Herschell Gordon Lewis
I have written a little bit about Herschell below. I also had the good fortune of meeting Herschell and also Doris Wishman on a trip to Florida. You can read about me meeting these two cult icons by clicking on the link below.
Following the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis is like tracing the history of exploitation films itself, and that is what is so fascinating about watching his movies. He started off mainly making "nudie cuties" in the early 60s with his partner David F. Friedman. He also directed at least one "roughie" in the early 60s, a number of nudist camp movies, and a juvenile delinquent movie. After he felt that "nudie cutie" movies had run their course, he and his partner Friedman needed to decide which direction to go in. Since their budgets were practically nonexistent, and they couldn't compete with Hollywood movies, they needed to exploit something that Hollywood wouldn't touch. The decided to create a movie which has graphic scenes of blood and guts in it because Hollywood wouldn't touch this sort of thing. They flew to Florida and shot a film called Blood Feast in 1963, and the "gore" movie was born. This is the movie that made Lewis famous. It was a huge hit around the nation, especially at drive-ins. They then tried to make a gore film with a bigger budget and better acting. The result was 2000 Maniacs, which is the best movie the duo ever produced. However, the movie didn't make as much money as Blood Feast, so they never tried making another "big" budget movie again (big being relative, of course). They then completed their "gore trilogy" with a movie called Color Me Blood Red.
After the ground breaking gore trilogy, the team of Lewis and Friedman split up. Friedman want on to do sexploitation films. Lewis was all over the map with his subsequent offerings. He went on to direct sexploitation films, Southern good ol' boy films, biker films, horror films, sci-fi films, more gore films, and even films for kids, like (Santa Visits) The Magic Land Of Mother Goose. Finally, in 1972, he got out of the business, sold the rights to his films to a bank, and became a successful marketing consultant.
I don't think that every one of his films has resurfaced. Some of the films may be gone forever. A number of his films, like the gore trilogy, got legitimate releases in the 80s on videotape. And then later, cheap-o video labels like Something Weird and Sinister Cinema unearthed prints of some of the movies and released them. I've been trying to get my hands on copies of a number of his titles for years and have been unable to do so. Lately, I've been getting copies of some of his films from clearly illegal sources (or maybe not, there's something called the Byrne Act which states that if something is not made available to public for x amount of years, it becomes public property, but I'm not a lawyer, so who knows). These are copies that someone is making in their basement with prints that they've unearthed at flea markets or garage sales or the like. The prints are scratched and the colors are faded, but if you are intent on getting everything you can get your hands on, this is your only option.
Some Herschell Gordon Lewis movies are better than others, obviously, so they're not always great, but they are all fascinating as these movies are a buried part of the American culture. Interest in Lewis and his movies have increased tremendously in the past decade (as have interest in exploitation films in general) so more and more films have been unearthed and brought to market. And, this is a good thing. I'm glad that this part of our American heritage has not been lost forever.
Herschell Gordon Lewis movies always have a good sense of humor about them. He never believed that he was making art. He only wanted the audience to have a good time, so even during the goriest of gore scenes, the movie is winking at the audience. This is what makes his movies more watchable than, say, the Italian gore flicks, most of which have no sense of humor. And, ironically, Lewis really was making art, just not the kind of pretentious art that more "serious" movie creators were attempting to create.
To read more about Herschell Gordon Lewis, you can pick up the book Incredibly Strange Films, which has a very information section about him. There is also a book that I have called The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis. It's impossibly rare. It is not written in a very scholarly manner, but it does have some interesting information in it. John Waters has a good interview with Herschell Gordon Lewis in his book Shock Value.
I also have a very interesting autobiography written by David F. Friedman called A Youth In Babylon. It's a great book to read to learn about the history of exploitation filmmaking. I highly recommend it.
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