New York Daily News, by Lewis Beale
| Film's Golden Age of Sleaze Sex, drugs, alcoholism, prostitution, miscegenation: They were all great subjects for Dave Friedman, veteran exploitation-film producer and master of carnival-like hype. "These were the pictures that turned on your fathers and grandfathers," says Friedman, one of the subjects of "Mau Mau Sex Sex," a documentary about the exploitation-film scene of the 1930s-1960s, opening Friday at Cinema Village. "You sold the sizzle, not the steak, promised they would see something they're not going to see," says Friedman. "It was all a big sideshow scam." Friedman is referring to films such as "Mad Youth," which — in purporting to "educate" Americans about teenage debauchery — featured scenes of drugs, sex and nudity. Or the "nudie cuties" of the 1950s, which trumped mainstream Hollywood by featuring wall-to-wall females in the buff. "These films were exploitation within exploitation films," says director and film historian Frank Henenlotter. "They existed to flirt with a particular taboo — primarily sex — but under the guise of an anti-drug film or an anti-liquor film." The exploitation era coincided with the days of the Hays Code, a series of strictures that banned everything from nudity to visibly pregnant women onscreen. Seeing a commercial opening, a group of cheesy filmmakers and producers rushed into the void. Armed with a handful of prints featuring taboo footage, these pioneers drove from town to town, set up shop in independent movie theaters and sold their wares like carnival barkers. So a feature like "Birth of a Baby," which featured a real birth, was preceded by a public-health lecture, while books on natal care were sold in the lobby. Henenlotter says many of these films are barely competent and tend to move to their own bizarre rhythms. He adds that their only influence on mainstream filmmaking was in putting a shoulder to the censorship barriers. "The Hays Code would not have crumbled as quickly if there weren't theaters showing these films," Henenlotter says. Friedman claims both the gore horror-film genre and the proliferation of nude scenes in Hollywood films are a direct offshoot of the exploitation era. But, he adds, what he and his peers were doing was nothing new. "There has always been a market for the underbelly of entertainment," says Friedman. "You see it today in professional wrestling or stock-car racing. It goes back to the Colosseum in Rome. People want to be titillated and shocked. The only thing you can't do is bore them." Because these filmmakers were not bound by the Hays Code, they could make films about anything they wanted, says Friedman. "As long as it was in bad taste." |
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