Word: exploitationers
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They were the original movies your mother didn't want you to see. For half a century exploitation films--a robust compromise between stag loops and major-studio product--would grind away in Main Street fleabags and drive-ins, inflicting their lurid, no-budget fantasies on generations of bored salesmen...
The auteur kudos would give giggle fits to veteran sleazemasters, who saw films as just part of the con of peddling the promise of smut to suckers. If there was an art to grindhouse movies, it was the art of the spiel. As ace exploitation entrepreneur David F. Friedman (She...
As Prohibition created the bootleg-booze industry, Hollywood moralizing gave birth to exploitation films. With the adoption of a Production Code in 1922, the major studios ostensibly promised to renounce the ribald. Into that vacuum crept sideshowmen like Dwain Esper, who directed (ludicrously) and promoted (brilliantly) the first grindhouse classics...
Good, bad or worse, exploitation directors were the independent filmmakers in an era dominated by Hollywood. No one made black films for black audiences, so Micheaux did, beginning in 1918; and if his films often showed an actor waiting for him to bark out a stage direction, they satisfied their...
Exploitation films come in all genres, but the staple was sex. Kroger Babb, who billed himself as "Mr. Pihsnamwohs" (showmanship spelled backward), ballyhooed his 1944 birth-of-a-baby film, Mom and Dad, so successfully that it ran for decades and, according to the Grindhouse authors, earned $100 million. And...