Movie Time: Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies

It's Movie Time!

And today's movie is a movie about movies.

From 2004, it's Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies

This documentary covers the wild and wooly independent American film scene that operated way off the outskirts of Hollywood in the 1950's and '60's.   

"Exploitation" movies were made cheaply, quicky and by people who were figuring things out as they went along.

Nudity was a big draw for exploitation films and one way to deliver that to the masses was to set up cameras in nudist colonies and let them  roll. 

Naked women who just happened to be naked was a loophole in various community morality codes.  A lof exploitation producers would form travelling road shows to set up temporary shop with their collection of short films with women just cavorting naked around in the sunshine, playing volleyball and croquet or just lounging around.

The road show would stick around until the keepers of the community standards caught up to what they were doing and the show would be travelling again to the next town.

Some films got away with nudity in the name of science. There were movies that would show the graphic results of sexually transmitted diseases.

And pregnancy. Wanna see a full on vaginal child birth? Schlock! has a clip of one such scene from an early exploitation film.

But mostly it's just boobies bouncing in the sun.

Which eventually got boring?

Producers began slipping in some corny comedy.  There was a series of "nudies" that included recurring gags from the producers commenting on just how bad their movies were.

These guys can't believe
they're getting away with this shit! 

Director Doris Wishman, the "Queen of the Nudies", went a step further by adding a science fiction story line to one of her nudist colony films.  Astronauts land on the moon to discover a hidden world that looks a lot like Florida filled with naked women, giving us the movie Nude On the Moon.  

Schlock! has numerous clips from the exploitation films of the '50's and '60's along with contemporary interviews with people who brought these crazy films to life.  Sam Arkhoff, Doris Wishman, Roger Corman and more recount their days engaged in gonzo filmmaking.

Roger Corman's legacy in making exploitation films is coupled with also providing a starting point for acclaimed filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppla, Peter Bogdanovich and Ron Howard.  

The documentary begins by asking, "What is an exploitation movie?" There is not an easy answer to that question. It's mostly "you know it when you see it".  

These are movies that appeal to our primal natures, to experience fear or shock or arousal, movies made quickly and cheaply and with little regard for what polite society might have to say about them.  

The free wheeling spirit of exploitation films began to take a decidedly darker turn through the 1960's with the whimsical "nudies" being edged out by "roughies" with sex being expressed through acts of violence. 

It's a shame the film stops short of the 1970's with exploitation delving into horror, martial arts and black culture (Blacula, anyone?) 

Still, Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies is an effective snapshot of an era that produced so really bad movies that had a culmulative impact on our culture.

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Tomorrow: more MOVIE TIME as we go back to the 1970's to go back to 1960. It's American Graffiti.