Birmingham, Alabama News
| DOCUMENTARY DETAILS FRIEDMAN'S LIFE AND TIMES By Bob Carlton Among exploitation filmmakers, Anniston's David Friedman is a living legend - the self-professed ''trashfilm king.'' His dubious claims to cinematic fame include such shamelessly sleazy B-movies as Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs and Scum of the Earth. And he's proud of 'em, too. Now retired but hardly forgotten, the 76-year-old Friedman, along with fellow exploiteer Dan Sonney, is the subject of Mau Mau Sex Sex - ''a digital documentary detailing the lives of America's two oldest living independent filmmakers and peddlers of smut.'' Directed by Ted Bonnitt, Mau Mau Sex Sex deals less with the exploitation movies of the 1950s and '60s, and more with the characters who made them. And he found a couple of real characters in Friedman and the 85-year-old Sonney.''It's a two-faceted story,'' Bonnitt said in a phone call. ''It's a story about their wild careers and about the swingers of the '60s, which these guys were.''Now, they're in their mid-80s and mid-70s,'' he adds. ''It became a two-fold story about fast times and how ageism changes everything.'' Bonnitt filmed Friedman, who's a carny from way back,during the Calhoun County Fair,and he went to lunch with Friedman and his wife,Carol, at the Anniston Country Club. He found the Friedmans to be the perfect Southern hosts. Later, Bonnitt followed Friedman and Sonney as they tooled around Los Angeles together revisiting some of their old haunts. Bonnitt says it was like hanging out with Walther Matthau and Jack Lemmon. ''He wanted to make this movie about us as a couple of unlikely people to have been engaged in this enterprise,'' Friedman says. ''He just got interested in these two old characters and how we did all these outrageous things over the years.'' |
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