Caída de rocas

Just as the freak show began its slow fade from popularity and acceptance in the 1930s, exploitation also experienced a gradual demise as a cultural force. By the 1950s, exploitation was suffering its death throes, its real heyday essentially at an end. Those remaining exploiteers who doggedly continued the roadshow tradition had no new edu- cational wares to peddle and were forced to recycle old prints of Mom and Dad or Because of Eve for the burgeoning drive-in circuit (delivering their lectures via micro- phone from the concession stand).

An age of on-screen permissiveness was dawning and the cheaply made sexploitation and gore-cinema of the late 1950s and early ’60s usurped the once mighty reign of exploitation as America’s favorite breaker of taboos. No longer bound by the educational pretense of its predecessor, this new breed of carnal cinema was allowed to dispense with the creaky “moral” tone of classic exploitation, and showed as much nudity as a tissue-thin plot could sustain. Since guilty consciences no longer needed to be assuaged by medical authority, the exploitation conventions of roadshowing films and live lecturers also became unnecessary. The nudie movie business boomed and low-budget sex films were able to find distribution in greater numbers, especially since they no longer required the delicate handling typical of an exploitation roadshow.

With the birth of exploitation’s naughty upstart child, sexploitation, there also came a distinct change in the underground cinema’s tone. Quaint fears of marijuana’s effects and the nightmare outcome of premarital sex shifted with films of the ’50s and ’60s. These films boasted a harsher, more nihilistic tone, with scenes of rape and gore-drenched violence becoming more prevalent in subterranean fare labeled “roughies” and “ghoulies.” The equation of sex with violence that would come to dominate the slasher cinema of the 1970s replaced the relatively carefree cat fights of Maniac and Test Tube Babies. A genre founded on innuendo and tease was steamrolled by an audacious new age, though as critic David Chute rightly notes of the sexploitation and gore to come, ultimately, “the newer pictures bore because they don’t flirt.”1

This new cycle of sinema was pioneered by former roadshowman David Friedman and a new breed of filmmaker, Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose 1963 Blood Feast was one of the definitive shockers of its day, an epically bloody tale of ritual sacrifice and nude women. While Lewis established himself as one of the pioneers of lowbrow gore, “King of the Nudies” Russ Meyer carved his own niche in sleaze circles with a prototypical “nudie-cutie” flick, 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas. Foreshadowing a new breed of sex cinema dis- tinct from classic exploita- Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)

tion, The Immoral Mr. Teas featured a glossy, polished surface (indebted to its colos- sal—in classic exploitation terms—$24,000 budget) and the unapologetic thrill of show- ing naked women without an educational screen to hide its naughty wares. Such films also had a distinctly saucy, comical, all-American breeziness that countered the pecu- liar mix of moralizing and thrills that made exploitation so uniquely guilt-ridden.

The floodgates of film filth to come were thus opened as the Golden Era of the exploiteer died. As chronicler of the exploiteer’s code, David Friedman in A Youth in Babylon noted in typically alliterative, flamboyant carny prose about the dwindling draw of a 1958 run of Because of Eve:

Our shows were beginning to show their age. Customers were being offered more skin on screen than ever before, movies where the showgoer didn’t have to endure some “professor’s” preachment and dire warnings of the perils of promiscuity, then be incited to pop for a buck or two for some thin little biology home-study books. (p.214)

As the carnal cinema “progressed” to something less educational and more ex- plicit, the importance of craftiness and creativity in the making and marketing of films steadily diminished. As exploitation evolved—some might say devolved—into sexploitation, the genre lost not only its innocence but also its charm.

In his handbook for aspiring starlets, Hollywood Rat Race, Ed Wood Jr. also la- mented the arrival of “nudie cuties” in no uncertain terms.

Cured of their diseases and enlightened as to the workings of the reproductive system, John Parker and Wanda McKay in Because of Eve, bid farewell to the age of exploitation.

These particular films have no purpose beyond titillating with sex and the naked female, of course, and it wouldn’t be difficult to deter- mine what kind of person is buying a ticket. There are perverts in all walks of life who can find something in these films. Of course, there are the “sleazy producers” who put out pure, unadulterated crap strictly for this type of demented individual... There is little or no story line, just one weak excuse after another to incident after incident, so the girls take their clothes off in front of the camera... Once you see the film you’ll want to vomit.2

Self-righteous on the surface, Wood’s text is tragically self-loathing when one considers the director’s own circum- stance at the time, already entrenched in the “nudie cutie” genre. By the time Wood penned this furious indictment he’d already written the atrocious graveyard striptease film Orgy of the Dead, and would later script and ap- pear in other, more explicit low-end sex pictures. But there’s something to Wood’s rage at his audi- ence of perverts. While exploitation undoubtedly attracted its share, it was also a disreputable, under- ground cinema that drew from many walks of life, attracting both men and women, those looking for a little skin and others, looking for a little enlight- enment.

The fall of regional censorship (and the consequential end of exploitation) was also accelerated by foreign “art films” of the 1950s, whose poster art capitalized on the looser European standards where nudity was concerned, playing up luscious female stars like Sophia Loren, Harriet Andersson and Brigitte Bardot. This rash of foreign imports gave old-time exploitation a run for its money, since these films were sellable as both sophisticated art films and babe-oramas in keeping with the exploitation play- it-both-ways approach. And while exploitation operated in respectability’s shadows, Was Ed Wood referring to his 1965 schlock-strip film Orgy

of the Dead when he said, “Once you see the film you’ll want to vomit?”

the new breed of Euro-titillation was booked into legitimate theaters and often endorsed by mainstream critics rather than by fictitious medi- cal boards and phantom clergymen. Even the wiliest exploiteers could no longer compete with the randy Euro-sinema typified by Bardot’s And God Created Woman, a film Friedman pinpointed as the C-cup omen of exploitation’s doom.

By the 1950s, what could be called the “true” exploitation film was disappearing, its most unique feature—the roadshow—essen- tially withered away, the golden age of the genre giving way to an unin- spired rash of conventional teen melodramas, banal sexploitation and cheapo gore.

In Hollywood, two other fac- tors contributed to the extinction of

the exploitation film. One was the Supreme Court’s decision to apply the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to motion pictures in 1948. The studios which had formerly controlled all phases of the industry—production, distribution, exhibition—were ordered to stop such complete, unilateral control of the motion picture business. And because the studios were no longer producing enormous amounts of product to fill their own film screens, exhibitors could now choose which features they wanted for their theaters and not have to fill their cinematic dance cards with second-rate B-picture product. Exhibi- tors increasingly turned to the new crop of independent filmmakers to stock their screens. The reason behind Hollywood’s move away from high-quantity, mid-quality pro- grammers was the bite taken out of the market by television and the geographic disper- sion of audiences. With postwar audiences now fleeing urban centers for the suburbs, movie houses were not as accessible as before and could certainly not compete with television, which provided its entertainment for free. Hollywood’s ticket sales were declining and the industry fought back by offering blockbuster productions, new tech- nology such as CinemaScope, 3-D and all variety of color processes to distinguish its product. The only other way Hollywood could compete with TV was in offering audi- ences something they could not get at home, namely adult themes and sexual material. The definitive blow to Hollywood’s Production Code came in the Supreme Court’s 1952 decision concerning Roberto Rossellini’s Italian film The Miracle, blocked by the New York State Board of Censors for its treatment of religious matters. Contrary to prevailing laws which classified film as pure profit-driven entertainment, the Supreme Court (in Burstyn v. Wilson) ruled that films are “a significant medium for the commu- nication of ideas,” summarily deflating the balloon of hyperbole and moral crusading that made exploitation films exceptional.

By the 1950s, ads appeared without any mention of pressing social concerns or educational value.

The Supreme Court ruled that movies had the same rights under the First Amend- ment as other protected forms of speech such as newspapers and magazines, a decision which led to a definitive revision of the Pro- duction Code in 1956. Audiences could now enjoy previously forbidden themes and top- ics only the underground exploitation film could treat in the ’30s and ’40s. In the 1950s, Hollywood trespassed upon exploitation’s terrain with films like the capital punishment shocker I Want To Live! and The Man With the Golden Arm, a tale of heroin addiction starring Frank Sinatra. And, making their product even more appealing, Hollywood of- fered these new libidinal, scandalous sub- jects with its typical high-gloss, big-budget treatment, offering audiences the thrill of fa- vorite stars acting out dramas culled from newspaper headlines and police records as once only unknown actors could. Almost as pleasurable as a real scandal (like the Robert Mitchum pot bust) was watching Susan Hayward or Sinatra or Jack Lemmon reduced to a hardboiled junkie or trembling alcoholic in sordid performances that stoked the two-pronged public lust for celebrities and a glimpse into the darker side of life.

But showmanship cannot be easily vanquished, and the 1950s saw the spirit of exploitation appearing in unusual new forms, like the spook shows which bore a strong resemblance to exploitation. In this tiny subgenre, traveling showmen toured towns with one or two outmoded horror films, and supplemented the double feature with live performances of magic and illusionism. Almost surpassing the already fraudulent hype of many exploitation films, spook shows routinely promised live appearances by ev- eryone from Frankenstein and Dracula to the ghost of James Dean (via rubber masks or glow-in-the-dark placards paraded up and down the darkened theaters’ aisles). Spook shows raffled off “live babies” (baby chicks, that is) and employed every conceivable form of Barnum-esque trickery to coax audiences into the seats.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, Columbia Pictures producer William Castle took obvi- ous note of exploitation’s potential and adapted similar methods of hype to promote his own series of cornball horror films. Audience polls, inflatable skeletons on strings, electrified seats and insurance policies (against death by fright) are only a few of Castle’s innovations that returned to the moviegoing experience the carnivalesque atmosphere of exploitation.

But though the true exploitation film eventually faded away, the contributions of the Golden Age of exploitation cinema to popular culture remain, surfacing sporadi- cally in Tim Burton’s bio-pic of visionary (but technically inept) filmmaker Ed Wood, (which was based on Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy, a far more compelling survey of the cinematic madman’s career). The genre’s remnants can also be found in less obvious places such as the campy, irony-laden exploitation retreads of John Waters

(whose scratch-and-sniff Polyester paid homage to the florid gimmickry of Will- iam Castle) and in more serious homages to exploitation seen in David Lynch’s postmodern morality tales.

Though he has not discussed the in- fluence of the exploitation film upon his work, the genre is clearly reflected in the road-to-ruin plots of Blue Velvet and Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series. Linked to the Depression-era fables of wholesome American kids drawn by their own curi- osity down a path of sexual peril, Lynch’s films feature exploitation extremes like the ultra-wholesome Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) of Blue Velvet, who cross over to the wrong side of the tracks and are physi- cally and psychologically ravaged by the contemporary incarnation of exploitation’s white slavers and dope dealers, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). The predicament of a respectable and happily married fa-

ther coming face-to-face with his seemingly innocent daughter who is secretly work- ing as a prostitute occurs in the 1928 version of Road to Ruin and twice in Lynch’s work (Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). Less specifically, Lynch’s films embrace the artificiality of the exploitation film, its tendency toward excess, its use of saccharine sentimentality and all-American iconography, not to mention the wonders and horrors of medical technology (The Elephant Man, the father’s hospital room in Blue Velvet, the abortion in Wild at Heart and the dental hygiene tableaux that appear in Images, Lynch’s book of photography).

Lynch’s TV series (Twin Peaks) and movie (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) storylines were prototypical exploitation, with their tales of innocent high school girls corrupted by overage drug dealers and pimps at the Roadhouse, a remote center of illicit activity clearly referencing the classic exploitation dens of iniquity. While Lynch’s Roadhouse featured a swinger’s club in its bowels, his Twin Peaks brothel, One-Eyed Jack’s, recruited its high school prostitutes from the local department store, like the manicurist shop in Slaves in Bondage which also lured gullible smalltown girls into a netherworld of prostitution.

Other films, like the 1975 exploitation parody The Rocky Horror Picture Show also reference those long-ago tales of sexual degradation. Featuring a medical lecture by a pompous-but-clueless Dr. Know It All, Everett Scott, The Rocky Horror Picture Show centered upon a typically clean-cut pair of sweethearts, Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon). Brad and Janet’s timidity mimes the Squaresville blundering of exploitation’s teenyboppers, provoking their own degrada- tion by transsexual Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Rocky’s savvy tongue-in-cheek send-up of Directed by John Waters, a former disciple of exploitation, Pink Flamingos embodies much of the excessive raunch and gritty charm that made the genre so memorable.

classic exploitation. The film’s cult fol- lowing, which centered on audience par- ticipation, also echoes the exploitation film’s fusion of live performance and film and a more elastic relationship be- tween film and audience.

But exploitation’s legacy is not re- stricted to conscious directorial odes to this lost chapter of film history. Ameri- can culture remains fascinated with the connection between sex and death exam- ined in exploitation’s sex hygiene melo- dramas and true crime documentaries, and anxious to explore the taboo subjects kept hidden from the public. This thirst for the unknown has saturated the low- est and highest reaches of American life, from the visual arts to the tawdry fixa- tions of tabloid TV.

The highbrow reaches of the visual arts and academia have lately shown an interest in exploring the same taboo sub- jects of death and disease which so fas- cinated exploitation’s producers and au- diences. It seems the cultural elite are as prone to ghoulish interest in the great unknowns as the “hayseed” exploitation audiences of the ’30s and ’40s.

The traveling exhibition “Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence” curated by San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (and documented in an accompanying book) featured elaborate charts of criminal features—characteristic noses, eyes, lips, to be used in identifying the criminal visage, in eugenical tradition—as well as crime scene images of murder victims, surveillance photos and a host of photographs which may re-contextualize death as socially and historically significant art, but indulge the same curiosity about taboo subjects seen in exploitation.

Photographers like Weegee, Brassai, Diane Arbus and Mathew Brady delivered early dispatches from an unseen world of deformed bodies, suicide and grisly battle- fields, but current photographers like Joel-Peter Witkin and Andres Serrano have re- verted to this still provocative subject matter. Famous for his publicly condemned “blasphemous” image “Piss Christ,” Serrano has recently documented various global sexual practices in his photographic survey, “A History of Sex” and dead bodies in his hypnotically beautiful series of color photographs “The Morgue.” Serrano’s work re- calls the syphilis-ravaged bodies and graphic scalpel incision of a cesarean section in early exploitation which was so unimaginatively replaced by the T&A centered sexploitation. Though such artists do not specifically reference exploitation films, they show the continued cultural interest in the themes exploitation films explored: the In its tale of strayed sweethearts discovering

new worlds of vice and degeneracy, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a true tongue-in- cheek exploitation film, complete with cam- era address by the eminent Dr. Scott.

same fascination with bodily functions hidden by a modern culture that denies the bloody reality of death and birth.

The 1973 book that signaled a new interest in the country’s secret history, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, about the hidden stories of disease, murder and suicide operating beneath the surface of a turn-of-the century Wisconsin town, inaugurated a trickle of examinations of the taboo. Recently that trickle has evolved into a pre- millennial torrent. Books such as Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook, Looking at Death and Death in Paradise: An Illustrated History of the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner revisit the visual outrages of the “March of Crime” documentaries and exploitation lobby displays of death cars, mummies and drug para- phernalia. A rash of books have also resuscitated exploitation’s curiosity about the body, from Luc Sante’s haunting collection of black-and-white photographs of 1910s crime scenes, Evidence, to the pioneering work of medical archivist Stanley B. Burns, who documents the medical community’s often prurient, sexual obsession with photo- graphically representing its patients’ bodies.

But hardly restricted to academic theorizing of “the body” and subcultural interest in grisly, truthful antidotes to America’s white-washed past, even a more middlebrow and middle-of-the-road public soaks up the same viscera-fascination nightly on televi- sion programs such as America’s Most Wanted, Rescue 911 and Unsolved Mysteries, in serial killer true crime novels, National Enquirer headlines and Faces of Death videos. Faux news programs like Hard Copy, talk shows, or A&E Biography with their pre- tense of enlightening the public and their pandering treatments of the most grotesque subject matter can make early exploitation look tasteful by comparison.