"Behind the Scenes!: Exploitation Film Exposed"

Rachel Adams "Behind the Scenes!: Exploitation Film Exposed" (on Eric Schaefer, "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" A History ofExploitation Films, 1919-1959 [Durham: Duke UP, 1999]) During the shooting of Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), MGM employees were dismayed to find themselves sharing the studio commissary with the film's unusual cast of human sideshow attractions . One legendary incident involved a drunken F. Scott Fitzgerald—working as a screenwriter at the time, and prone to alcoholic binges—who found himself seated at a table with the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. The situation became unbearable when "one of them picked up the menu, and, without even looking at the other, asked, 'What are you going to have?'" (Skal and Savada 168). This mundane question, turned extraordinary by the fact that the interlocutor shared a body with its recipient, proved too much for the author, who immediately rushed outside to vomit. (This incident appears in muted form in Fitzgerald's story "Crazy Sunday," in Babylon Revisited.) It is not surprising that Fitzgerald, a writer whose life and fiction were marked by persistent class anxiety , would respond with such visceral disgust to the invasion of his workplaceby an element associated with the lowest forms of popular entertainment, the carnival freak show. MGM resolved the problem by providing the cast with a separate table outside, where they could dine together without offending the sensibilities of the studio's more conventional employees. This incident appears frequently in accounts of the film's production, for it is a perfect symbol of the controversialunion ofrîoiïywoodproductand carnivalfreakshow— a union also discussed by Skal and Savada, Brosnan, Morris and Viera, and Norden. The encounter between one of the nation's canonized literary figures and carnival freaks attests not only to the contentious relationship between elite and popular cultural forms, but to a stratification within the mainstream film industry itself. Typically grouped together under the rubric of popular culture, Hollywood films can in fact be subdivided according to an internal hierarchy based on studio, genre, and stars. Freaks in the commissary suggested a jarring violation of that order, which registered among the MGM employees in thegut-level responses of nausea, shuddering, and aversion . Freaks were a part of the older and less respectable forms of live entertainment found in sideshow tents, traveling carnivals, circuses , and dime museums. Their presence on the MGM lot transgressed the apparently secure boundary dividing the slick, glamor- 360 the minnesota review ous Hollywood industry (typified by the spectacular MGM musicals ) from the tawdry world ofcarnival. However, by the 1930s freaks belonged less to the domain of actual sideshows (which had been dwindling in popularity for several decades) than to exploitation film, a degraded genre that preserved many of the cinema's original ties to live entertainment. (See Bogdan for a history of freak shows and Gunning for an account of the relationship between "primitive " cinema and live entertainment.) Indeed, although Freaks was not produced as an exploitation film, after disastrous returns at the box office it was picked up by exploitation impresario Dwain Esper in the 1940s and recycled with a prefatory square-up that placed it firmly within the genre. The lumpy conglomeration of deliciously bad films that make up the exploitation genre are the subject of Eric Schaefer 's "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" A History ofExploitation Film, 1919-1959. The first scholarly work to grant this genre serious consideration, Schaefer's book provides a detailed account of the mode of production and distribution, form and content, and historical backdrop for the rise and fall of a constellation of films that have long been excluded from cinematic history. This elision is due in part to a perception that these films are simplistic and uninteresting. But they also pose practical problems to the film scholar; as a cheap and ephemeral form, prints were often destroyed or recycled, and neither records of production and distribution nor the films themselves were considered worthy ofarchival preservation. Schaefer's project is commendable for its creative and painstaking research alone, which reconstructs a history from neglected archival holdings, primary documents stored in private collections, and oral histories of those involved with the industry. While it would be...