![]() At the same time, the concept of fringe exploitation was merging with a closely related and similarly venerable tradition: “ nudie" films featuring nudist-camp footage or striptease artists like Bettie Page had simply been the softcore pornography of previous decades. In the early 1960s, exploitation movies in the original sense continued to appear: 1961's Damaged Goods, a cautionary tale about a young lady whose boyfriend's promiscuity leads to venereal disease, comes complete with enormous, grotesque closeups of VD's physical manifestations. With major studios having exited traditional B-movie production, exploitation became a way to refer to the entire field of low-budget genre films. Exploitation-style promotional practices had become standard practice at the lower-budget end of the industry. With the loosening of industry censorship constraints, the 1960s and 1970s saw a major expansion in the production and commercial viability of a variety of B-movie subgenres that have come to be known collectively as exploitation films. ![]() Motorpsycho (1965) exemplifies the shocking nature of many B movies of the time. That year, Roger Corman took American International down a new road: "When they asked me to make two ten-day black-and-white horror films to play as a double feature, I convinced them instead to finance one horror film in color." A period piece in the vein of Britain's Hammer Films, House of Usher was a success, launching a series of Poe-based movies Corman would direct for AIP. An 82-minute-long suspense film, Terror Is a Man, ran as a "co-feature", and is notable for including a now-common exploitation gimmick, asking sensitive viewers to close their eyes during the dénouement. Levine sword-and-sandals import, Hercules Unchained, opened at neighborhood theaters in New York. The dual genre-movie package, popularized by American International Pictures (AIP) in the previous decade, was the new face of the double feature. The traditional twin bill of B film preceding and balancing a subsequent-run A film had largely disappeared from American theaters. In 1950, the figure had been $1 million in 1961, it reached $2 million-after adjusting for inflation, the increase in real terms was less than 10 percent. 1960s ĭespite many transformations in the industry, the average production cost of an American feature film remained mostly stable over the course of the 1950s. The success of the B-studio exploitation movement had a significant effect on the strategies of the major studios during the 1970s. ![]() The demise of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1968, coupled with the success of the exploitation film Easy Rider the following year fueled the trend throughout the subsequent decade. As censorship pressures lifted in the early 1960s, the low-budget end of the American motion picture industry increasingly incorporated the sort of sexual and violent elements long associated with so-called ‘exploitation’ films. The 1960s and 1970s marked the rise of exploitation-style independent B movies films which were mostly made without the support of Hollywood's major film studios. ![]()
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