The Sleaze Merchants: Adventures in Exploitation Filmmaking

Now it can be told - here are the true stories of fifteen fearless filmmakers who defied the system...and won! This incredbible book documents the real stories of Hollywood's true giants, the pioneers and crazed visionaries, the cinematic sorcerers without any magnificent men like Sam Katzman, Jim Wynorski, Fred Olen Ray, Jess Franco, and Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Tim Burton's Ed Wood, a 1994 film profiling an ungifted but persistent director, focused some attention on exploitation movies. McCarty's book assesses Wood along with 14 other purveyors of this alternative cinema. Although Albert Zugsmith (Sex Kittens Go to College), Larry Cohen (It's Alive), and Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case) are absent, many of exploitation's exemplars are discussed, and their achievements are evoked by provocative stills and promotional ads for the movies. There are terrific interviews with Fred Olen Ray (The Tomb), William Lustig (Maniac Cop), and the makers of the 1963-64 cult classics Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs, Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman. While some argue that The Corpse Grinders, The Astro-Zombies, and The Lustful Turk demonstrate that civilization can't be taken for granted, this book's able dissection reveals that these films have a place in film history. Recommended for strong film collections.?Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Genre film surveyor McCarty (The Fearmakers , Hollywood Gangland [1993], etc.) presents a passel of entertaining and informative essays on the giants of grade-Z cinema. "Nudie-Cutie" movies; teen-themed hot-car, drug, and gang pictures; low-budget space operas and monster movies; and the amazing symphonies of sleaze composed by John (Pink Flamingos) Waters--they're all represented here by means of profiles of the likes of (besides Waters) Sam Katzman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Fred Olen Ray, the now famous (thanks to the Tim Burton movie) Ed Wood, and many more. Still-living auteurs are interviewed, and their words frame their filmographies with insights at once laughable and telling. Today's direct-to-cable productions and mall-theater fodder are very much higher-tech extrapolations from the drive-in dreck these guys made. So learn something about where all that stuff came from--get to know our greatest purveyors of cinema sleaze through this seminal collection. Mike Tribby