WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.700 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are really 00:00:01.700 --> 00:00:03.700 glad you're here because today we're tackling 00:00:03.700 --> 00:00:07.900 something that is, it's basically in the DNA 00:00:07.900 --> 00:00:10.259 of the modern movie industry, even if people 00:00:10.259 --> 00:00:12.500 don't realize it. Oh, it's a topic just surrounded 00:00:12.500 --> 00:00:14.699 by misconceptions. Huge misconceptions. Today 00:00:14.699 --> 00:00:17.879 we're talking about the B movie. And I know exactly 00:00:17.879 --> 00:00:19.859 where your brain goes when I say that. You're 00:00:19.859 --> 00:00:22.460 picturing like a grainy black and white film. 00:00:22.600 --> 00:00:25.719 A guy in a rubber lizard suit, maybe? Yeah, stomping 00:00:25.719 --> 00:00:28.339 on a cardboard city or maybe a flying saucer 00:00:28.339 --> 00:00:30.719 that looks... suspiciously like a pie tin on 00:00:30.719 --> 00:00:32.840 a string. The assumption is always that B stands 00:00:32.840 --> 00:00:36.140 for bad or, you know, bottom of the barrel. Right. 00:00:36.219 --> 00:00:38.140 We use it as an insult. Right. That something 00:00:38.140 --> 00:00:41.119 is B grade, it's trash. But looking at the research 00:00:41.119 --> 00:00:43.079 we've pulled together, this comprehensive history, 00:00:43.320 --> 00:00:46.859 that definition is historically just completely 00:00:46.859 --> 00:00:49.679 wrong. It wasn't a quality judgment at all. No. 00:00:50.159 --> 00:00:52.020 It was a hard -nosed economic term. And it was 00:00:52.020 --> 00:00:55.100 purely business. If you want to understand Hollywood, 00:00:55.380 --> 00:00:58.280 not the glitz, but the actual machinery of how 00:00:58.280 --> 00:01:01.079 it survived the 20th century, you have to understand 00:01:01.079 --> 00:01:03.079 the B movie because this wasn't just a dumping 00:01:03.079 --> 00:01:05.900 ground for cheap films. It was the R &D lab for 00:01:05.900 --> 00:01:09.079 the entire industry. Exactly. The R &D lab. And 00:01:09.079 --> 00:01:12.659 I love that. So let's unpack this. If B doesn't 00:01:12.659 --> 00:01:15.500 mean bad. What did it originally mean? We have 00:01:15.500 --> 00:01:17.540 to go back to the 1930s for this, right? Right. 00:01:17.579 --> 00:01:20.000 To get the B movie, you have to get inside the 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:22.019 wallet of the average American during the Great 00:01:22.019 --> 00:01:24.560 Depression. Which was pretty much empty. Completely 00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:26.859 empty. People had very little disposable income. 00:01:26.939 --> 00:01:29.920 So if a family was going to spend a nickel, maybe 00:01:29.920 --> 00:01:33.319 a dime at the theater, they needed to feel like 00:01:33.319 --> 00:01:35.340 they were getting a huge return on that. They 00:01:35.340 --> 00:01:38.930 wanted volume. Quantity for their money. Precisely. 00:01:38.989 --> 00:01:41.810 So these small neighborhood theaters, the slang 00:01:41.810 --> 00:01:44.430 for them was nabes. They couldn't just show one 00:01:44.430 --> 00:01:46.829 movie anymore. They had to offer a full program. 00:01:47.049 --> 00:01:48.769 And this is where the double feature comes from. 00:01:48.849 --> 00:01:50.870 This is the birth of the double feature. But 00:01:50.870 --> 00:01:53.549 it wasn't just two movies. The standard programming 00:01:53.549 --> 00:01:58.109 became this massive buffet. A newsreel. Catch 00:01:58.109 --> 00:02:01.049 up on the news. A cartoon for the kids. Maybe 00:02:01.049 --> 00:02:03.989 a serial adventure episode like Flash Gordon. 00:02:04.290 --> 00:02:06.650 And then two feature films. Talk about getting 00:02:06.650 --> 00:02:08.629 your money's worth. And you had your main event, 00:02:08.770 --> 00:02:12.150 the A movie, that had the big stars, your Clark 00:02:12.150 --> 00:02:14.710 Gables, your Katharine Hepburns, and the big 00:02:14.710 --> 00:02:18.349 budget. And then to fill out the bill, you had 00:02:18.349 --> 00:02:22.490 the second feature, the B movie. So strictly 00:02:22.490 --> 00:02:25.080 speaking, it just means second on the bill. But 00:02:25.080 --> 00:02:26.840 this is where the economics get really interesting 00:02:26.840 --> 00:02:28.979 to me. The difference wasn't just where they 00:02:28.979 --> 00:02:32.159 were on the marquee. It was about how the theater 00:02:32.159 --> 00:02:35.099 paid for them. This is the crucial part. The 00:02:35.099 --> 00:02:38.520 A movie was rented on a percentage basis. Meaning 00:02:38.520 --> 00:02:41.159 the studio gets a cut of the ticket sales. A 00:02:41.159 --> 00:02:43.520 cut of every ticket sold. So if the A movie was 00:02:43.520 --> 00:02:46.310 a huge hit, the studio made a fortune. If it 00:02:46.310 --> 00:02:49.189 flopped. It lost big. Exactly. High risk, high 00:02:49.189 --> 00:02:51.789 reward. But the B movie was different. How so? 00:02:52.009 --> 00:02:55.150 It was rented for a flat fee. A flat fee. A fixed 00:02:55.150 --> 00:02:58.550 price. The theater pays, say, 50 bucks to show 00:02:58.550 --> 00:03:00.050 it for a week, and they keep all the ticket sales 00:03:00.050 --> 00:03:02.009 after that. Okay. For the studio, the profit 00:03:02.009 --> 00:03:05.169 was capped, but it was guaranteed. As long as 00:03:05.169 --> 00:03:07.020 they kept their own budget super low. That's 00:03:07.020 --> 00:03:09.340 the whole game. It becomes a simple math problem. 00:03:09.560 --> 00:03:12.639 If the rental fee guarantees you, say, $50 ,000, 00:03:12.900 --> 00:03:15.340 you just make damn sure you shoot the movie for 00:03:15.340 --> 00:03:18.319 $30 ,000. So the B movie isn't art, it's a widget. 00:03:18.620 --> 00:03:21.120 A product designed to fill a time slot for a 00:03:21.120 --> 00:03:24.020 price. That's it. And the major studios, like 00:03:24.020 --> 00:03:27.819 Warner Bros. and Fox, they had specific B units 00:03:27.819 --> 00:03:30.240 just to churn these things out. It was a literal 00:03:30.240 --> 00:03:32.680 assembly line. And then there were the Poverty 00:03:32.680 --> 00:03:35.099 Row Studios. What a great name. Oh, yeah. Places 00:03:35.099 --> 00:03:37.120 like Republic and Monogram. They didn't even 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:39.680 make A movies. They only made B movies. And they 00:03:39.680 --> 00:03:41.300 were cranking out what they called quickies. 00:03:41.460 --> 00:03:43.240 How quick are we talking? We're talking about 00:03:43.240 --> 00:03:45.699 shooting an entire feature film in four days. 00:03:45.960 --> 00:03:48.960 Four days. That sounds impossible. It was intense. 00:03:49.139 --> 00:03:52.180 They reused scripts, costumes. They'd even reuse 00:03:52.180 --> 00:03:55.759 footage. A guy falls off a horse in a 1935 movie. 00:03:55.819 --> 00:03:58.240 You might see that exact same shot in a 1938 00:03:58.240 --> 00:04:01.159 movie. Waste not, want not. And speaking of horses, 00:04:01.180 --> 00:04:03.539 the main genre here was the Western, wasn't it? 00:04:04.560 --> 00:04:07.400 Overwhelmingly, in the 30s and 40s, the B -Western 00:04:07.400 --> 00:04:09.599 was the staple. This is where John Wayne cut 00:04:09.599 --> 00:04:12.520 his teeth. Before he was the Duke, he was just 00:04:12.520 --> 00:04:14.759 churning out dozens of these. And you had series 00:04:14.759 --> 00:04:17.699 like The Three Musketeers. Oh, Play on Musketeers, 00:04:17.740 --> 00:04:19.879 yeah. They were formulaic, sure, but they were 00:04:19.879 --> 00:04:23.000 efficient. But it wasn't just cowboys. This is 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:24.720 one of the things I found most surprising, film 00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:28.720 noir. Right. We think of film noir today as this 00:04:28.720 --> 00:04:31.949 high art... moody, stylish thing we study in 00:04:31.949 --> 00:04:34.970 film school. But it has its roots deep in the 00:04:34.970 --> 00:04:37.569 B -movie mud. It absolutely does. And if you 00:04:37.569 --> 00:04:39.009 think about the constraints, it makes perfect 00:04:39.009 --> 00:04:41.889 sense. If you're a B -unit director, you have 00:04:41.889 --> 00:04:44.709 no money for fancy sets. Your walls look like 00:04:44.709 --> 00:04:46.970 cheap plywood. How do you hide that? Turn the 00:04:46.970 --> 00:04:49.550 lights off. You use shadows. You use high contrast. 00:04:49.829 --> 00:04:51.829 You put a Venetian blind in front of your one 00:04:51.829 --> 00:04:54.250 light source and create those iconic bars of 00:04:54.250 --> 00:04:56.990 shadow. That moody look we call artistic was 00:04:56.990 --> 00:04:58.990 just a way to hide how cheap everything was. 00:04:59.170 --> 00:05:01.170 That is the definition of creativity through 00:05:01.170 --> 00:05:04.600 limitation. It is. Take a film like Stranger 00:05:04.600 --> 00:05:08.300 on the third floor from 1940. It's only 64 minutes 00:05:08.300 --> 00:05:12.139 long, a classic B runtime. But critics now say 00:05:12.139 --> 00:05:15.500 it's the first true film noir. So the golden 00:05:15.500 --> 00:05:18.639 age was built on this. But then in the late 40s 00:05:18.639 --> 00:05:21.459 and early 50s, everything changes. What happened? 00:05:21.759 --> 00:05:24.120 A double whammy hit the industry. First, the 00:05:24.120 --> 00:05:26.399 government stepped in. There was a huge antitrust 00:05:26.399 --> 00:05:29.560 ruling in 1948 that banned block booking. OK, 00:05:29.639 --> 00:05:31.500 we should explain block booking. It sounds technical, 00:05:31.579 --> 00:05:33.939 but is the engine of the whole system. It really 00:05:33.939 --> 00:05:37.000 was. Basically, if a theater wanted the big A 00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:39.740 -list blockbuster, the studio would say, fine, 00:05:40.019 --> 00:05:42.240 but you also have to rent these five B movies 00:05:42.240 --> 00:05:44.259 from us to go with it. They forced them to take 00:05:44.259 --> 00:05:45.899 the whole package. Right. And once the Supreme 00:05:45.899 --> 00:05:48.519 Court banned that, theaters could just say, no, 00:05:48.600 --> 00:05:50.480 thanks, we'll just take the hit. And the guaranteed 00:05:50.480 --> 00:05:53.389 market. all those cheap films just evaporated 00:05:53.389 --> 00:05:55.389 and the second part of that whammy the glowing 00:05:55.389 --> 00:05:59.769 box in everyone's living room television tv was 00:05:59.769 --> 00:06:02.329 the b movie killer or at least the killer of 00:06:02.329 --> 00:06:05.990 the old b movie why would you pay to see a formulaic 00:06:05.990 --> 00:06:07.730 western when you could just stay home and watch 00:06:07.730 --> 00:06:10.829 gun smoke for free so the second feature starts 00:06:10.829 --> 00:06:15.019 to die but the b movie doesn't disappear It mutates. 00:06:15.019 --> 00:06:18.220 It finds a new habitat. The drive -in. The numbers 00:06:18.220 --> 00:06:20.839 here are just wild. In 1945, there were what, 00:06:20.939 --> 00:06:24.430 like 96 drive -ins in the U .S.? Yep. By 1955, 00:06:24.769 --> 00:06:28.970 over 3 ,700. That's an explosion. A total explosion. 00:06:29.129 --> 00:06:31.689 And the audience shifted. It wasn't the family 00:06:31.689 --> 00:06:34.329 anymore. It was teenagers. And we have to be 00:06:34.329 --> 00:06:37.290 honest about the social dynamics of the drive 00:06:37.290 --> 00:06:39.009 -in. They were called passion pits for a reason. 00:06:39.089 --> 00:06:41.290 Exactly. The teens were there to hang out, to 00:06:41.290 --> 00:06:43.709 show off their cars, to make out. They were distracted 00:06:43.709 --> 00:06:46.209 viewers. They didn't want a complex drama. You 00:06:46.209 --> 00:06:48.310 needed something loud and simple. Loud, sensational, 00:06:48.550 --> 00:06:50.610 and simple. This is where we see the pivot from 00:06:50.610 --> 00:06:53.720 westerns to atomic cinema. It's the Cold War. 00:06:53.839 --> 00:06:56.279 There's this fear of the bomb, of science gone 00:06:56.279 --> 00:06:59.740 wrong. So you get the amazing colossal man. A 00:06:59.740 --> 00:07:02.329 guy grows giant from radiation. Or Invasion of 00:07:02.329 --> 00:07:04.350 the Body Snatchers, which is actually a brilliant 00:07:04.350 --> 00:07:07.209 allegory for conformity. It really is. Yeah. 00:07:07.269 --> 00:07:09.290 And to get people to the drive -ins, the studios 00:07:09.290 --> 00:07:11.850 got desperate. They started using gimmicks. This 00:07:11.850 --> 00:07:14.149 is the era of William Castle. Oh, the king of 00:07:14.149 --> 00:07:16.990 the gimmick. For his movie Macabre, he offered 00:07:16.990 --> 00:07:20.009 a $1 ,000 insurance policy in case you died of 00:07:20.009 --> 00:07:22.550 fright. That's marketing genius. Our movie is 00:07:22.550 --> 00:07:25.029 so scary, it's a liability. And for The Tingler, 00:07:25.189 --> 00:07:27.449 a movie about a creature that feeds on fear, 00:07:27.649 --> 00:07:31.269 he installed buzzers called Percepto in some 00:07:31.269 --> 00:07:33.529 of the theater seats. Buzzers in the seats. They 00:07:33.529 --> 00:07:42.990 were surplus airplanes. And your seat starts 00:07:42.990 --> 00:07:45.569 vibrating. I can only imagine the chaos. It was 00:07:45.569 --> 00:07:48.230 a carnival. But there was also a business innovation 00:07:48.230 --> 00:07:51.269 happening thanks to a studio called AIP American 00:07:51.269 --> 00:07:53.670 International Pictures. Right. Samuel Arkhoff 00:07:53.670 --> 00:07:55.550 and James Nicholson. What was their secret sauce? 00:07:55.810 --> 00:07:58.110 They realized the old rental model was broken. 00:07:58.230 --> 00:08:00.810 So they packaged two of their own cheap genre 00:08:00.810 --> 00:08:04.050 films together, say Day the World Ended and The 00:08:04.050 --> 00:08:07.149 Phantom from 10 ,000 Leagues as a prepackaged 00:08:07.149 --> 00:08:09.389 double feature. And because they provided the 00:08:09.389 --> 00:08:11.579 whole show. They could demand a percentage of 00:08:11.579 --> 00:08:14.319 the box office, just like an A movie. They made 00:08:14.319 --> 00:08:17.339 A money on B budgets by targeting teens with 00:08:17.339 --> 00:08:20.300 titles like I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Which brings 00:08:20.300 --> 00:08:22.980 us to a name that's basically synonymous with 00:08:22.980 --> 00:08:25.980 this whole era. The King of the Bs, Roger Corman. 00:08:26.420 --> 00:08:29.220 Although, interestingly, he hated that title. 00:08:29.600 --> 00:08:31.759 Corman always said he never made a B movie because 00:08:31.759 --> 00:08:33.860 the traditional second feature was dead by the 00:08:33.860 --> 00:08:36.539 time he started. He preferred low -budget exploitation. 00:08:37.059 --> 00:08:38.779 Whatever you call it, the man was a machine. 00:08:39.309 --> 00:08:41.509 What was that story? Monster from the ocean floor 00:08:41.509 --> 00:08:43.870 on a $12 ,000 budget. And a six -day shooting 00:08:43.870 --> 00:08:46.269 schedule. Corman was the master of efficiency. 00:08:46.509 --> 00:08:48.549 He'd shoot two movies back -to -back on the same 00:08:48.549 --> 00:08:51.690 set just to save money. But his real legacy isn't 00:08:51.690 --> 00:08:53.950 just the penny -pinching. It's the people he 00:08:53.950 --> 00:08:56.690 hired. The Corman Film School. Oh, the alumni 00:08:56.690 --> 00:08:58.889 list is staggering. We're talking Jack Nicholson, 00:08:59.009 --> 00:09:01.250 Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan 00:09:01.250 --> 00:09:03.909 Demme, James Cameron. They all got their start 00:09:03.909 --> 00:09:06.190 with Corman. Why was he such a magnet for talent? 00:09:06.519 --> 00:09:09.159 Well, he gave them a shot, but he also gave them 00:09:09.159 --> 00:09:11.580 freedom within constraints. He'd say, here's 00:09:11.580 --> 00:09:13.580 a camera. Here's 20 grand. Go make a movie. I 00:09:13.580 --> 00:09:15.100 don't care what you do. Just make sure there's 00:09:15.100 --> 00:09:17.259 a monster and a girl and it comes in on budget. 00:09:17.899 --> 00:09:20.580 That's incredibly liberating for a young filmmaker. 00:09:20.799 --> 00:09:22.679 It was the film school of the streets. You could 00:09:22.679 --> 00:09:24.759 experiment. If you failed, who cared? It was 00:09:24.759 --> 00:09:28.039 a cheap movie. But if you succeeded, you might 00:09:28.039 --> 00:09:30.620 just invent the future of Hollywood. So as we 00:09:30.620 --> 00:09:33.840 move into the 60s and 70s, the content gets edgier. 00:09:34.220 --> 00:09:37.059 The old production code, the censorship starts 00:09:37.059 --> 00:09:41.100 to crumble and the B movie leans hard into exploitation. 00:09:41.259 --> 00:09:43.700 This is where the definition shifts again. It's 00:09:43.700 --> 00:09:45.740 no longer about being low budget. It's about 00:09:45.740 --> 00:09:48.860 selling a specific sensation. Sex, violence, 00:09:49.120 --> 00:09:51.580 drugs, rebellion, stuff you couldn't see on TV. 00:09:51.759 --> 00:09:53.659 And the subgenres got really specific. You had 00:09:53.659 --> 00:09:56.100 nudies, you had gore. Right. You had Russ Meyer 00:09:56.100 --> 00:10:00.090 with faster pussycat kill. Kill. And then Herschel 00:10:00.090 --> 00:10:02.750 Gordon Lewis, the godfather of gore, he made 00:10:02.750 --> 00:10:06.529 Blood Feast in 1963. Before him, movies would 00:10:06.529 --> 00:10:09.070 cut away from the violence. Lewis zoomed in. 00:10:09.190 --> 00:10:12.470 And the effects were not great. Oh, terrible. 00:10:12.710 --> 00:10:15.789 He used sheep organs from a butcher shop. But 00:10:15.789 --> 00:10:18.110 it was shocking. His marketing gimmick was handing 00:10:18.110 --> 00:10:21.409 out vomit bags. Classic. But again, there's real 00:10:21.409 --> 00:10:23.909 cultural impact here. It wasn't just trash. Let's 00:10:23.909 --> 00:10:27.110 talk blaxploitation. That started with Sweetback's 00:10:27.110 --> 00:10:30.590 Badass Song. By Melvin Van Peebles in 1971. Yeah, 00:10:30.649 --> 00:10:32.610 and he partly funded it with a loan from Bill 00:10:32.610 --> 00:10:35.929 Cosby, which is a wild detail. The movie was 00:10:35.929 --> 00:10:39.389 rough, experimental, and a massive independent 00:10:39.389 --> 00:10:42.470 hit. Why did it resonate so much? Because for 00:10:42.470 --> 00:10:45.370 the first time, you had a black hero who beat 00:10:45.370 --> 00:10:48.009 the system. He wasn't a sidekick. He didn't die. 00:10:48.169 --> 00:10:51.009 It proved there was a huge underserved African 00:10:51.009 --> 00:10:53.830 -American audience. And that launched Coffee 00:10:53.830 --> 00:10:56.679 and Foxy Brown with Pam Grier. And the lines 00:10:56.679 --> 00:10:59.039 between A and B movies start to get really blurry 00:10:59.039 --> 00:11:01.879 here. I mean, Psycho. Psycho is the perfect example. 00:11:02.240 --> 00:11:04.279 Hitchcock was the biggest director in the world, 00:11:04.379 --> 00:11:06.740 but the studio hated the idea. They thought it 00:11:06.740 --> 00:11:09.480 was trashy, so he shot it with his TV crew. Cheap, 00:11:09.480 --> 00:11:11.740 black and white. It looked like a B movie, but 00:11:11.740 --> 00:11:13.980 it made A movie money. And then there's Night 00:11:13.980 --> 00:11:15.840 of the Living Dead. George Romero makes that 00:11:15.840 --> 00:11:17.940 for a hundred grand in Pittsburgh. And yeah, 00:11:18.019 --> 00:11:20.659 it's a zombie movie, but it's also a devastating 00:11:20.659 --> 00:11:24.500 critique of... Vietnam, social collapse, racism. 00:11:25.100 --> 00:11:28.159 It proved you could hide deep, subversive ideas 00:11:28.159 --> 00:11:31.019 inside a B -movie wrapper. But the biggest bridge 00:11:31.019 --> 00:11:34.080 has to be Easy Rider. Without a doubt. It started 00:11:34.080 --> 00:11:37.879 as an AIP biker movie idea, a standard exploitation 00:11:37.879 --> 00:11:40.980 genre, but it ended up getting released by Columbia 00:11:40.980 --> 00:11:43.480 Pictures. It cost next to nothing and made millions. 00:11:43.720 --> 00:11:46.340 It showed the big studios that these fringe subjects 00:11:46.340 --> 00:11:48.840 were actually mainstream. And that realization, 00:11:49.120 --> 00:11:51.399 ironically, is kind of what killed the traditional 00:11:51.399 --> 00:11:53.899 B -movie industry. It's the ultimate paradox. 00:11:54.200 --> 00:11:56.659 In the late 70s, the majors looked at what the 00:11:56.659 --> 00:11:58.940 B filmmakers were doing, creature features, space 00:11:58.940 --> 00:12:01.639 operas, and said, what if we just did that, but 00:12:01.639 --> 00:12:04.019 with an A -list budget? Enter Jaws and Star Wars. 00:12:04.240 --> 00:12:06.840 Exactly. Jaws is a monster movie. Star Wars is 00:12:06.840 --> 00:12:09.419 a space serial like Flash Gordon. Before 1975, 00:12:09.940 --> 00:12:12.559 this was B -level stuff. But Spielberg and Lucas 00:12:12.559 --> 00:12:14.340 turned them into the highest grossing films in 00:12:14.340 --> 00:12:17.139 history. So the blockbuster is just a B -movie 00:12:17.139 --> 00:12:19.639 on steroids. That's the blockbuster takeover. 00:12:19.740 --> 00:12:22.340 Once the big studios started spending $50 million 00:12:22.340 --> 00:12:25.139 on Superman, how could the little guys compete? 00:12:25.360 --> 00:12:27.620 The audience didn't want a rubber monster anymore. 00:12:27.679 --> 00:12:30.159 They wanted the real thing. But the B -movie 00:12:30.159 --> 00:12:33.769 didn't die. It just moved again. This time to 00:12:33.769 --> 00:12:35.929 our living rooms. The home video revolution. 00:12:36.309 --> 00:12:39.309 The video store became the new name. You had 00:12:39.309 --> 00:12:41.929 companies like Empire Pictures and Troma just 00:12:41.929 --> 00:12:45.529 thriving on VHS. Troma gave us the toxic Avenger. 00:12:45.649 --> 00:12:48.490 Which is really in that Z movie category films 00:12:48.490 --> 00:12:51.389 that are proud of being bad. Troma knew exactly 00:12:51.389 --> 00:12:53.590 who their audience was. The late night cable 00:12:53.590 --> 00:12:56.070 crowd. And that lineage continues today with 00:12:56.070 --> 00:12:58.809 studios like. The Asylum. Right. They mastered 00:12:58.809 --> 00:13:01.429 the mockbuster. Mockbuster. They release a movie 00:13:01.429 --> 00:13:03.629 that sounds just like a big Hollywood movie. 00:13:03.750 --> 00:13:05.850 So when Transformers comes out, they release 00:13:05.850 --> 00:13:08.610 Transmorphers. This is just shameless. It is. 00:13:08.610 --> 00:13:10.970 And it's profitable. But they also gave us Sharknado. 00:13:11.610 --> 00:13:13.429 Sharknado is fascinating because it feels like 00:13:13.429 --> 00:13:16.230 a throwback to that William Castle gimmick era. 00:13:16.370 --> 00:13:19.049 It knows it's ridiculous. It's a self -aware 00:13:19.049 --> 00:13:22.590 B -movie. And with CGI, they can do these crazy 00:13:22.590 --> 00:13:25.559 creature features for nothing. They skipped theaters 00:13:25.559 --> 00:13:28.120 and went straight to cable and streaming. You 00:13:28.120 --> 00:13:30.179 know, we've covered so much ground here, from 00:13:30.179 --> 00:13:33.080 Depression -era double bills to Sharknado. Looking 00:13:33.080 --> 00:13:35.399 back, what's the big takeaway? Why does the B 00:13:35.399 --> 00:13:37.539 -movie matter? I think the key insight is that 00:13:37.539 --> 00:13:39.840 it was never really about cheapness. It was about 00:13:39.840 --> 00:13:42.039 freedom because the financial stakes were so 00:13:42.039 --> 00:13:45.240 low, the creative risks could be high. It was 00:13:45.240 --> 00:13:48.440 the industry's R &D lab. The R &D lab. I really 00:13:48.440 --> 00:13:51.179 like that. Think about it. Lighting styles, sound 00:13:51.179 --> 00:13:54.080 techniques, new kinds of storytelling. Jack Nicholson 00:13:54.080 --> 00:13:56.379 learned how to act on a Corman set, not a Marvel 00:13:56.379 --> 00:13:59.440 set. B -movies tested the boundaries of taste 00:13:59.440 --> 00:14:01.600 and technology. When they found something that 00:14:01.600 --> 00:14:04.200 worked like the slasher film, the A -list studios 00:14:04.200 --> 00:14:06.840 would swoop in, polish it, and sell it to the 00:14:06.840 --> 00:14:09.179 masses. So the B -movies did the dirty work so 00:14:09.179 --> 00:14:11.980 the A -movies could shine. Exactly. Without that 00:14:11.980 --> 00:14:14.379 chaotic, messy, low -budget training ground, 00:14:14.620 --> 00:14:17.360 American cinema would be incredibly boring. So 00:14:17.360 --> 00:14:19.360 here's a thought to leave you with. We've talked 00:14:19.360 --> 00:14:21.360 about how the B -movie moved from theaters to 00:14:21.360 --> 00:14:24.980 drive -ins to VHS to cable. Today, we have YouTube. 00:14:25.080 --> 00:14:27.879 We have TikTok. We have content creators making 00:14:27.879 --> 00:14:30.620 videos on their phones for zero dollars that 00:14:30.620 --> 00:14:33.279 get millions of views. The barrier to entry is 00:14:33.279 --> 00:14:35.460 lower than it has ever been in history. Right. 00:14:35.559 --> 00:14:39.360 So is the B -movie dead? Or is that video you 00:14:39.360 --> 00:14:41.759 just watched of a kid doing a stunt in his backyard? 00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:44.200 Is that the modern equivalent? Maybe we're all 00:14:44.200 --> 00:14:46.779 just living in a 247 global double feature now. 00:14:46.879 --> 00:14:49.740 That is a terrifying and fascinating thought. 00:14:49.960 --> 00:14:52.259 That's all for this deep dive. Thanks for listening, 00:14:52.320 --> 00:14:53.519 and we'll catch you on the flip side.