B Movies (Transition in The 1950s) - AIP and Corman

AIP and Corman

The Amazing Colossal Man was released by a new company whose name was much bigger than its budgets. American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff in a reorganization of their American Releasing Corporation (ARC), soon became the leading U.S. studio devoted entirely to B-priced productions. American International helped keep the original-release double bill alive through paired packages of its films: these movies were low-budget, but the economic model was different from that of the traditional B movie—instead of a flat rate, they were rented out on a percentage basis, like A films. I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) is perhaps the best known AIP film of the era. Guided by experienced genre writer-producer Herman Cohen, the movie starred a twenty-year-old Michael Landon. As its title suggests, AIP sought audiences not only with fantastic genre subjects, but also with new, teen-oriented angles. One exemplary film, Daddy-O (aka Out on Probation; 1958), sported the tagline "Alive!! With the Beat and the Heat of Today's Rock-N-Roll Generation!" If Hot Rod Gang (1958) worked, then why wouldn't hot rod horror? Result: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959). AIP is credited with having "led the way...in demographic exploitation, target marketing, and saturation booking, all of which would become standard procedure for the majors in planning and releasing their mass-market 'event' films" by the late 1970s.

At least in terms of content, the majors were already there, putting out low-budget "J.D." movies such as Warner Bros.' Untamed Youth (1957), starring Mamie Van Doren, and MGM's High School Confidential (1958), with Van Doren and Russ Tamblyn. In Bill Osgerby's description, these films "purported to preach against the 'evils' of juvenile crime, yet simultaneously provided young audiences with the vicarious thrills of delinquent rebellion", a gambit as old as St. Augustine, if not the Hollywood hills themselves. Variety's review of the Van Doren vehicle Girls Town (1959) declared, "The screenplay of the film is as flimsy as a G-string, and designed for somewhat the same purpose. It includes all the staples of the exploitation film—a drag race, a necking party, the flip and shallow conversation of a segment of youth, the slight and unconvincing nod to conventional morality at the ending."

In 1954, a young filmmaker named Roger Corman received his first screen credits as writer and associate producer of Allied Artists' Highway Dragnet. Later that year, he independently produced his first movie, The Monster from the Ocean Floor, on a $12,000 budget and a six-day shooting schedule. In 1955, Corman produced and directed the first official ARC release, Apache Woman, one of five movies he had a hand in directing that year. Within a few months he would direct Day the World Ended, half of Arkoff and Nicholson's first twin-bill package, and one of the first AIP films, It Conquered the World. Corman would go on to direct over fifty feature films through 1990. As of 2007, he remained active as a producer, with more than 350 movies to his credit. Often referred to as the "King of the B's", the historically sensitive Corman has said that "to my way of thinking, I never made a 'B' movie in my life", as B movies, in the classic Hollywood sense of the term, were dying out by the time he began making pictures. He prefers to describe his metier as "low-budget exploitation films." In later years Corman, both with AIP and as head of his own companies, would help launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Robert De Niro, among many others.