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

Introduction

B-movies are frequently labeled as simply being “bad” films, both historically within the film industry and by many modern critics and fans. What this overlooks is how vital B-films have been overall to cinema, particularly from a business perspective. Despite often being ridiculed or dismissed as inconsequential trash, Bs were important commercial entities, not only in how they allowed the major Hollywood studios to solidify their control over the marketplace in the 1930s and 1940s as the double bill emerged, but also in how they allowed 1950s independent filmmakers to change the very way in which low-budget filmmaking was understood. Many film historians see the B-movie as a product of 1930s/1940s Hollywood , where the sometimes meager yet generally reliable profits generated from the Bs served as a support mechanism to the larger-budgeted A-films of the major studios. Yet low-budget filmmaking endured even after the double-bill format that necessitated B-filmmaking in the first place waned in the 1950s. Indeed, with many producers, directors, studio executives, and journalists still regularly using the term “B-movie” throughout this decade, it can be seen how the Bs did not simply die out in the 1950s—instead, they evolved. In the process, low-budget filmmaking secured a new role within the film industry, one that was no longer purely secondary but instead often innovative. Originating as a largely subordinate and supportive entity to the Hollywood A-film, B-movies were made with the intent of generating predictable profit margins from modestly budgeted films that satisfied a marketplace need for increased quantities of cinematic entertainment. While B-movies stem from a system of distribution choices that typically placed them in exhibition contexts limiting their earning potential in prior decades (although there were often exceptions), the Bs pioneered new methods in the 1950s by which The Bs Take Flight An Introduction 1 THE BATTLE FOR THE Bs 2 such fiscal restraints could often be overcome. Although the B-movie emerged within the framework of the double bill and a relationship with A-pictures in the studio-system era of filmmaking in the 1930s and 1940s, its role within the film industry evolved as both the overall cinematic marketplace and Hollywood filmmaking practices began to change. B-films didn’t disappear at the end of the 1940s despite industrial transformation; the film industry itself commonly used such terms as “B-movie” and “Poverty Row” to describe films produced on low budgets throughout the 1950s. This was even true of the tradition of “underground” filmmaking, in which films are made more for the purpose of artistic expression than profit-driven entertainment—the latter notion being central to B-filmmaking. This book chronicles the ways in which the B-film was understood as a low-budget product (which saw patterns of production, distribution, and exhibition that typically differed from those of higher-budgeted major studio releases) within the film industry throughout the 1950s, at a time when such filmmaking reinvented itself. Increasingly the result of newly formed independent companies, 1950s B-movies innovated such industrial components as new genre cycles, demographic patterns and marketing approaches. With both major and minor studios questioning the economic viability of lowbudget production, B-movies regularly existed in opposition to the cinematic mainstream—a legacy that was passed on to independent filmmakers of subsequent decades.1 On May 3, 1948, the United States Supreme Court handed down its infamous Paramount decree ruling, placing major Hollywood studios in violation of antitrust laws. The decision signaled the end of the classical Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, altering the corporate organization of these studios and in turn modifying how they made films. It also meant the end of the B-movie—at least in the traditional sense, as they would soon become a distinctly different product. Prior to the antitrust ruling, movie theaters were largely required to show whatever films the studios gave them due to the policy of block booking, whereby a distributor would offer certain films to an exhibitor only on the provision that an additional group of films would also be bought. Essentially, in order for exhibitors to get the films they really wanted, they had to take a lot of unwanted films as well. The antitrust ruling prohibited the practice of block booking as well as the process of vertical integration, whereby movie studios owned the theaters in which their films were shown. With studios forced to...