Reading about these movies is better than watching them-but then so is having periodontal surgery. What’s as shocking as, say, “Diary of a High School Bride” is that a bunch of books about B-movie moguls is suddenly invading the marketplace. And each is as thought-provoking as those buzzers that went off under theater seats during “The Tingler.” With beach season fast approaching, it’s time to take a look at four books that no normal person will steal while you’re in the water.
If you read only one autobiography this year by an overweight lawyer who smokes big cigars, make it Sam Arkoff’s Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants (Birch Lane. $18.95), in stores next month. Arkoff cofounded American International Pictures. He messed around with monsters (“I Was a Teenage Werewolf”) and dabbled in blaxploitation (“Blacula”). But ages from now, when the lips finally catch up to the words in his “Goliath and the Barbarians,” we’ll remember him most for the " Beach Party" movies with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Arkoff doesn’t seem to recall where “Muscle Beach Party” ended and “Beach Blanket Bingo” began. Yet he’s frank about his achievements (“She Gods [of Shark Reef]” wasn’t quite a masterpiece"), and he reveals his first commandment of filmmaking: “Thou shalt not put too much money into any one picture.”
Corman would say “amen” to that. In How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (Dell Paper, $12), the producer/director admits to shooting “The Little Shop of Horrors” in two days and bringing in “The Monster from the Ocean Floor” on a $12,000 budget. It’s the “King of the B’s” label that rankles. He prefers “exploitation film,” which he defines as “something wild with a great deal of action, a little sex and … some strange sort of gimmick.” Corman takes himself a tad seriously, yet the book does include a story about how, in “The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent,” one nubile Norse lady was wearing sunglasses while battling the monster.
Screw-ups were a fact of life in the B business. William Castle, director of “The House on Haunted Hill” (filmed in “Emergo!”) and “13 Ghosts” (“Illusion-O!”), once got trapped inside a coffin during a promotional stunt. But that was nothing compared to convincing Lloyds of London to insure everyone who saw “Macabre” against death by fright. Castle was a master of hype, and many stories in his Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (Pharos. Paper, $12.95) have an apocryphal feel. Still, the director whom John Waters calls “God” does tell all–down to his attempt to pass a kidney stone.
The weirdest book of the lot is Nightmare of Ecstasy. The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. by Rudolph Grey (Feral House. Paper, $14.95). It should be–it has the weirdest subject. Wood, a troubled transvestite who’d drunk himself to death by 1978, had a burning desire to be a filmmaker but no talent or taste, as such epics as “Glen or Glenda” would indicate. Nor did he possess a knack for solving cinematic problems. When Bela Lugosi died during “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Wood cast a chiropodist in the part but never explained why the character kept a black cloak around his face and said nothing. In his own way, though, Wood may have been the ultimate low-budget director. All the others somehow made do. He made pure doodoo.
