Background
Elmer Rhoden Jr. was a Kansas City motion picture theater exhibitor, president of the prominent Commonwealth Theaters chain in Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Rhoden wanted to get into producing movies. He had the distributing apparatus at hand and the necessary capital to invest. Although television was drawing viewers out of the theaters, teenagers still frequented theaters, and, soon, film producers realized that there was a large “teen market” they could tap in to. During the mid-to-late 1950s, following the success of movies by American International Pictures aimed at the teenage market such as Shake, Rattle & Rock! and Hot Rod Girl, a huge wave of films, often referred to as exploitation films, were later produced by the major Hollywood studios and independents alike. Common subjects of 1950s teen films included juvenile delinquency, rock and roll, horror, science fiction, and hot rods. Rhoden Jr. was one of the first independent exhibitors to note these shifts in the film industry and was determined to make it work for his business.
Due to the “consent decree” component of the “Paramount Ruling” of 1953, the major studios were constrained from booking their own chains by this antitrust ruling. But the Commonwealth circuit and other small regional independent film companies, by virtue of not having previously existed as film producers, were exempt from this rule. It was the beginning of the days of the low-budget regional filmmaker, and Rhoden figured that if he budgeted his “teen-flicks” cheaply enough and peddled them to his own Commonwealth chain, he would be guaranteed a tidy profit. So, in the spring of 1956, he raised $63,000 with the help of other local businessmen in Kansas City, decided his first teen film would be about troubled teens, thought up a title for it and nothing else, and hired local filmmaker Robert Altman (who knew Rhoden Jr. casually and had been directing industrial films and documentaries for the local Calvin Company) to write and direct the film.
Using several starting points such as Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, and Rebel Without a Cause for influence, Altman wrote the screenplay for The Delinquents in five to seven days.
Read more about this topic: The Delinquents (1957 film)
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