Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are really
glad you're here because today we're tackling
something that is, it's basically in the DNA
of the modern movie industry, even if people
don't realize it. Oh, it's a topic just surrounded
by misconceptions. Huge misconceptions. Today
we're talking about the B movie. And I know exactly
where your brain goes when I say that. You're
picturing like a grainy black and white film.
A guy in a rubber lizard suit, maybe? Yeah, stomping
on a cardboard city or maybe a flying saucer
that looks... suspiciously like a pie tin on
a string. The assumption is always that B stands
for bad or, you know, bottom of the barrel. Right.
We use it as an insult. Right. That something
is B grade, it's trash. But looking at the research
we've pulled together, this comprehensive history,
that definition is historically just completely
wrong. It wasn't a quality judgment at all. No.
It was a hard -nosed economic term. And it was
purely business. If you want to understand Hollywood,
not the glitz, but the actual machinery of how
it survived the 20th century, you have to understand
the B movie because this wasn't just a dumping
ground for cheap films. It was the R &D lab for
the entire industry. Exactly. The R &D lab. And
I love that. So let's unpack this. If B doesn't
mean bad. What did it originally mean? We have
to go back to the 1930s for this, right? Right.
To get the B movie, you have to get inside the
wallet of the average American during the Great
Depression. Which was pretty much empty. Completely
empty. People had very little disposable income.
So if a family was going to spend a nickel, maybe
a dime at the theater, they needed to feel like
they were getting a huge return on that. They
wanted volume. Quantity for their money. Precisely.
So these small neighborhood theaters, the slang
for them was nabes. They couldn't just show one
movie anymore. They had to offer a full program.
And this is where the double feature comes from.
This is the birth of the double feature. But
it wasn't just two movies. The standard programming
became this massive buffet. A newsreel. Catch
up on the news. A cartoon for the kids. Maybe
a serial adventure episode like Flash Gordon.
And then two feature films. Talk about getting
your money's worth. And you had your main event,
the A movie, that had the big stars, your Clark
Gables, your Katharine Hepburns, and the big
budget. And then to fill out the bill, you had
the second feature, the B movie. So strictly
speaking, it just means second on the bill. But
this is where the economics get really interesting
to me. The difference wasn't just where they
were on the marquee. It was about how the theater
paid for them. This is the crucial part. The
A movie was rented on a percentage basis. Meaning
the studio gets a cut of the ticket sales. A
cut of every ticket sold. So if the A movie was
a huge hit, the studio made a fortune. If it
flopped. It lost big. Exactly. High risk, high
reward. But the B movie was different. How so?
It was rented for a flat fee. A flat fee. A fixed
price. The theater pays, say, 50 bucks to show
it for a week, and they keep all the ticket sales
after that. Okay. For the studio, the profit
was capped, but it was guaranteed. As long as
they kept their own budget super low. That's
the whole game. It becomes a simple math problem.
If the rental fee guarantees you, say, $50 ,000,
you just make damn sure you shoot the movie for
$30 ,000. So the B movie isn't art, it's a widget.
A product designed to fill a time slot for a
price. That's it. And the major studios, like
Warner Bros. and Fox, they had specific B units
just to churn these things out. It was a literal
assembly line. And then there were the Poverty
Row Studios. What a great name. Oh, yeah. Places
like Republic and Monogram. They didn't even
make A movies. They only made B movies. And they
were cranking out what they called quickies.
How quick are we talking? We're talking about
shooting an entire feature film in four days.
Four days. That sounds impossible. It was intense.
They reused scripts, costumes. They'd even reuse
footage. A guy falls off a horse in a 1935 movie.
You might see that exact same shot in a 1938
movie. Waste not, want not. And speaking of horses,
the main genre here was the Western, wasn't it?
Overwhelmingly, in the 30s and 40s, the B -Western
was the staple. This is where John Wayne cut
his teeth. Before he was the Duke, he was just
churning out dozens of these. And you had series
like The Three Musketeers. Oh, Play on Musketeers,
yeah. They were formulaic, sure, but they were
efficient. But it wasn't just cowboys. This is
one of the things I found most surprising, film
noir. Right. We think of film noir today as this
high art... moody, stylish thing we study in
film school. But it has its roots deep in the
B -movie mud. It absolutely does. And if you
think about the constraints, it makes perfect
sense. If you're a B -unit director, you have
no money for fancy sets. Your walls look like
cheap plywood. How do you hide that? Turn the
lights off. You use shadows. You use high contrast.
You put a Venetian blind in front of your one
light source and create those iconic bars of
shadow. That moody look we call artistic was
just a way to hide how cheap everything was.
That is the definition of creativity through
limitation. It is. Take a film like Stranger
on the third floor from 1940. It's only 64 minutes
long, a classic B runtime. But critics now say
it's the first true film noir. So the golden
age was built on this. But then in the late 40s
and early 50s, everything changes. What happened?
A double whammy hit the industry. First, the
government stepped in. There was a huge antitrust
ruling in 1948 that banned block booking. OK,
we should explain block booking. It sounds technical,
but is the engine of the whole system. It really
was. Basically, if a theater wanted the big A
-list blockbuster, the studio would say, fine,
but you also have to rent these five B movies
from us to go with it. They forced them to take
the whole package. Right. And once the Supreme
Court banned that, theaters could just say, no,
thanks, we'll just take the hit. And the guaranteed
market. all those cheap films just evaporated
and the second part of that whammy the glowing
box in everyone's living room television tv was
the b movie killer or at least the killer of
the old b movie why would you pay to see a formulaic
western when you could just stay home and watch
gun smoke for free so the second feature starts
to die but the b movie doesn't disappear It mutates.
It finds a new habitat. The drive -in. The numbers
here are just wild. In 1945, there were what,
like 96 drive -ins in the U .S.? Yep. By 1955,
over 3 ,700. That's an explosion. A total explosion.
And the audience shifted. It wasn't the family
anymore. It was teenagers. And we have to be
honest about the social dynamics of the drive
-in. They were called passion pits for a reason.
Exactly. The teens were there to hang out, to
show off their cars, to make out. They were distracted
viewers. They didn't want a complex drama. You
needed something loud and simple. Loud, sensational,
and simple. This is where we see the pivot from
westerns to atomic cinema. It's the Cold War.
There's this fear of the bomb, of science gone
wrong. So you get the amazing colossal man. A
guy grows giant from radiation. Or Invasion of
the Body Snatchers, which is actually a brilliant
allegory for conformity. It really is. Yeah.
And to get people to the drive -ins, the studios
got desperate. They started using gimmicks. This
is the era of William Castle. Oh, the king of
the gimmick. For his movie Macabre, he offered
a $1 ,000 insurance policy in case you died of
fright. That's marketing genius. Our movie is
so scary, it's a liability. And for The Tingler,
a movie about a creature that feeds on fear,
he installed buzzers called Percepto in some
of the theater seats. Buzzers in the seats. They
were surplus airplanes. And your seat starts
vibrating. I can only imagine the chaos. It was
a carnival. But there was also a business innovation
happening thanks to a studio called AIP American
International Pictures. Right. Samuel Arkhoff
and James Nicholson. What was their secret sauce?
They realized the old rental model was broken.
So they packaged two of their own cheap genre
films together, say Day the World Ended and The
Phantom from 10 ,000 Leagues as a prepackaged
double feature. And because they provided the
whole show. They could demand a percentage of
the box office, just like an A movie. They made
A money on B budgets by targeting teens with
titles like I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Which brings
us to a name that's basically synonymous with
this whole era. The King of the Bs, Roger Corman.
Although, interestingly, he hated that title.
Corman always said he never made a B movie because
the traditional second feature was dead by the
time he started. He preferred low -budget exploitation.
Whatever you call it, the man was a machine.
What was that story? Monster from the ocean floor
on a $12 ,000 budget. And a six -day shooting
schedule. Corman was the master of efficiency.
He'd shoot two movies back -to -back on the same
set just to save money. But his real legacy isn't
just the penny -pinching. It's the people he
hired. The Corman Film School. Oh, the alumni
list is staggering. We're talking Jack Nicholson,
Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan
Demme, James Cameron. They all got their start
with Corman. Why was he such a magnet for talent?
Well, he gave them a shot, but he also gave them
freedom within constraints. He'd say, here's
a camera. Here's 20 grand. Go make a movie. I
don't care what you do. Just make sure there's
a monster and a girl and it comes in on budget.
That's incredibly liberating for a young filmmaker.
It was the film school of the streets. You could
experiment. If you failed, who cared? It was
a cheap movie. But if you succeeded, you might
just invent the future of Hollywood. So as we
move into the 60s and 70s, the content gets edgier.
The old production code, the censorship starts
to crumble and the B movie leans hard into exploitation.
This is where the definition shifts again. It's
no longer about being low budget. It's about
selling a specific sensation. Sex, violence,
drugs, rebellion, stuff you couldn't see on TV.
And the subgenres got really specific. You had
nudies, you had gore. Right. You had Russ Meyer
with faster pussycat kill. Kill. And then Herschel
Gordon Lewis, the godfather of gore, he made
Blood Feast in 1963. Before him, movies would
cut away from the violence. Lewis zoomed in.
And the effects were not great. Oh, terrible.
He used sheep organs from a butcher shop. But
it was shocking. His marketing gimmick was handing
out vomit bags. Classic. But again, there's real
cultural impact here. It wasn't just trash. Let's
talk blaxploitation. That started with Sweetback's
Badass Song. By Melvin Van Peebles in 1971. Yeah,
and he partly funded it with a loan from Bill
Cosby, which is a wild detail. The movie was
rough, experimental, and a massive independent
hit. Why did it resonate so much? Because for
the first time, you had a black hero who beat
the system. He wasn't a sidekick. He didn't die.
It proved there was a huge underserved African
-American audience. And that launched Coffee
and Foxy Brown with Pam Grier. And the lines
between A and B movies start to get really blurry
here. I mean, Psycho. Psycho is the perfect example.
Hitchcock was the biggest director in the world,
but the studio hated the idea. They thought it
was trashy, so he shot it with his TV crew. Cheap,
black and white. It looked like a B movie, but
it made A movie money. And then there's Night
of the Living Dead. George Romero makes that
for a hundred grand in Pittsburgh. And yeah,
it's a zombie movie, but it's also a devastating
critique of... Vietnam, social collapse, racism.
It proved you could hide deep, subversive ideas
inside a B -movie wrapper. But the biggest bridge
has to be Easy Rider. Without a doubt. It started
as an AIP biker movie idea, a standard exploitation
genre, but it ended up getting released by Columbia
Pictures. It cost next to nothing and made millions.
It showed the big studios that these fringe subjects
were actually mainstream. And that realization,
ironically, is kind of what killed the traditional
B -movie industry. It's the ultimate paradox.
In the late 70s, the majors looked at what the
B filmmakers were doing, creature features, space
operas, and said, what if we just did that, but
with an A -list budget? Enter Jaws and Star Wars.
Exactly. Jaws is a monster movie. Star Wars is
a space serial like Flash Gordon. Before 1975,
this was B -level stuff. But Spielberg and Lucas
turned them into the highest grossing films in
history. So the blockbuster is just a B -movie
on steroids. That's the blockbuster takeover.
Once the big studios started spending $50 million
on Superman, how could the little guys compete?
The audience didn't want a rubber monster anymore.
They wanted the real thing. But the B -movie
didn't die. It just moved again. This time to
our living rooms. The home video revolution.
The video store became the new name. You had
companies like Empire Pictures and Troma just
thriving on VHS. Troma gave us the toxic Avenger.
Which is really in that Z movie category films
that are proud of being bad. Troma knew exactly
who their audience was. The late night cable
crowd. And that lineage continues today with
studios like. The Asylum. Right. They mastered
the mockbuster. Mockbuster. They release a movie
that sounds just like a big Hollywood movie.
So when Transformers comes out, they release
Transmorphers. This is just shameless. It is.
And it's profitable. But they also gave us Sharknado.
Sharknado is fascinating because it feels like
a throwback to that William Castle gimmick era.
It knows it's ridiculous. It's a self -aware
B -movie. And with CGI, they can do these crazy
creature features for nothing. They skipped theaters
and went straight to cable and streaming. You
know, we've covered so much ground here, from
Depression -era double bills to Sharknado. Looking
back, what's the big takeaway? Why does the B
-movie matter? I think the key insight is that
it was never really about cheapness. It was about
freedom because the financial stakes were so
low, the creative risks could be high. It was
the industry's R &D lab. The R &D lab. I really
like that. Think about it. Lighting styles, sound
techniques, new kinds of storytelling. Jack Nicholson
learned how to act on a Corman set, not a Marvel
set. B -movies tested the boundaries of taste
and technology. When they found something that
worked like the slasher film, the A -list studios
would swoop in, polish it, and sell it to the
masses. So the B -movies did the dirty work so
the A -movies could shine. Exactly. Without that
chaotic, messy, low -budget training ground,
American cinema would be incredibly boring. So
here's a thought to leave you with. We've talked
about how the B -movie moved from theaters to
drive -ins to VHS to cable. Today, we have YouTube.
We have TikTok. We have content creators making
videos on their phones for zero dollars that
get millions of views. The barrier to entry is
lower than it has ever been in history. Right.
So is the B -movie dead? Or is that video you
just watched of a kid doing a stunt in his backyard?
Is that the modern equivalent? Maybe we're all
just living in a 247 global double feature now.
That is a terrifying and fascinating thought.
That's all for this deep dive. Thanks for listening,
and we'll catch you on the flip side.