The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-budget Cinema

NOTES

217 NOTES THE Bs TAKE FLIGHT 1. Many scholars see B-films as a distinct product of the 1930s/1940s, such as Brian Taves, who suggests that using the term to widely encompass “bad” films of all decades is inaccurate, given that “there is little comparison in either content or style between the 1930s B and the low-budget pictures of the 1950s and beyond; applying the B label to such widely different forms as exploitation, 1950s horror and sci-fi, and 1980s slasher films is a misnomer. Properly speaking, the historical context of the B belongs to the studio era of double bills, when such movies operated in relation to, and as a variation on, the principles of classical filmmaking” (“The B Film: Hollywood’s Other Half,” in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939, ed. Tino Balio, History of the American Cinema series [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993], 350). This book proceeds from the idea that while the 1950s B-film often retained many aspects of the production process of prior decades, it evolved into a product that frequently challenged A-films at the box office. With my own definition of the B-film, including films of later decades that similarly functioned within relatively limited economic contexts, I hope to bring renewed attention to the very low-budget nature of such films themselves, and how exactly such limitations determined their content and style—thereby challenging the “B = bad” mentality that persists among many film audiences and has limited the scholarly attention that B- films receive. 2. Michael Conant explains that under block-booking policies, distributors “charged less than the highest possible price for superior films and more for inferior films than if sold singly. Many mediocre films,” namely B-movies, “would never have earned their costs of production had the distributor tried to market them singly, each on its own merits. In this way block booking enabled distributors to shift a part of the market uncertainties to the exhibitors by guaranteeing that poorly accepted pictures would be bought. By insuring a market for the season’s output, block booking helped the producer-distributors to secure financing for production. As to the policy of deliberately making class B pictures and block booking them with class A films, the . . . motives were to assure full utilization of production and distribution plant by making a supplementary group of low-cost films, and to secure and maintain long-run control of the marketplace. The effect of block booking as a long-run market policy, when followed by seven distributors in combination, was to preempt independent exhibitors’ playing time and thus foreclose entry into the market to independent distributors” (Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis [New York: Arno Press, 1978], 79). 3. Thomas Emerson Hall and J. David Ferguson, The Great Depression: An International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 4. 4. Thomas Doherty, “This Is Where We Came In: The Audible Screen and the Voluble Audiences of Early Sound Cinema,” in American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 146–148; Frank S. Nugent, “What’s Wrong with the Movies?” New York Times Magazine, 20 November 1938, 24–26. The movie quiz contest was prompted in 1938 by Fox West Coast Theatres head (and later Twentieth Century–Fox chairman) Spyros Skouras, who got other theater chains involved in the event as well. 5. Douglas Gomery, “The Economics of U.S. Film Exhibition Policy and Practice,” CineTracts 12 (Winter 1981): 37. 6. Ibid., 37–38; Tino Balio, “Surviving the Great Depression,” in Balio, Grand Design, 28–29. “The first-run houses of the major chains tendered double bills” in the early 1930s, says Gomery, “but not in the numbers of their independent competitors. The mix varied. Some exhibitors presented two or more A films, others an A and B, still others three B’s. Theatre owners constantly varied combinations in order to gain an edge on nearby competitors.” 7. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (London: Macmillan, 1986), 19; Gomery, “Economics,” 39. 8. Paul Kerr, “Out of What Past? Notes on the B Film Noir,” in The Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul Kerr (London: Routledge, 1986), 227. 9. Balio, “Surviving the Great Depression,” 29. 10. Andre Senwald, “As the Old Year Draws to a Close,” New York Times, 29 December 1935...