Newark Star Ledger, by Stephen Whitty
| Revealed at last! King of Sin tells all! Uncut! Uncensored! Complete! Intact! A film that literally assaults the sensual senses! A picture in the tradition of "Lawrence of Arabia" -- but with girls! "Nobody ever said I made good pictures," producer Dave Friedman cheerfully admits today. "But -- boy! -- did I make good trailers." He made dozens of them over half-a-century in the movie business, for dozens of movies that never played your neighborhood theater. That is, unless, you lived in a very dicey neighborhood. "Two Thousand Maniacs." "The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood." "She Freak." And endless other splatter shockers, silly sex spoofs and degenerate drive-in dramas for those "in the advanced stages of adulthood." "I started in carnivals, went into motion pictures, and now I'm in wrestling," Friedman, 77, says on the phone from Alabama. "It's all the same milieu. It goes back to Egypt, to people wandering through the Middle Ages with dancing bears. Girlie shows, freak shows, mummified bodies, exploitation films -- it's all part and parcel of show business." Friedman's own life is part and parcel of "Mau Mau Sex Sex," a new documentary at Manhattan's Cinema Village about him and producing partner Dan Sonney. But his story is also an alternative history of American entertainment, weaving through the forgotten sideshows of show business. "If you try exploring underground Americana, all roads lead to Dave," says Eddie Muller, co-writer of "Mau Mau" and author of "Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of 'Adults Only' Cinema." "He's a vital participant in this strange subculture, and he's always had a great historical appreciation of the hucksters who came before." The son of a Alabama newspaperman and his proper wife, Friedman began his show-biz career as a kid, tearing tickets for a carnival. During World War II, he ran the movies on base, and cut himself a slice of the concessions. Afterward he picked up two anti-aircraft searchlights, cheap, and sold them as theatrical spotlights to a man named Howard "Kroger" Babb. "'America's Fearless Young Showman,'" Friedman says with a laugh. "Of course, later, I stole the title." At the time, Babb was the most successful of a band of movie cutthroats known as "The Forty Thieves" who "roadshowed" the country peddling their movies (or anyone's, if they could steal a print). Made without studio money or censorship, the pictures specialized in sex, violence and reefer madness, and moved in for a close-up whenever studio movies cut away. "Exploitation films were sort of the flipside of Hollywood," says Eric Schaefer, an assistant professor at Boston's Emerson College and author of the history "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" (Duke University Press). "They were the shadow cinema that Hollywood was not allowed to make." "They capitalized on what was taboo, and they did it in their own inimitable, sleazy way," says director Frank Henenlotter, an exploitation fan (and perpetrator of his own exploitive "Basket Case"). "Of course now that the taboos have all been knocked down, the films look like they were made on Pluto." "Anything was fair game as long as it was in bad taste," Friedman remembers. "But the whole secret was 'the square-up' at the start of the picture. You know, 'We show this not in any attempt to exploit this sordid subject, but to make the public aware of its existence, in the hopes that they will become aware of this evil. And if the life of just one boy or girl can be saved . . . .'" Fifty years later, and he can still do the spiel. "Just watching these fellows operate -- Damon Runyon couldn't have written them," says Friedman. "But it was a unique little family business. We didn't ask anything from anybody. We financed these things with our own money. We went out with the film under our arms, traveled from town to town, put up our posters, showed the pictures, counted our money -- and got out before the cops came." By the early '50s, Friedman was helping Babb and other producers market their bargain-basement dramas, moonlighting on his job in the Paramount publicity department. That posh studio post came with an expense account and plum assignments pushing pictures like "The Greatest Show on Earth." But DeMille's "Greatest Show" was a sanitized circus life. Friedman still hungered for the real thing. So, at 33, he turned in his company Diners Club card, tore off his necktie, and ran off to join the carnival -- or, at least, the crazy circus that revolved around the films he was soon churning out himself. "I think Dave's greatest story is how he gave up the system to go off on his own," says "Mau Mau Sex Sex" director Ted Bonnitt. "It's really about the value of understanding how the world really works, and profiting off it, and enjoying life in the process." Bonnitt's documentary flatteringly casts Friedman and Sonney as "America's Oldest Independent Filmmakers" but their efforts were several worlds away from modern mavericks. Shot in rented rooms, cast with strippers and community-theater dropouts, these were simply B movies that refused to behave. When the fad faded for "nudie-cuties," Friedman reacted like any carny, and hastily put up new attractions. First, with director Herschell Gordon Lewis, he made groundbreaking "splatter" horrors such as 1963's "Blood Feast." When that palled, he turned to "roughies," creepy sadistic thrillers like "The Defilers" (1965). "I have to say, some of the roughies we don't even want to put out," says Henenlotter, who's overseen some Friedman re-issues for Something Weird Video. "They're on a level of offensiveness where we don't need to go." The director of "Frankenhooker" has a point. Although most of Friedman's "Adults Only" movies would draw only an R today, some can still make audiences squirm -- like 1969's "Love Camp 7," a gruesome Nazi picture full of stormtrooper S&M. Friedman takes the criticism about as seriously as complaints about a spookhouse. "Take the girls in 'Love Camp 7,'" he says. "'Oh, they're being tortured, oh, it's so terrible.' You know what the biggest problem was? To keep them from giggling when the camera was rolling. You had to practically use the whip to keep them from laughing! I tell you, making those movies was fun. It was a ball." The hard work for Friedman began once the movies were made, crafting his assiduously alliterative posters ("A positive plethora of pulchritude!"), writing those teasing trailers and keeping the bluenoses at bay. "The censorship back then depended on where you were, and what was OK in Kansas may not have been OK in Memphis, where they used to censor 'Our Gang' comedies because they had a black kid,'" Friedman says. "I remember one of the biggest cases right here in Alabama, when the governor ordered a raid on all the theaters playing adult movies, and one was playing United Artists' 'Midnight Cowboy' and the other was running one of ours, 'Thar She Blows.' And we were the ones who fought him." Ironically, the final fall of censorship turned out to be the end of exploitation, too. Friedman and his fellow Thieves had thrived on unfulfilled desire, luring customers in and leaving them wanting more. "That was the whole racket," Friedman says. "They thought, 'Well, we didn't see it all this week, but boy, wait til next week's show!' Hard core ruined that. They gave the third act away as soon as they raised the curtain." Friedman fought back by making more elaborate sex spoofs such as 1972's "The Erotic Adventures of Zorro." He made a straightforward action film, "Johnny Firecloud," and eventually, half-heartedly, moved into the hard-core business, filming an all-nude take-off on "A Chorus Line." But the new audiences didn't know why he was bothering with plots and jokes and gimmicks, and soon Friedman didn't know why he was bothering at all. "Dave is a filmmaker," Henenlotter says. "Hard-core didn't need filmmakers. Hard-core just needed a couple and a camera and a weekend." And so Friedman went back home to Anniston, Ala., where he still lives with Carol, his astoundingly understanding wife of 49 years. Occasionally he meets with young horror mavens intent on remaking "Blood Feast" or "Two Thousand Maniacs." ("I'll confirm this when I have the check in my hands.") Sometimes, he sees his own films, back on late-night cable or selling to fans as deluxe DVDs. "I never thought anybody would want to see this stuff again," he says. "Who's going to drink 3.2 beer when they can get 100 proof vodka? But a lot of guys my age remember this stuff fondly, and there's 100 million kids out there who think it's high camp. And it is." "As important as any of the films he's done, as important as his advocacy for freedom of expression, is the fact that Dave's made an effort to see that this story is preserved," says Schaefer. "I consider him a sort of historian." "Once we were pariahs," Friedman marvels. "Now they're writing doctoral theses on us!" Perhaps that's because there's something oddly endearing about this venal vendor of voluptuous vixens, this mirthful merchant of maniacal menace. In an era of straight-to-video horrors, Dave Friedman is still a step-right-up showman. In an industry of anonymous accountants, Dave Friedman still evokes a Hollywood of plaid sports jackets, straight Scotch, foot-long cigars and the screen spectacular of a lifetime. And sure enough, nearly an hour into the interview, he is still going, still spieling, still pitching that old ballyhoo. "We had a screening of 'Mau Mau' at a film festival in Birmingham," he says. "Unfortunately this film about the Scottsboro Boys was entered too, and that won. Well, that was a local story. But we had the biggest audience, about 600 people watching in the basement of an abandoned department store. And one lady said, 'David Friedman, I grew up in this town. I know who your father was. I knew your family. Whatever possessed you to make these kinds of movies?'" He pauses, relishing the punchline. "And I said, 'Well, ma'm, somebody had to do it.'" Somebody did. And Damon Runyon couldn't have written him if he tried. |
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