B movie: the story on HearLore

B movie

In 1927, a single film called That Certain Thing cost less than twenty thousand dollars to produce, a sum that would barely cover the petty cash of a major studio's A-picture department. This tiny expenditure marked the birth of a new cinematic entity that would eventually dominate the American movie industry for decades. Before sound arrived in 1929, studios used cheap films to keep their facilities busy and train new talent, but the real revolution came when theaters began pairing these low-budget pictures with feature films to create the double feature. The second feature, which actually screened before the main event, cost the exhibitor less per minute than the equivalent running time in shorts, allowing small-town and urban neighborhood venues to survive economically. By 1935, half of all films produced by the eight major studios were B movies, and when combined with the three hundred or so films made annually by Poverty Row firms, approximately seventy-five percent of Hollywood movies from the decade were classifiable as B pictures. The Western was by far the predominant B genre in both the 1930s and 1940s, with studios like Republic Pictures producing films such as Pals of the Saddle that lasted just fifty-five minutes, an average for the era's Three Mesquiteers adventures. These films were not merely filler; they were the backbone of a system that allowed theaters to offer quantity and variety to audiences who demanded something of interest no matter what specifically was on the bill. The term B movie originally connoted a general perception that these films were inferior to the more lavishly budgeted headliners, yet they provided a unique platform for actors like John Wayne and Jack Nicholson to establish their careers before moving to the big leagues. The B movie was a creature of necessity, born from the economic pressures of the Great Depression and the technological shift to sound, evolving from a simple cost-saving measure into a cultural phenomenon that shaped the American imagination for generations.

Poverty Row And The Golden Age Of Horror

While the major studios like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount focused on their A-list productions, a parallel universe of filmmaking thrived on Poverty Row, where shoestring operations made films whose costs might run as low as three thousand dollars. These micro-budget movies, often known as quickies, were produced in schedules as short as four days to meet the constant demand for new product in the thousands of smaller, independent theaters. In 1940, the average production cost of an American feature was four hundred thousand dollars, a negligible increase over ten years, yet the line between A and B movies remained ambiguous as films shot on B-level budgets occasionally emerged as sleeper hits. One of the most famous of the major studios' Golden Age B units was Val Lewton's horror unit at RKO, which produced moody, mysterious films such as Cat People in 1942 and I Walked with a Zombie in 1943. These films, directed by Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise, were released by Poverty Row's Eagle-Lion firm and are now widely described as the first classic film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor, a sixty-four-minute B that was produced at RKO. The other major studios also turned out a considerable number of movies now identified as noir during the 1940s, though most of the best-known film noirs were A-level productions. In 1947, PRC's The Devil on Wheels brought together teenagers, hot rods, and death, and the little studio had its own house auteur: with his own crew and relatively free rein, director Edgar G. Ulmer was known as the Capra of PRC. Ulmer made films of every generic stripe, including Girls in Chains released in May 1943 and Isle of Forgotten Sins, a South Seas adventure set around a brothel. The B movie was not just about cheap thrills; it was a space for experimentation where directors like Anthony Mann and Ida Lupino could explore taboo subjects such as rape in 1950's Outrage and 1953's The Bigamist. 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, creating a cycle of movies classifiable as atomic bomb cinema. Science fiction, horror, and various hybrids of the two were now of central economic importance to the low-budget end of the business, with films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers treating conformist pressures and the evil of banality in haunting, allegorical fashion.

When did the B movie genre originate and what was the first film?

The B movie genre originated in 1927 with the film That Certain Thing, which cost less than twenty thousand dollars to produce. This tiny expenditure marked the birth of a new cinematic entity that would eventually dominate the American movie industry for decades.

What was the average production cost of an American feature film in 1940?

In 1940, the average production cost of an American feature was four hundred thousand dollars. This figure represented a negligible increase over the previous ten years, yet the line between A and B movies remained ambiguous.

Who is known as the King of the Bs and when did he produce his first movie?

Roger Corman is known as the King of the Bs and he produced his first movie, Monster from the Ocean Floor, in 1956. He made this film on a twelve thousand dollar budget and a six-day shooting schedule.

When was the Production Code officially scrapped and what replaced it?

The Production Code was officially scrapped in 1968 to be replaced by the first version of the modern rating system. That same year, films like Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead heralded new directions for American cinema.

What year did the average Hollywood feature film cost reach eight point five million dollars?

The average expense of moviemaking hit eight point five million dollars in 1980. This cost had doubled from two million dollars to four million between 1961 and 1976, and then more than doubled again in just four years.

When was Troma Pictures founded and what is its best-known production?

Troma Pictures was founded in 1974 and its best-known production is The Toxic Avenger. This film features a hideous hero affectionately known as Toxie, who was featured in three sequels, a 2023 reboot, and a TV cartoon series.

The King Of The Bs And The Teenage Revolution

In 1956, a young filmmaker named Roger Corman received his first screen credits as writer and associate producer of Allied Artists' Highway Dragnet, but he soon independently produced his first movie, Monster from the Ocean Floor, on a twelve thousand dollar budget and a six-day shooting schedule. Often referred to as the King of the Bs, Corman has said that to his way of thinking, he never made a B movie in his life, as the traditional B movie was dying out when he began making pictures. He prefers to describe his metier as low-budget exploitation films, and he directed over fifty feature films through 1990, with more than three hundred fifty movies to his credit as of 2007. Corman's influence extended far beyond his own films; he helped launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Robert Towne, and Robert De Niro, among many others. In 1957, American International Pictures, founded by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, became the leading American studio devoted entirely to B-cost productions. The success of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, made for about one hundred thousand dollars, brought AIP a large return, and the studio relied on both fantastic genre subjects and new, teen-oriented angles. When Hot Rod Gang turned a profit, hot rod horror was given a try with Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow in 1959. David Cook credits AIP with leading the way in demographic exploitation, target marketing, and saturation booking, all of which became standard procedure for the majors in planning and releasing their mass-market event films by the late 1970s. The postwar drive-in theater boom was vital to the expanding independent B movie industry, with the number of drive-ins in the United States rising from ninety-six in January 1945 to more than three thousand seven hundred a decade later. Unpretentious pictures with simple, familiar plots and reliable shock effects were ideally suited for auto-based film viewing, with all its attendant distractions. The phenomenon of the drive-in movie became one of the defining symbols of American popular culture in the 1950s, and at the same time, many local television stations began showing B genre films in late-night slots, popularizing the notion of the midnight movie. In 1959, Joseph E. Levine's Embassy Pictures bought the worldwide rights to Hercules, a cheaply made Italian movie starring American-born bodybuilder Steve Reeves, and spent an unprecedented amount on advertising and publicity. The strategy was a smashing success, with the film earning millions in domestic rentals and even more overseas, setting the stage for the exploitation philosophy that would dominate Hollywood in the decades to follow.

Exploitation And The Death Of The Code

In 1960, Roger Corman took American International Pictures down a new road, convincing them to finance one horror film in color instead of two ten-day black-and-white horror films to play as a double feature. The resulting House of Usher typifies the continuing ambiguities of B picture classification, as it was clearly an A film by the standards of both director and studio, with the longest shooting schedule and biggest budget Corman had ever enjoyed, yet it is generally seen as a B movie. The schedule was still a mere fifteen days, the budget just two hundred thousand dollars, one tenth the industry average, and its eighty-five-minute running time close to an old thumbnail definition of the B. The 1960s saw exploitation-style themes and imagery become increasingly central to the realm of the B, with the combination of intensive and gimmick-laden publicity with movies featuring vulgar subject matter and often outrageous imagery. The most famous of those promoters, Kroger Babb, was in the vanguard of marketing low-budget, sensationalistic films with a 100 percent saturation campaign, inundating the target audience with ads in almost any imaginable medium. In the late 1950s, as more of the old grindhouse theaters devoted themselves specifically to adult product, a few filmmakers began making nudies with greater attention to plot, with Russ Meyer releasing his first successful narrative nudie, the comic Immoral Mr. Teas, in 1959. Five years later, Meyer came out with his breakthrough film, Lorna, which combined sex, violence, and a dramatic storyline, and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in 1965, made for about forty-five thousand dollars, ultimately became the most famous of Meyer's sexploitation pictures. The Production Code was officially scrapped in 1968, to be replaced by the first version of the modern rating system, and that year, two horror films came out that heralded directions American cinema would take in the next decade. One was a high-budget Paramount production, directed by the celebrated Roman Polanski, Rosemary's Baby, produced by B horror veteran William Castle, and the other was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, produced on weekends in and around Pittsburgh for one hundred fourteen thousand dollars. Romero's film doubled as a highly effective thriller and an incisive allegory for both the Vietnam War and domestic racial conflicts, and its greatest influence derived from its clever subversion of genre clichés and the connection made between its exploitation-style imagery, low-cost, truly independent means of production, and high profitability. In 1969, for the first time a Russ Meyer film, Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!, was reviewed in The New York Times, and soon, Corman was creating nudity-filled sexploitation pictures such as Private Duty Nurses and Women in Cages.

The Midnight Movie And The Independent Renaissance

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, and Wanda is both a seminal event in the independent film movement and a classic B picture. The crime-based plot and often seedy settings would have suited a straightforward exploitation film or an old-school B noir, and the one hundred fifteen thousand dollar 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 the 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. One of the first films adopted by the new circuit in 1971 was the three-year-old Night of the Living Dead, and the midnight movie success of low-budget pictures made entirely outside the studio system, like John Waters' Pink Flamingos in 1972, with its campy spin on exploitation, spurred the development of the independent film movement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 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. Asian martial arts films began appearing as imports regularly during the 1970s, and these kung fu films as they were often called were popularized in the United States by the Hong Kong-produced movies of Bruce Lee. Horror continued to attract young, independent American directors, and in 1974, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, made for less than three hundred thousand dollars, became one of the most influential horror films of the 1970s. John Carpenter's Halloween in 1978, produced on a three hundred twenty thousand dollar budget, grossed over one hundred million dollars worldwide and effectively established the slasher flick as horror's primary mode for the next decade. 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, and in the 1970s, original feature-length programming increasingly began to echo the B movie as well. The reverberations of Easy Rider could be felt in such pictures, as well as in a host of theatrical exploitation films, but its greatest influence on the fate of the B movie was less direct, as by 1973, the major studios were catching on to the commercial potential of genres once largely consigned to the bargain basement.

The Blockbuster Era And The Video Revolution

In 1975, Steven Spielberg's creature feature Jaws and George Lucas's space opera Star Wars had each, in turn, become the highest-grossing film in motion picture history, and Superman, released in December 1978, had proved that a studio could spend millions on a movie about a children's comic book character and turn a big profit. Blockbuster fantasy spectacles like the original 1933 King Kong had once been exceptional; in the new Hollywood, increasingly under the sway of multi-industrial conglomerates, they ruled. It had taken a decade and a half, from 1961 to 1976, for the production cost of the average Hollywood feature to double from two million dollars to four million, and in just four years it more than doubled again, hitting eight point five million dollars in 1980. Even as the U.S. inflation rate eased, the average expense of moviemaking continued to soar, and with the majors now routinely saturation booking in over a thousand theaters, it was becoming increasingly difficult for smaller outfits to secure the exhibition commitments needed to turn a profit. Double features were now literally history, almost impossible to find except at revival houses, and one of the first leading casualties of the new economic regime was venerable B studio Allied Artists, which declared bankruptcy in April 1979. In the late 1970s, AIP had turned to producing relatively expensive films like the very successful Amityville Horror and the disastrous Meteor in 1979, and the studio was sold off and dissolved as a moviemaking concern by the end of 1980. Despite the mounting financial pressures, distribution obstacles, and overall risk, many genre movies from small studios and independent filmmakers were still reaching theaters, and horror was the strongest low-budget genre of the time, particularly in the slasher mode as with The Slumber Party Massacre in 1982. At the beginning of 1983, Corman sold New World, and New Horizons, later Concorde, New Horizons, became his primary company. In 1984, New Horizons released a critically applauded movie set amid the punk scene written and directed by Penelope Spheeris, and the New York Times review concluded that Suburbia is a good genre film. The video rental market was becoming central to B film economics, and Empire Pictures' financial model relied on seeing a profit not from theatrical rentals, but only later, at the video store. One of the most successful 1980s B studios was a survivor from the heyday of the exploitation era, Troma Pictures, founded in 1974, and Troma's most characteristic productions, including Class of Nuke 'Em High and Redneck Zombies, take exploitation for an absurdist spin. Troma's best-known production is The Toxic Avenger, its hideous hero, affectionately known as Toxie, was featured in three sequels, a 2023 reboot and a TV cartoon series, and one of the few successful B studio startups of the decade was Rome-based Empire Pictures, whose first production, Ghoulies, reached theaters in 1985.