American International Pictures

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American International Pictures

For three decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s, American International Pictures (AIP) supplied America's drive-ins and movie theatres with cult favorites such as It Conquered the World, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Beach Blanket Bingo, and The Pit and the Pendulum. The studio not only made the movies that the younger generation wanted to see, but it also helped to create the stars of the future. AIP gave directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorcese their first jobs, and cast actors such as Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Peter Fonda in their first movies. Hollywood had always made "B" movies, but no one made them as fast or with as much enthusiastic abandon as AIP. With miniscule budgets, ten or fifteen-day shooting schedules, recycled sets, and churned-out screenplays, AIP changed the way movies were made by creating a demand for a brand new kind of low-budget entertainment; Hollywood would never be the same again.

American International Pictures founder Samuel Z. Arkoff had wanted to be a part of the motion picture industry since boyhood. It took him almost twenty years to fulfill his dream. After serving in World War II, he moved to Los Angeles, where he attended law school on the G.I. Bill. For five years, Arkoff made a living as a minor television and film lawyer. When he met former theatre chain owner, James Nicholson, the two hatched an idea for a production company whose time, they felt, had come.

By the early 1950s, the Golden Age of Hollywood was at an end. During the previous decade, the U.S. Congress had filed an anti-trust suit against the eight major studios. The government's goal was to check the studios' monopolistic abuse of power by forcing them to close down their distribution arms, that is, to prevent studios from owning theaters. The case dragged on, but by the end of the 1940s, a consent decree was passed, forcing the studios to divest control of their theaters. By 1954, the eight major studios no longer owned theaters and the studio system that had sustained Hollywood was gone.

But this was not the only major change to hit Hollywood. Television was wooing viewers away from the big screen. The neighborhood movie houses began shutting down as viewers flocked to the stores to buy television sets. In response, the major studios stopped making "B" pictures, concentrating their efforts instead on mega-productions, musicals, new gimmicks such as 3-D, and wide-angle processes such as Cinema Scope and VistaVision, transforming movies into big screen special events that they hoped would lure viewers away from their televisions.

It was at this time that Arkoff and Nicholson spotted a hole in the movie market. They realized that the second-run movie houses and drive-ins were unable to afford these first-run Hollywood extravaganzas, and so were losing their audiences. Arkoff and Nicholson knew that if they could find a way to make first-run movies inexpensively and then supply them to exhibitors at a much lower cost, they would make a huge profit.

In 1954, Arkoff and Nicholson met a young filmmaker named Roger Corman who was looking for a distributor for a low-budget film he was producing. The Fast and the Furious, a race car movie starring John Ireland and Dorothy Malone, was just what Arkoff and Nicholson had in mind. They bought the film as part of a four-picture deal with Corman and AIP was born. With Corman as one of their main directors and teenagers their target audience, AIP turned out Westerns, action flicks, prison movies, sci-fi thrillers, and horror films, shamelessly jumping on every cinematic trend. By the late 1950s, with films such as Invasion of the Saucer-Men, Sorority Girl, and Machine Gun Kelly, the company was turning a steady profit.

By the early 1960s, AIP had found their formula and they felt they could start to take a few risks. When Roger Corman approached Arkoff and Nicholson about filming Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, the studio signed veteran star Vincent Price to a multi-picture contract, and the critically and financially successful Corman-Price-Poe cycle was born. Realizing that horror movies were in demand, they hired stars from the Golden Age of Horror such as Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff to appear in their films, fueling a horror renaissance that lasted well into the next decade.

During the 1960s, it seemed as if AIP could do no wrong. When the studio signed Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon to frolic in the sand in Beach Party, they initiated a huge wave of successful beach movies. Hot young stars such as Funicello, Avalon, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and Nancy Sinatra were brought up in the AIP ranks, and by the early 1970s cutting-edge young directors began flocking to the studio to have their films made. Among these were Martin Scorcese, who directed Boxcar Bertha; Brian De Palma, who made Sisters; Ivan Reitman, who filmed Cannibal Girls; and Oliver Stone, who directed Seizure. Even Woody Allen got his first break at AIP, when the studio hired the young stand-up comedian to dub over a Japanese spy film. His What's Up, Tiger Lily? became an instant cult classic.

During the 1970s, AIP branched out into bigger productions with horror classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes, blaxploitation film Foxy Brown, futuristic thriller Mad Max with Mel Gibson, and Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill. By the time the studio merged with Filmways in 1980, American International Pictures had become an integral part of moviemaking history.

In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of AIP's films, an honor about which Arkoff mused, "In the early days of AIP, if anyone had told me that our pictures would be shown in the Museum of Modern Art, I would have been startled. That was the furthest thing from my mind. We did not deliberately make art. We were making economical pictures for our youthful market, but at the same time, I guess we were also doing something unique and evolutionary." Indeed, this unique and evolutionary approach to making movies changed not only the face of American cinema, but also helped to transform American popular culture. As the curators of the film department at MOMA noted, "Not only are [American International's] films rich in their depiction of our culture, but indeed they have played a not insignificant part in it."

—Victoria Price