It Conquered Hollywood: The Story of American International Pictures
                         

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Unless you are really paying attention and keep this data in your head better than I do, it is easy to forget all the films that AIP produced. Films that will make you go - oh sure I have seen that and that and that or at least heard of them. Hundreds of films. And that these films exist is basically due to two men getting together with no money, no experience and thinking, let's make movies. In the early 1950's these two out of the mid-west - Samuel Z, Arkoff and James Nicholson - saw an opportunity that the major studios were missing and had no desire to touch. Low budget exploitation films. When they came to Hollywood they had no backers, no scripts and no money - but they soon found what they needed. Roger Corman. He had a finished a film about race cars and they persuaded him to let them distribute it and in return they would finance his next three films at $60,000 each. When a basic Hollywood film cost about $5 million. They took his film around to exhibitors and said, would you like more films like this. Yes. Ok, we need your money and they were off.


Hollywood was in the middle of bad times - the Supreme Court had broken up the monopoly between studios and their theater chains and TV was decimating audience attendance. Theaters were shutting down in large numbers. They needed content and AIP churned out lots of films. Their audience - teenagers - preferred horror, monster, sci-fi, rock and roll and basic trashy films. One of their biggest hits in the 1950s was I Was a Teenage Werewolf - others that are familiar are The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes, It Conquered the World, Shake, Rattle and Rock, Voodoo Woman, Invasion of the Saucer Men, High School Hellcat and many many more. They also brought over foreign films - not the classics - but Peplum films and dubbed them into English.


In the 1960s Corman directed his wonderful films based on Edgar Allen Poe, then the Beach films with Annette Funicello that googly eyed boys dreamed about at night and continued with foreign imports - Japanese monster films, Bava films - and probably editing them, dubbing them and making a mess of them. But those were the only versions Americans saw for decades. In the later part of the 60's they got into the rebellious youth films - a long ways from Annette and Frankie - The Wild Angels was a huge hit followed by Riot on Sunset Strip and the druggie film The Trip. By the end of the 60s Nicholson had left the company and so had Corman but they kept churning out movies through the 70's but more and more just distributed movies. But they also made the Pam Grier films that we are all thankful for. Arkoff finally sold the company in 1979 to Filmways but what a ride it is. Looking through their list of films - on Wikipedia - is basically genre paradise.

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