Retro Bio: Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants
© Michelle Troutman
Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants: From the Man Who Brought You I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Muscle Beach Party by Sam Arkoff with Richard Trubo
Birch Lane Press1992 (out-of-print)
ISBN: #1559721073
287 pages, illustrations
"My number one commandment -- beginning in 1954 when Jim Nicholson and I founded American International Pictures -- has always been 'Thou shalt not put too much money into any one picture. And with the money you do spend, put it on the screen; don't waste it on the egos of the actors or on nonsense that might appeal to highbrow critics.'" - Samuel Z. Arkoff
A.I.P. co-founder and producer Sam Arkoff reveals how he started making movies under budget and on time and became successful through careful management and clever ad campaigns in the 1950s, when movie studios feared losing their audiences to television.
The biography begins with Arkoff's life before A.I.P. and the remainder chronicles the studio's birth, from The Fast and the Furious through its demise in the early '80s after Dressed to Kill. He engagingly details the pleasures and the pains of making A.I.P.'s best-known pictures. Most chapters focus on a different genre A.I.P. capitalized on, whether introducing the '60s beach party movies and protest pictures or profiting from a certain film's popularity. Of A.I.P.'s answer to The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Amazing Colossal Man, and other knock-offs, Arkoff asserts, "Once you've found something that works, why not milk it dry?"
Despite critics' scorn and lack of respect from major studios and theater bookers, A.I.P. survived because its movies appealed to audiences. Some are classics and some are cheesy. Fifties flicks such as It Conquered the World and I Was a Teenage Werewolf have proven great targets for the wisecrackers on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
This book is a must read for fans of A.I.P. films and those interested in independent film and film history.
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