who built a reputation with violent B movies such as The Driller Killer (1979) and Ms. Eventually they arranged a financing and distribution deal with Columbia, as two more graduates of the Corman/AIP exploitation mill joined the project: Jack Nicholson and cinematographer László Kovács.
All established B units to provide films for the expanding second-feature market. 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 of the first films adopted by the new circuit in 1971 was the three-year-old Night of the Living Dead. Their disaster plots and dialogue were B-grade at best; from an industry perspective, however, these were pictures firmly rooted in a tradition of star-stuffed extravaganzas.
At the same time, over the past 2-3 years, the quality of digital filmmaking has improved dramatically. Independent filmmakers, whether working in a genre or arthouse mode, continue to find it difficult to gain access to distribution channels, though so-called digital end-to-end methods of distribution offer new opportunities. Weldon—referred to by a fellow critic as the historian of marginal movies —to denote the sort of low-budget genre pictures that are generally disdained or ignored entirely by the critical establishment. Cracking · Scene · Demos (Demoscene) .
One was a high-budget Paramount production, directed by the celebrated Roman Polanski. Many examples of the so-called blaxploitation genre, featuring stereotype-filled stories revolving around drugs, violent crime, and prostitution, were the product of AIP.
Nicholson and Samuel Z. The movie now widely described as the first classic film noir—Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a 64-minute B—was produced at RKO, which would release many additional melodramatic thrillers in a similarly stylish vein.
The video rental market was becoming central to B film economics: Empire s financial model relied on seeing a profit not from theatrical rentals, but only later, at the video store. 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, by 1961 the average production cost of an American feature film was still only $2 million—after adjusting for inflation, less than 10 percent more than it had been in 1950. With the loosening of industry censorship constraints, the 1960s saw a major expansion in the commercial viability of a variety of B movie subgenres that came to be known collectively as exploitation films.
The heads of Monogram soon pulled out and revived their company. Corman soon independently produced his first movie, The Monster from the Ocean Floor, on a $12,000 budget and a six-day shooting schedule.
In the 1970s, original feature-length programming increasingly began to echo the B movie as well. The five largest studios — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Fox Film Corporation (20th Century Fox as of 1935), Warner Bros., and RKO Radio Pictures (descendant of FBO) — also belonged to companies with sizable theater chains, further securing the bottom line. Poverty Row studios, from modest outfits like Mascot Pictures, Tiffany Pictures, and Sono Art-World Wide Pictures down to shoestring operations, made exclusively B movies, serials, and other shorts, and also distributed totally independent productions and imported films.
Although the U.S. In terms of content, the majors were already there, with J.D. movies such as Warner Bros. Untamed Youth (1957) and MGM s High School Confidential (1958), both starring Mamie Van Doren. In 1954, a young filmmaker named Roger Corman received his first screen credits as writer and associate producer of Allied Artists Highway Dragnet.
At Fox, which also shifted half of its production line into B territory, Sol M. Its distributor was small Cinemation Industries, then best known for releasing dubbed versions of the Italian Mondo Cane shockumentaries and the Swedish skin flick Fanny Hill, as well as for its one in-house production, The Man from O.R.G.Y.
As the average running time of top-of-the-line films increased, so did that of B pictures. This new breed of gross-out movie typifies the emerging sense of exploitation —the progressive adoption of traditional exploitation and nudie elements into horror, into other classic B genres, and into the low-budget film industry as a whole.
production of movies intended as second features largely ceased by the end of the 1950s, the term B movie continued to be used in the broader sense it maintains today. Double features were not the rule at these prestigious venues.
In just four years it more than doubled again, hitting $8.5 million in 1980 (a constant-dollar increase of about 25 percent). Melvin Van Peebles wrote, co-produced, directed, starred in, edited, and composed the music for the film, which was completed with a loan from Bill Cosby.
Television films inspired by recent scandals—such as The Ordeal of Patty Hearst, which premiered a month after her release from prison in 1979—harkened all the way back to the 1920s and such movies as Human Wreckage and When Love Grows Cold, FBO pictures made swiftly in the wake of celebrity misfortunes. The following year, Allied released Hollywood s last B series Westerns.
That average reflected both specials that might cost as much as $1 million and films made quickly for around $50,000. Indeed, the United Artists release Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis, is seen as the first significant film of the type.
The Exorcist had demonstrated the drawing power of big-budget, effects-laden horror. Many 1970s TV films—such as The California Kid (1974), starring Martin Sheen—were action-oriented genre pictures of a type familiar from contemporary cinematic B production.
In 1959, Levine s Embassy Pictures bought the worldwide rights to Hercules, a cheaply made Italian movie starring American-born bodybuilder Steve Reeves. Nightmare in Badham County (1976) headed straight into the realm of road-tripping-girls-in-redneck-bondage exploitation. The reverberations of Easy Rider could be felt in such pictures, as well as in a host of big-screen exploitation films.
Troma s best-known production is The Toxic Avenger (1985); its hideous hero, affectionately known as Toxie, became the symbol of Troma and an icon of the 1980s B movie. As production of TV movies expanded with the introduction of the ABC Movie of the Week in 1969, soon followed by the dedication of other network slots to original features, time and financial factors shifted the medium progressively into B picture territory.
The combination of intensive and gimmick-laden publicity with movies featuring vulgar subject matter and often outrageous imagery dated back decades—the term had originally defined truly fringe productions, made at the lowest depths of Poverty Row or entirely outside the Hollywood system. As Roger Ebert explained in one 1974 review, Horror and exploitation films almost always turn a profit if they re brought in at the right price.
As Marone observes, the equipment budget (camera, support) required for shooting digital is approximately 1/10th that for film, significantly lowering the production budget for independent features. Her most famous directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker, a 1953 RKO release, is often referred to as the only classic film noir directed by a woman.
The days of six quickies for a nickel were gone, but a continuity of spirit was evident. In 1970, a low-budget crime drama shot in 16 mm by first-time American director Barbara Loden won the international critics prize at the Venice Film Festival. In 1973, American International gave a shot to young director Brian De Palma.
The term B actor is sometimes used to refer to a performer who finds work primarily or exclusively in B pictures. It is not clear that the term B movie (or B film or B picture) was in general use before the 1930s, but a similar concept was already well established. In 1927–28, at the end of the silent era, the production cost of an average feature from a major Hollywood studio ranged from $190,000 at Fox to $275,000 at MGM.
The project was first taken by one of its cocreators, Peter Fonda, to American International. Most down-market films of the type—like many of those produced by William Alland at Universal (e.g., Creature from the Black Lagoon The Amazing Colossal Man was released by a new company whose name was much bigger than its budgets.
The midnight movie success of low-budget pictures made entirely outside of the studio system, like John Waters s Pink Flamingos (1972), with its campy spin on exploitation, spurred the development of the independent film movement. With audiences draining away to television and studios scaling back production schedules, the classic double feature vanished from many American theaters during the 1950s.
As described by historian Edward Jay Epstein, During these first runs, films got their reviews, garnered publicity, and generated the word of mouth that served as the principal form of advertising. Aside from at the theater itself, B films might not be advertised at all. The introduction of sound had driven costs higher: by 1930, the average U.S. While the Golden Age–style second feature was dying, B movie was still used to refer to any low-budget genre film featuring relatively unheralded performers ( B actors ).
The idea Fonda pitched would combine those two proven themes. At the same time, many local television stations began showing B genre films in late-night slots, popularizing the notion of the midnight movie. Increasingly, American-made genre films were joined by foreign movies acquired at low cost and, where necessary, dubbed for the U.S.
studio devoted entirely to B-cost productions. The low-budget picture of the 1920s thus evolved into the second feature, the B movie, of Hollywood s Golden Age. The major studios, at first resistant to the B feature, soon adapted.
Superman, released in December 1978, had proved that a studio could spend $55 million on a movie about a children s comic book character and turn a big profit—it was the top box-office hit of 1979. It had taken a decade and half, from 1961 to 1976, for the production cost of the average Hollywood feature to double from $2 million to $4 million—actually a decline if adjusted for inflation. Ulmer made films of every generic stripe: His Girls in Chains was released in May 1943, six months before Women in Bondage; by the end of the year, Ulmer had also made the teen-themed musical Jive Junction as well as Isle of Forgotten Sins, a South Seas adventure set around a brothel. 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.
In short, low-budget pictures made for her production company, The Filmakers, Lupino explored virtually taboo subjects such as rape in 1950 s Outrage and 1953 s self-explanatory The Bigamist. But the movie that truly ignited the blaxploitation phenomenon was completely independent: Sweet Sweetback s Baadasssss Song (1971) is also perhaps the most outrageous example of the form: wildly experimental, borderline pornographic, and essentially a manifesto for a black American revolution.
Even as Rocky Horror generated its own subcultural phenomenon, it contributed to the mainstreaming of the theatrical midnight movie. Asian martial arts films began appearing as imports regularly during the 1970s. Arkoff in a reorganization of their American Releasing Corporation (ARC), soon became the leading U.S.
The term is also now used loosely to refer to some higher budgeted, mainstream films with exploitation-style content, usually in genres traditionally associated with the B movie. From 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. But its greatest influence on the fate of the B movie was less direct.
Less sturdy Poverty Row concerns—with a penchant for grand sobriquets like Conquest, Empire, Imperial, and Peerless—continued to churn out dirt-cheap quickies. Taves estimates that half of the films produced by the eight majors in the 1930s were B movies. The 1960s would see exploitation-style themes and imagery become increasingly central to the realm of the B. Exploitation movies in the original sense continued to appear: 1961 s Damaged Goods, a cautionary tale about a young lady whose boyfriend’s promiscuity leads to venereal disease, comes complete with enormous, grotesque closeups of VD s physical effects.
Operations such as Roger Corman s New World Pictures, Cannon Films, and New Line Cinema brought exploitation films to mainstream theaters around the country. Troma s most characteristic productions, including Class of Nuke Em High (1986), Redneck Zombies (1986), and Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), take exploitation for an absurdist spin.
With the B films rented at a flat fee (rather than the box office percentage basis of A films), rates could be set virtually guaranteeing the profitability of every B movie. Grier has the distinction of starring in the first widely distributed movie to climax with a castration scene. Blaxploitation was the first exploitation genre in which the major studios were central.
In no position to directly block book, they mostly sold regional distribution exclusivity to states rights firms, which in turn peddled blocks of movies to exhibitors, typically six or more pictures featuring the same star (a relative status on Poverty Row). In the standard Golden Age model, the industry s top product, the A films , premiered at a small number of select first-run houses in major cities. In William Paul s description, it is also the film that really established gross-out as a mode of expression for mainstream cinema..
Block booking became standard practice: to get access to a studio s attractive A pictures, many theaters were obliged to rent the company s entire output for a season. Many graphically depicted the wages of sin in the context of promoting prudent lifestyle choices, particularly sexual hygiene. Audiences might see explicit footage of anything from a live birth to a ritual circumcision.
Unpretentious pictures with simple, familiar plots and reliable shock effects were ideally suited for auto-based film viewing, with all its attendant distractions. The British Hammer Film Productions made the successful The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), major influences on future horror film style.
On top of a $125,000 purchase price, Levine then spent $1.5 million on advertising and publicity, a virtually unprecedented amount. Latter-day B movies still sometimes inspire multiple sequels, but series are less common.
It earned more than $3 million in rentals, industry language for a distributor s share of gross box office receipts. In the 1940s, RKO stood out among the industry s Big Five for its focus on B pictures. Some actors, such as Béla Lugosi and Pam Grier, worked in B movies for most of their careers.
The 1959 creature feature The Tingler featured Castle s most famous gimmick, Percepto: at the film s climax, buzzers attached to select theater seats would unexpectedly rattle a few audience members, prompting either appropriate screams or even more appropriate laughter. The postwar drive-in theater boom was vital to the expanding independent B movie industry. A number of Concorde–New Horizon releases also went this route, appearing only briefly in theaters, if at all.
These sorts of films played in the grindhouses of the day—many of them not outright porno theaters, but rather venues for all manner of exploitation cinema. film had passed $25 million. At the same time as exhibition venues for B films vanished, the independent film movement was burgeoning; among the results were various crossovers between the low-budget genre movie and the sophisticated arthouse picture.
Lewton produced 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 would become renowned only later in their careers or entirely in retrospect. The second feature, which actually screened before the main event, cost the exhibitor less per minute than the equivalent running time in shorts.
Levine financed the shooting of new footage with American actor Raymond Burr that was edited into the Japanese sci-fi horror film Godzilla. Three majors beside RKO contributed a total of five more.
AIP was intrigued but balked at giving his collaborator, Dennis Hopper, also a studio alumnus, free directorial rein. This result mirrored the film s scrambling of definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire—specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor s arthouse division. By the turn of the millennium, the average production cost of an American feature had already spent three years above the $50 million mark. On the other hand, recent industry trends suggest the reemergence of something that looks very like the traditional A-B split in major studio production, though with fewer programmers bridging the gap.
The term connoted a general perception that B movies were inferior to the more handsomely budgeted headliners; individual B films were often ignored by critics. According to a 2006 report by industry analyst Alfonso Marone, The average budget for a Hollywood movie is currently around $60m, rising to $100m when the cost of marketing for domestic launch (USA only) is factored into the equation.
Along with these eighteen unambiguous B noirs, an additional dozen or so noir programmers came out of Hollywood. Down in Poverty Row, low budgets led to less palliative fare. Even as the U.S.
By 1953, the old Monogram brand had disappeared, the company having adopted the identity of its higher-end subsidiary, Allied Artists. The additional movie also gave the program balance —the practice of pairing different sorts of features suggested to potential customers that they could count on something of interest no matter what specifically was on the bill.
By 1973, the major studios were catching on to the commercial potential of genres once largely consigned to the bargain basement. The film (which incorporated another favorite exploitation theme, the redneck menace, as well as a fair amount of nudity) was brought in at a cost of $501,000.
Fox s many B series, for instance, included Charlie Chan mysteries, Ritz Brothers comedies, and musicals with child star Jane Withers. By 1940, the average production cost of an American feature was $400,000, a negligible increase over ten years. The age of the hour-long feature film was past; 70 minutes was now roughly the minimum.
In its post–Golden Age usage, there is ambiguity on both sides of the definition: on the one hand, many B movies display a high degree of craft and aesthetic ingenuity; on the other, the primary interest of many inexpensive exploitation films is prurient. From a latter-day perspective, the most famous of the major studios Golden Age B units is Val Lewton s horror unit at RKO.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), an inexpensive film from 20th Century-Fox that spoofed all manner of classic B picture clichés, became an unparalleled hit when it was relaunched as a late show feature the year after its initial, unprofitable release. One of blaxploitation s biggest stars was Pam Grier, who began her career with a bit part in Russ Meyer s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970).
The growth of the cable television industry also helped support the low-budget film industry, as many B movies quickly wound up as filler material for 24-hour cable channels or were made expressly for that purpose. By 1990, the cost of the average U.S. A more recently coined synonym is psychotronic movie. The C movie is the grade of motion picture at the low end of the B movie, or—in some taxonomies—simply below it. The term Z movie (or grade-Z movie) is used by some to characterize low-budget pictures with quality standards well below those of most B and even so-called C movies.
The crime-based plot and often seedy settings would have suited a straightforward exploitation film or an old-school B noir. Most films referred to as Z movies are made on very small budgets by operations on the fringes of the commercial film industry.
Roger Corman s The Trip (1967) for American International, written by veteran AIP/Corman actor Jack Nicholson, never shows a fully bared, unpainted breast, but flirts with nudity throughout. Horror continued to attract young, independent American directors.
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 for the bottom of the bill. Its source is pure pulp, one of Mickey Spillane s Mike Hammer novels, but Robert Aldrich s direction is self-consciously aestheticized.
American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956 by James H. The result is a brutal genre picture that also evokes contemporary anxieties about what was often spoken of simply as the Bomb. The fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, along with less expressible qualms about radioactive fallout from America s own atomic tests, energized many of the era s genre films.
inflation rate eased, the average expense of moviemaking would continue to soar. Despite the mounting financial pressures, distribution obstacles, and overall risk, a substantial number of genre movies from small studios and independent filmmakers were still reaching theaters. The sub-$200,000 production, for which Loden spent six years raising money, was praised by Vincent Canby for the absolute accuracy of its effects, the decency of its point of view and..purity of technique. In the early 1970s, the growing practice of screening nonmainstream motion pictures as late shows, with the goal of building a cult film audience, brought the midnight movie concept home to the cinema, now in a countercultural setting—something like a drive-in movie for the hip.
The major studios promoted the benefits of recycling, offering former headlining movies as second features in the place of traditional B films. The first prominent victim of the changing market was Eagle-Lion, which released its last films in 1951. The film s length, 106 minutes, is A level, but its star, Ralph Meeker, had previously appeared in only one major film.
Fewer $30-70m releases are expected. In sum, this is an updated version of a Golden Age big studio B unit targeting a market very similar to the one AIP helped define in the 1950s. In a development hinted at in this Variety piece, recent technological advances are greatly facilitating the production of truly low-budget motion pictures. At the same time, the realm of the B movie was becoming increasingly fertile territory for experimentation, both serious and outlandish. Ida Lupino, well known as an actress, established herself as Hollywood s sole female director of the era.
Wurtzel was similarly in charge of more than twenty movies a year during the late 1930s. A number of the top Poverty Row firms consolidated: Sono Art joined another company to create Monogram Pictures early in the decade. Republic aspired to major-league respectability while making many cheap and modestly budgeted Westerns, but there wasn t much from the bigger studios that compared with Monogram exploitation pictures like juvenile delinquency exposé Where Are Your Children? (1943) and the prison film Women in Bondage (1943).
The terms drive-in movie and midnight movie, which emerged in association with specific historical phenomena, are now often used as synonyms for B movie. market.
Audiences of Macabre (1958), an $86,000 production distributed by Allied Artists, were invited to take out insurance policies to cover potential death from fright. feature film cost $375,000 to produce.
Almost always shorter than the top-billed films they were paired with, many had running times of 70 minutes or less. The micro-budget quickies of 1930s fly-by-night Poverty Row production houses may be thought of as Z movies avant la lettre. Psychotronic movie is a term coined by film critic Michael J.
In a similar way, Internet sites such as YouTube have opened up entirely new avenues for the presentation of low-budget motion pictures. The terms C movie and the more common Z movie describe progressively lower grades of the B-movie category. Imports of Hammer Film s increasingly explicit horror movies and Italian gialli, highly stylized pictures 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 modern rating system.
The development and widespread usage of digital cameras and postproduction methods allow even low-budget filmmakers to produce films with excellent (and not necessarily grittier ) image quality and editing effects. The film was produced for New World on a budget of $250,000. Larry Cohen continued to twist genre conventions in pictures such as Q (aka Q: The Winged Serpent; 1982): the kind of movie that used to be indispensable to the market: an imaginative, popular, low-budget picture that makes the most of its limited resources, and in which people get on with the job instead of standing around talking about it. it was picked up for distribution by New Line, retitled The Evil Dead, and became a hit. One of the most successful 1980s B studios was a survivor from the heyday of the exploitation era, Troma Pictures, founded in 1974.
The Duel release anticipated practices that fueled the B-movie industry in the late 1950s; when the top Hollywood studios made them standard two decades after that, the B movie would be hard hit. Considerations beside cost made the line between A and B movies ambiguous.
