Documentary Hails the Conquering B-Movie Machine

American International Pictures’ motto was, “Make ‘em fast and make ‘em cheap.”

Really cheap.

Samuel Z. Arkoff, who founded the scrappy little studio with the late Jim Nicholson, recalls the time producer-director Roger Corman was given a mere $29,000 to make the 1955 horror flick “The Beast With a Million Eyes.”

“Roger said, ‘I can’t do it [for that budget],’ ” recalls Arkoff, now 83. “I said, ‘Roger, you can do it.’ So he went off to Palm Springs to make the movie.”

When Corman gave the completed film to the editors to cut, everyone quickly realized there was no beast in the film. And AIP had already sent out posters publicizing the multi-eyed creature.

“I said, ‘Where is the beast?,’ ” Arkoff says. “Roger said, ‘I didn’t have any money. You put in the monster.’ So what we finally did is we got a teakettle and we put about 50 holes in it and got steam going through it. That became our beast with a million eyes.”

Though Arkoff sold his holdings in AIP to Filmways in 1982--Nicholson left the company in 1969 and died in 1972--the independent studio’s films have lived on thanks to television and video.

And now American Movie Classics is saluting the studio with an hourlong documentary, “It Conquered Hollywood! The Story of American International Pictures,” premiering tonight on the cable network.

During its existence, AIP produced such cult teen favorites as the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello sun and fun musicals “Beach Party,” “Muscle Beach Party” and “Beach Blanket Bingo,” as well as “I Was a Teen-age Werewolf,” “Teenage Caveman,” “The Trip” and “Wild in the Streets.” During AIP’s later years, the studio branched out to make a few prestige pictures, like Brian De Palma’s thriller “Dressed to Kill,” the box-office hit “The Amityville Horror” and the Sean Connery-Natalie Wood vehicle “Meteor.”

AIP gave such directors as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen their starts and showcased such then-young, up-and-coming actors as Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Cher, Pam Grier, Richard Pryor and Nick Nolte.

“It Conquered Hollywood!,” narrated by AIP alumnus Peter Bogdanovich, features clips from the movies as well as interviews with Arkoff, Corman and such actors as Bruce Dern, Beverly Garland, Aron Kincaid and Pam Grier.

AIP was born in 1954 when Arkoff, a lawyer from Iowa, and Jim Nicholson, a theater chain manager from Nebraska, teamed up to make low-budget movies. The fact they only had $3,000 in capital, no scripts, no stars and no experience in making movies didn’t stop them.

They got off the ground by acquiring and distributing Corman’s “The Fast and the Furious.” Corman agreed to “lend” them the race car drama for 90 days. In return, Corman was given a three-picture deal with $40,000 to make each film.

Corman had offers from Columbia and Republic to distribute “The Fast and the Furious” but went with Arkoff and Nicholson. “I could see the trap which was that you made a film and you waited to get the money back from distribution before you could make your next film,” says Corman. “Therefore, you were limited in your output.”

Even though AIP was the new kid on the block, Corman explains, “I was willing to go with them because I had faith in both of them.”

The producers also were the first to understand there was an audience of teenagers hungry for films that reflected their world. Arkoff realized how out of touch was Hollywood when he went to a Joan Crawford movie.

“She was close to 45 or 50 and she dressed as a teenager,” says Arkoff. “The teenagers in the audience said, ‘My God, she is older than my mother.’ I said to Jim and Roger, we have to make pictures for teenagers. That is what we started to do: ‘I was a Teen-age Werewolf,’ ‘I Was a Teenage Frankenstein’ and ‘Teenage Caveman.’ The kids came.

“About that time, TV was coming [into fashion]. Veterans were getting to buy houses, and so the older people were sitting at home watching TV with their families. And the young people wanted to get out.”

“I think both Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff understood the young market,” Corman says. “They had children who were young at the time, and I think that kept them in touch with it. Plus, Jim had previously been a former theater manager. He had some understanding of audiences from that.”

Among AIP’s early films were such exploitation quickies as “Hot Rod Girl,” “Runaway Daughters” and “Shake, Rattle and Rock.” By the end of 1958, the independent studio had produced and distributed 50 films.

Actor-comedian Frank Gorshin got his start in those early AIP films. “I had just come out to L.A.,” he says. “They were low-budget, but I didn’t care. It was just exciting to be in front of the camera. There was a great camaraderie. I did a picture [for AIP] called ‘The Invasion of the Saucer Men.’ I didn’t have much to do with it. But it has become a cult now. People will have me sign the poster.”

Kincaid, who appeared in the ‘60s AIP films “Ski Party,” “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine” and “Ghost in the Invisible Bikini,” thought all of those films would be forgotten as soon as they left the theaters.

“I didn’t realize I was doing something people were going to be fond of when I was an old man,” says the 61-year-old Kincaid, now a visual artist.

Kincaid remembers shooting the films’ interiors at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. “They had dressing rooms and little trailers for us,” says Kincaid. “They had really nice lunches for us when we were on location. When we did ‘Ski Party,’ we were flown to Sun Valley.”

And the casts were always sent on PR tours for their movies. “We would go to drive-ins where they should show these movies,” Kincaid says. “They would introduce us from the stage, and the parents would be yawning and their young children would be screaming and clawing for us. It was really a remarkable time.”’

During his nearly 15-year stint with AIP, Corman made more than two dozen films for the studio, including “The Raven,” “The Trip” and “House of Usher.”

According to Arkoff, Corman was born with “cheap” genes. “As cheap as we were, or as frugal we were, Roger was even more frugal,” says Arkoff, who is remaking some of his AIP horror films for HBO.

“He would go make movies out of town, and then we would get the rushes. I would call him up and say, ‘For God’s sake, Roger, extras are cheap, put some extras in the background.’ ”

In the late ‘60s, Corman left AIP after Arkoff and Nicholson made changes on his films “The Wild Angels” and “The Trip.”

Still, Corman says, “I never had a serious problem with them. I began to get a little bit more radical, and they had gone public and started to get a little bit more conservative. So the last two films they did some editing. They eased back on some of the things I thought were important, but which maybe were a little bit too radical politically or socially for what they saw themselves as a publicly held company. I remained friendly with them and, even after I formed my own company, I produced a couple for them.”

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* “It Conquered Hollywood! The Story of American International Pictures” airs tonight at 7 on AMC. The network has rated it TV-PG (maybe unsuitable for young children).