B movie

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The B movie has two lives, and they contradict each other. The first life: a cheap filler film, stapled to the bottom of a double bill, ignored by critics, shot in four days on a budget that barely covered petty cash on a major studio production. The second life: the training ground where John Wayne found stardom, where Roger Corman launched Francis Ford Coppola and Jonathan Demme, where Anthony Mann learned to direct before making masterpieces, and where George Romero's Night of the Living Dead changed American cinema for good. These two lives coexisted in the same films, at the same time, for decades. How did a product designed to be forgotten become one of Hollywood's most generative forces? The answer runs from the silent-era nickelodeons of the 1920s through the drive-ins of the 1950s, the grindhouses of the 1970s, and the video store shelves of the 1980s.

• 2. The Double Bill Economy

  ›

  Columbia's That Certain Thing was made in 1928 for less than $20,000. That sum tells the whole story of early B movie economics: the cheapest films existed to fill space, not to make art. In the late 1920s, a single feature from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer might cost $275,000 to produce; smaller studios like Columbia and Film Booking Offices of America survived by doing the opposite, chasing the cheapest product possible for small-town and neighborhood theaters called 'nabes.' Below even those operations sat the Poverty Row studios, where production budgets could run as low as $3,000.

  With sound film arriving in American theaters in 1929, the old programming model collapsed. Live acts and assorted shorts gave way to a new standard package: newsreel, short, cartoon, and two features. The second feature cost the exhibitor less per minute than the equivalent running time in shorts, and it helped smaller independent theaters compete with the big studio chains. Those chains operated under 'clearance' rules that gave their own venues first access to premium films; the second feature let independent exhibitors offer quantity when quality was locked away.

  Block booking made B movies a nearly guaranteed profit center for the majors. To rent a studio's desirable A pictures, theaters had to take the studio's entire seasonal output. B films were rented at a flat fee rather than a box office percentage, so rates could be set to virtually guarantee profit on every release. Blind bidding went further: exhibitors often had to buy pictures sight unseen. By the mid-1930s, this machinery had made the double feature the dominant exhibition model in the United States. In 1935, B movie production at Warner Bros. jumped from 12% to 50% of studio output, with Bryan Foy heading the unit under the title 'Keeper of the Bs.'

• 3. Poverty Row and Its Auteurs

  ›

  Film historian Jon Tuska argued that the B product of the 1930s achieved 'a uniquely American perfection of the well-made story,' pointing to Western series at Universal, Columbia, RKO, and Republic. The Western was by far the dominant B genre of both the 1930s and, to a lesser degree, the 1940s. Poverty Row's Ajax put out oaters starring Harry Carey, then in his fifties. One entry in the form took the concept to an extreme: The Terror of Tiny Town (1938) was a Western with a cast consisting entirely of little people, made totally outside the studio system. It proved popular enough in independent bookings that Columbia picked it up for distribution.

  Series films drove the B economy through the first decade of sound. Fox ran Charlie Chan mysteries, Ritz Brothers comedies, and Jane Withers musicals simultaneously. At MGM, the Andy Hardy and Dr. Kildare series carried A-level budgets, while Poverty Row's Consolidated Pictures offered something rather different: Tarzan the Police Dog in a franchise proudly branded 'Melodramatic Dog Features.' By 1938, average film lengths revealed the studio hierarchy plainly. MGM features ran 87.9 minutes on average; Monogram's ran 60.0 minutes. Taves estimates that half of the eight major studios' films in the 1930s were B movies, and when Poverty Row's roughly three hundred annual productions are added in, approximately 75% of Hollywood films from the decade were classifiable as Bs.

  At the low end of Poverty Row sat PRC, which had its own house director: Edgar G. Ulmer, known as 'the Capra of PRC,' made films across every genre with his own crew. In 1943 alone, Ulmer directed Girls in Chains, Women in Bondage competitor Jive Junction, and the South Seas adventure Isle of Forgotten Sins. Val Lewton's horror unit at RKO became the era's most celebrated B factory; Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Body Snatcher (1945) were directed by Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, and others whose reputations grew only later.

• 4. Science Fiction, Horror, and the Atomic Age

  ›

  In January 1945, there were 96 drive-in theaters in the United States. A decade later, there were more than 3,700. That shift in exhibition infrastructure did more to sustain the independent B movie industry than almost any other single factor. Unpretentious pictures with familiar plots and reliable shock effects were ideal for auto-based film viewing and all its attendant distractions. At the same time, local television stations began running B genre films in late-night slots, spreading the concept of the midnight movie.

  Rocketship X-M, produced by small Lippert Pictures in 1950, is cited as possibly the first post-nuclear-holocaust film, sitting at the leading edge of a large cycle of low-budget pictures classifiable as 'atomic bomb cinema.' The fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, combined with anxieties about radioactive fallout from American atomic tests, powered science fiction and horror at the low-budget end of the industry. William Alland at Universal produced Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); Sam Katzman at Columbia produced It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), released by Allied Artists, treated conformist pressures allegorically. Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) was described as a cold-war fable spinning 'Korea, the army's obsessive secrecy, and America's post-war growth into one fantastic whole.'

  American International Pictures, founded in 1956 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff from a reorganization of their American Releasing Corporation, became the leading studio devoted entirely to B-cost productions. AIP rented its films on a percentage basis like A pictures rather than at a flat rate, keeping exploitation content alive in the age of TV. I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), made for about $100,000, earned a large multiple at the box office. Roger Corman received his first screen credits as writer and associate producer of Allied Artists' Highway Dragnet in 1954, then independently produced Monster from the Ocean Floor on a $12,000 budget in six days. He directed over fifty feature films through 1990 and, as of 2007, had more than 350 movies to his producing credit.

• 5. Exploitation and the Loosening of Censorship

  ›

  Russ Meyer released his first successful narrative nudie film, the comic Immoral Mr. Teas, in 1959. Five years later, his breakthrough Lorna combined sex, violence, and drama. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), made for about $45,000, ultimately became the most famous of his sexploitation pictures. It was aimed at the same drive-in circuit that screened AIP teen movies with titles like Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1966).

  Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, made with the lowest budget of his American career, earned against a production cost of $800,000, making it the most profitable film of 1960. Its mainstream release without the Production Code seal helped weaken U.S. film censorship. William Castle, responding to Psycho, made Homicidal (1961), an early step toward the slasher subgenre that took off later. Blood Feast (1963), made for approximately $24,000 by Herschell Gordon Lewis, established the gore or splatter film as its own category. Lewis's partner David F. Friedman distributed vomit bags to theatergoers and arranged an injunction against the film in Sarasota, Florida, a calculated stunt to generate publicity.

  The Production Code was officially scrapped in 1968. That year, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, produced by B horror veteran William Castle, became the first upscale Hollywood horror film in three decades and the year's seventh-biggest hit. Also that year, George Romero made Night of the Living Dead on weekends in and around Pittsburgh for $114,000. It built on the allegorical work of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, doubling as a thriller and an incisive commentary on the Vietnam War and domestic racial conflicts. In May 1969, Easy Rider premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Made for $501,000 and released by Columbia, it connected AIP/Corman alumni Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs with mainstream distribution.

• 6. Blaxploitation, Midnight Movies, and New Independence

  ›

  Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) is described as essentially a manifesto for an African American revolution. Melvin Van Peebles wrote, co-produced, directed, starred in, edited, and composed the music for the film, completing it with a loan from Bill Cosby. Its distributor was small Cinemation Industries, then best known for releasing dubbed Italian shockumentaries and Swedish skin films. Pam Grier, who became blaxploitation's biggest star, began with a bit part in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), then made The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972) for Roger Corman's New World Pictures before Jack Hill directed her two most famous AIP films, Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974).

  Barbara Loden spent six years raising funds before shooting Wanda (1970) on a budget of $115,000. Shot in 16 mm, it won the international critics' prize at the Venice Film Festival. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, made by Tobe Hooper for less than $300,000, became one of the most influential horror films of the 1970s. John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), produced for $320,000, grossed over worldwide and effectively established the slasher film as horror's primary mode for the following decade.

  The midnight movie circuit gave a second life to films the theatrical market had passed by. Night of the Living Dead was adopted by the new circuit in 1971, three years after its release. John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972), made entirely outside the studio system, became a midnight hit and spurred the independent film movement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), an inexpensive 20th Century Fox production, became an unparalleled cult hit when relaunched as a late show feature the year after its initial unprofitable release. The Warner Bros. release of The Exorcist, meanwhile, demonstrated that a heavily promoted horror film could be an absolute blockbuster, and by the end of the 1970s, the exploitation booking strategy of opening films simultaneously in hundreds to thousands of theaters had become standard industry practice across the majors.

• 7. Video, Collapse, and Legacy

  ›

  Allied Artists declared bankruptcy in April 1979, one of the first leading casualties of a new economic regime in which major studios routinely booked saturation releases in over a thousand theaters, making it increasingly difficult for smaller outfits to secure exhibition commitments. AIP, having turned to comparatively expensive productions like the Amityville Horror and the disastrous Meteor in 1979, was sold and dissolved as a filmmaking concern by the end of 1980. The average Hollywood production cost hit $8.5 million in 1980, roughly double what it had been four years earlier.

  Roger Corman sold New World at the beginning of 1983. His successor company, New Horizons (later Concorde-New Horizons), released Penelope Spheeris' punk-scene film Suburbia in 1984 to favorable reviews. Sam Raimi was a week shy of his twenty-second birthday when The Book of the Dead debuted in Detroit in October 1981, made for less than $400,000; star and co-executive producer Bruce Campbell was twenty-three. Picked up by New Line and retitled The Evil Dead, it became a hit. One of the few successful B studio startups of the decade was Rome-based Empire Pictures, whose first production, Ghoulies, reached theaters in 1985; its financial model relied on video store revenue rather than theatrical rentals.

  Troma Pictures, founded in 1974, issued its most characteristic productions in the 1980s: Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986), Redneck Zombies (1986), and Surf Nazis Must Die (1987). Troma's best-known production, The Toxic Avenger (1984), generated three sequels, a 2023 reboot, and a TV cartoon series. The drive-in had given B movies one exhibition lifeline in the 1950s; the video rental store gave them another in the 1980s. Both are now largely gone, but the careers launched in B pictures, and the techniques developed under their financial constraints, remain embedded in the mainstream cinema that displaced them.