No Parents, No Church, No Authorities in Our Films: Exploitation Movies, the Youth Audience, and Roger Corman’s Counterculture Trilogy

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Bikinis to Bikersin early june 1966, james h. nicholson, president of American International Pictures (AIP), US film industry's most important major-minor studio and its leading producer of low-budget, independent movies for youth audiences, announced sharp change of direction for his company. The era of saucy-butwholesome and bikini pictures that had been AIP's stock-in-trade for past three years-ever since success of Beach Party (1963) had birthed lucrative cycle of movies built around vacation frolics of scantily clad high-school hotties-was over. Henceforth, AIP would offer its customers stronger, more challenging fare in form of what Nicholson called a series of (qtd. in From Sand in Bikini) designed to both reflect and exploit turbulent, antiauthoritarian turn taken by American youth culture at mid-decade.1The first of what Box Office labeled AIP's protest dramas was The Wild Angels (1966), according to Variety an documentary style depiction of transgressive lifestyles of California's outlaw motorcycle gangs most closely associated with Hell's Angels, which were then enjoying period of nationwide notoriety thanks to exposes in Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, Nation, and Time and Life magazines.2 Only couple of years before, Nicholson had stridently defended his beachbikini pictures as the epitome of morality, deflecting accusations of prurience by insisting that there no overtly sexy sequences and no sex talk among kids; the stars of AIP's beach pictures, he noted, are always talking about getting married (qtd. in McGee 219). Now, though, his company reveled shamelessly in shockingly antisocial content of its product. AIP's publicity notes for press screening of The Wild Angels sensationalized film's biker gang as a group of fanatical rebels . . . bent on kicks that, guided by morality of its own, seeks to revenge itself harshly on society . . . for what it feels unwarranted intrusions and frustrations (The Wild Angels pressbook). A provocative advertising campaign poster screamed, Their credo is violence, their god is hate! And reviewers played their part, dwelling on film's multiple instances of depravity and moral turpitude: a sick, unclean, revolting spectacle, concluded Hollywood Reporter, remarking that even necrophilia, most loathsome of perversions, is presented with detachment (Powers).Trading bikinis for bikers was an unqualified success. By end of 1966, The Wild Angels, which cost AIP only $360,000 to make, had grossed over $5 million, becoming by far company's highest-earning film to date and ranking thirteenth in Variety's year-end box office chart. AIP embarked on cycle of biker films, comprising further twelve pictures over next five years, while company's competitors in youth exploitation market jumped on biker bandwagon, creating flourishing subgenre that between 1966 and 1972 would encompass some three dozen films in total.3Even majors took note. Rider (1969), joint project of Wild Angels star Peter Fonda and AIP alumnus Dennis Hopper, and property on which AIP itself passed, was picked up by Columbia. When this variant of disreputable AIP biker formula became fourth-highest-grossing film of 1969, making over $19 million from meager $370,000 budget (Hill 30), Hollywood was shocked into rapidly recalibrating its production practices to cater to hitherto-derided youth audience that AIP had spent previous fifteen years cultivating. As Paul Monaco argues, Easy Rider convinced industry that movie production for future would have to be based largely on search for formulas and aesthetics that could truly excite core audience of moviegoers- now composed almost entirely of adolescents and young adults (188). AIP's shift from bikinis to bikers precipitated fundamental change in model of American film production and transformed industry's perception of its market. …