Johnny Deadline: The Best of David F. Friedman

 by JB

Taking a week off from the “movie beat” to review an honest-to-goodness, gol-durned vinyl record!

The fine folks at Modern Harmonic have released a real doozy this week: a vinyl record* featuring trailers, radio spots, and music cues from the disreputable work of exploitation producer David F. Friedman. Friedman started his career in film as an assistant to Kroger Babb, the wily entrepreneur who virtually created a specific low-budget film release model. Babb was a promotional genius and made the film Mom and Dad on the limited budget of $65,000 with the express purpose of presenting it through saturation advertising, gender-segregated audiences, and a book pitch. The intermission of the film featured “noted hygiene lecturer” Elliot Forbes selling sex-education pamphlets.

At the height of Mom and Dad’s theatrical run, Babb had more than 50 Elliot Forbeses crisscrossing the country, selling his booklets during the intermission of the film. The booklets cost eight cents apiece to produce. Babb sold them for a dollar. Mom and Dad played in theaters for over ten years. The film’s final gross is estimated to be more than $65 million, and that does not include book sales, which often grossed more than the film itself.

THIS is where David F. Friedman learned the movie business.

When Friedman ventured out on his own, he soon pioneered the “roughie” (pre-hardcore sexploitation films featuring loads of violence) and the “splatter film,” when he teamed up with Herschell Gordon Lewis to make the infamous gore trilogy, Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, and Color Me Blood Red, arguably the first American horror films to show explicit gore and violence.

And then Friedman and Lewis parted company. Friedman went into softcore and later hardcore pictures, and Lewis became the guru of direct sales marketing strategies, authoring several best-selling books on the subject.

Why am I explaining all of this historical nonsense? Because I love it. Friedman’s book, A Youth in Babylon, is required reading for anyone interested in the history of exploitation film. This is the “hidden history” of film: not the Oscar-winners and art films about which so much is written and discussed, but the odd, offbeat movies that forged their own paths across middle and rural America. The stories I’ve read researching films like this are banana-pants crazy. The hucksters, showmen, and four-wallers of these “social problem exploitation” movies were approaching film from a completely different angle than as art or entertainment or narrative or even theater; they saw it as a con. This is where we find the intersection between motion pictures and three-card monte.

ANNOYING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PAUSE: I once met Friedman at a film convention (I believe it was the first Famous Monsters convention in the early Nineties on the East Coast) and found him to be the quintessential showman, half carnival barker and half used car salesman. Learning that I taught a high-school film class, he began reeling off a list of films that he suggested my students just had to see. All of the films on the list, of course, were his own films that he was conveniently selling right there at his vendor’s table. I remember that he was very charming.

Like their previous three Something Weird vinyl compilations (Hey Folks! It’s Intermission Time, The Best of Doris Wishman, and Spook Show Spectacular A-Go-Go!) this new release gathers audio ephemera from the whole of Friedman’s career. We get the trailer soundtracks for roughies like The Defilers; A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine; and The Pick-Up, softcore fare like The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill and The Brick Dollhouse, and his later, more explicit films, The Ramrodder, Thar She Blows, and Trader Hornee.

You can also order the vinyl record with a companion DVD, featuring a David Friedman Trailer Show, consisting of VIDEO highlights of The Defilers; Kissy Hill; A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine; She Freak; Hard and Fast; Brick Dollhouse; The Headmistress; The Acid Eaters; The Lustful Turk; A Sweet Sickness; Space Thing; The Pick-Up; The Master Piece; The Ramrodder; Thar She Blows (“She promised a holocaust of ecstasy!”); A Brand of Shame; Starlet, Trader Hornee, The Adult Version of Jeckyl and Hyde; The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (“Sex! Flamenco Dancing! Perversion!”); Bummer; and Johnny Firecloud, plus bonus “music video” clips of The Chantays, The Impressions, and the Vaqueros.

Quite a package. This is quintessential American nonsense. I only wish it were available on colored vinyl! You can spin either the vinyl disc or the video disc... and pretend you’re back in the early Sixties: you’ve just graduated from high school, you’ve just had your first beer, you’re thinking about maybe smoking some grass, and you’ve just been drafted to Vietnam! Before shipping out... you decide to go to the movies... you pay good money to see David F. Friedman’s The Erotic Adventures of Zorro. You shed a tear and think, “I’m going to miss the United States of America.”



*Relax. It’s also available on CD.