To B or Not to B: Can Low-budget Direct-to-Video Films Survive?

By: John Thonen
Date: Tuesday, July 18, 2000

Low-budget films, exploitation flicks, independent productions, or just good old B-movies. Call them what you will, this seldom respected yet once integral segment of the film industry has fallen on hard times in recent years. These low-rent productions once played in theaters and drive-ins, developed new acting and directorial talents, and later helped forge the home video and cable TV booms of the '80s. Today, these independents have been driven from theaters and are losing ground in the home video market. So what's the future for this cinematic stepchild? What is the niche they will claim in a film climate dominated by music video whiz-kids, video game designers, and slick lawyer-cum-studio heads who think George Romero was the lead in that Shakespeare thing that inspired Romeo Must Die?

To try to answer these questions, Fandom spoke to a number of low-budget filmmakers, ranging from old masters to the more recent practitioners who follow in their footsteps. Our commentators, who were interviewed separately, include:

ROGER CORMAN - The once and future King of the B's who has, as producer and/or director, been responsible for over 600 films, jump-starting the careers of everyone from Jack Nicholson to Francis Ford Coppola in a career that will soon celebrate its 50th anniversary.

CHARLES BAND - The current head of Full Moon Entertainment is the only active filmmaker whose career comes close to that of Corman's. The perennially boyish producer-director has weathered many a financial setback on his way to a filmography with over 100 titles. The man behind the Puppetmaster Ghoulies, Trancers, and Subspecies franchises bears a genuine passion for fantastic genre movies, and for nearly 30 years, Charlie Band has made the type of films he loves.

FRED OLEN RAY - Since 1978, when he put his motorcycle up as collateral to finance, his first professional film The Alien Dead, Ray has directed over 50 films and written or produced some 25 more. The budgets of the entire Ray filmography wouldn't match that of Armageddon's, but in terms of return-on-initial-investment, they may be more profitable, He is also, almost certainly, the only filmmaker to have won, under the name Freddy Valentine, a pro-wrestling title. To hell with Spielberg's Oscars. Who's ever seen him execute a double suplex?

JIM WYNORSKI - May be the most consistently unacknowledged master of the B-movie around. With over 30 films under his belt, Wynorski has worked in nearly every genre, from horror to children's comedies. A protégée of Corman's and a friend of Olen Ray's, Wynorski's long running predilection for corny humor and overflowing breasts has faded in recent years, to unveil a more mature and highly capable filmmaker. But he'd be the first to deny it.


To understand the current status of B-moviemaking, one has to start at the beginning: the 1950s. Before then, according to Fred Olen Ray, the B-movies offered by independent producers were quite a different beast. 'They were originally the second feature with an 'A' film, and they were, by nature, programmers. A big step down from the first feature. I think people who remember those days still think a B-picture is somehow sub-par. But today, 'B' really stands for 'budget.' Our films are very budget conscious. But it doesn't mean they're bad.'

It was during the '50s that independent filmmakers, a film industry presence from the earliest days of the art, found a niche all their own in the youth and exploitation market. Several upstart independents, most notably American International Pictures (AIP)with major input from Roger Corman--proved that B-movies could be made and marketed to stand on their own. Today, Corman recalls that, 'When I started in the late '50s and up until the early '80s, we could go in with a low-budget film and maybe 30-40 prints in a city or region and maybe a $100,000 advertising campaign and compete, and sometimes beat, the majors.'

Numerous independent production companies flourished during this period, as many of the major studios floundered thanks to the newfound competition of television. For most of the next three decades, the films from AIP, Allied Artists and later New World, Cannon and others, were a common presence in theaters. Then, Corman says, things began to change. 'What happened was the growth and power of the major studios. Starting around the mid-'80s, the majors moved to a national release: 1000, 2000, or more prints and theaters at the same time. That's millions of dollars just for the prints. Then add in that the typical major studio budget when I started was probably 10-million, and today it's 50-million. That combination really slammed the door on the independent. We just couldn't compete.'

Charlie Band, who was just 21 when he entered the B-movie market in the '70s as its golden days were nearing an end, shares his own view on why 'B' movies faded from the theaters: 'There's a lot of factors, but first and foremost, it's that the majors started making 100-million-dollar B-movies. When I first started in the business, genre films were few and far between, and that made a niche for the films I made, because there was an audience for them and no one was serving it. Then Jaws and later Star Wars, changed all of that. However much you might like and admire those films, they are still just big-budget B-movies in concept.' Band feels that situation is even more true today. 'In a lot of ways, Armageddon is a 200-million-dollar End of the World [a 1977 Band film]. I could have made about 600 of those for what they spent on Armageddon.'

Jim Wynorski, who cut his exploitation teeth in the promotions department of Corman's old New World Studios, feels both the methods of the studios and the perception of the audience can be blamed for the changing fortunes of the B-movie. 'The major studios decided they didn't want the independents competing with them for screens, and the audiences decided they didn't want to pay $7.50 to see Chopping Mall [an early Wynorski film] or Erotic Time Machine [a recent Band production]. Now those are very different films, but in terms of audience perception, those are the same film: low budget, no stars, limited promotion. Unless it's an art film or a big studio film, theatrical release became impossible.'

Few independents had the deep pockets to survive the major changes the '80s brought to the theatrical market. Most either folded up their tents or unsuccessfully tried to compete with the majors. However, a new market was developing, and some of the more savvy survivors embraced it, eventually even giving birth to a new group of independents. That market was home video, and the result was the direct-to-video movie.

One of the first major players in the home video marketplace, and one who remains a major presence there today, was Charlie Band. 'I was involved in the early days of video when I started what might have been the first independent video company, Media. At that time, the major studios didn't have a clue about home video. Some were even fighting it. The independents I went to, to license filmstitles like The Groove Tube and Halloweenthey thought I was crazy. 'Who on Earth is going to buy these?' they'd say to me.' Of course, Band proved himself more than a little prescient, when home video shot through the roof and became a major income source, first for the independents and later for the major studios.

But, as Corman explains, the home video market was a mixed blessing. 'The plus to the video market was that it put a floor under the potential gross. You could almost always count on making a certain amount of money. The downside was, it also put a ceiling on that gross, so that you could also count on never making much more than that amount of money. If you put it in baseball terms, it was as if every time I came to bat I'd hit a single. Now and then, maybe a double or a triple. But no home runs. No giant hits. They just didn't exist in video.'

Full Moon's Charlie Band agrees with Corman's assessment of the heyday of home video, but feels there were extenuating aspects of the industry that, in the long run, could offset the downside. 'Maybe there were no home runs. I'd have to agree with that. But take the Puppetmaster franchise. That was a home run, even if each film was only a single or a double. We've made seven of them in the last 10 years. They play endlessly on cable. The Sci-Fi Channel even has Puppetmaster weeks. We've even launched a very successful line of action figures based on the series. So, in the long run, those and some of our other franchises have been home runs.'

The home video franchise was pioneered by Band but today is dominated by Disney owned Dimension Pictures, who offer Dusk Till Dawn, Children of the Corn and other series, along with Universal, producers of the Phantasm, Tremors and Darkman films. However, the franchise wasn't the only method B-movie-makers used to draw attention to their direct-to-video, fare, as Roger Corman explains. 'There are performers with a very recognizable hook for the audience. Performers whose very name on a video box tells the renter what kind of film they are getting. Shannon Tweed [star of dozens of erotic thrillers] and Don 'the Dragon' Wilson [a real-life kickboxing champion who starred in over 20 martial arts films throughout the '80s] are very good examples of video movie stars. There are other new people coming up, but the market is weaker so there are fewer of them and they have less influence. Julie Strain [the pneumatic inspiration and voice for the animated lead in Heavy Metal 2000] may be one of the last.'

Corman sites his decision not to go head-to-head with the majors as one of the keys to his company's survival. 'We have always believed that we are niche players. Say we make a picture for 1.5-million, which is about average for us. Our income is home video, pay cable, cable and syndicated TV, and we can turn a reasonable profit in those areas. These other companiesthey want a piece of that theatrical market. So they up their budgets to 5-million, put another couple million into prints and advertising, and try to compete with the majors by presenting themselves as a slightly less expensive major picture. But almost invariably, they are seen as a slightly more expensive low-budget picture. They'll bring in a little more doing it, but they spent 8- or 10-million more to get it. You can go down the list: Trimark, LIVE, Cannon, Kushner Locke. They've all tried it, and most are completely gone.'

In the early '90s, the home video market became more competitivedue to the increased presence of the majors and the video super-stores' reliance on stocking multiple copies of major releases; a repeat of the '80s purge of the independent theatrical filmmakers hit the direct-to-video market. Once powerful video labels such as Media, New World, Academy, and Vestron were suddenly no more, and the DTV filmmakers found that the video well had suddenly gone dry. One of the few that survived this cinematic pogrom, albeit in a weakened state, was Charlie Band's Full Moon Video.

'We built Full Moon as its own franchise,' Band recalls. 'Not every movie is alike, and some are better and some worse. But they're all cut from the same cloth. If we had released a different type of film every monthfirst a drama, then a horror film, then an action filmI don't think we'd be in business today.' Which is not to say that Band found survival in the '90s to be simple. 'A few years back, it was very difficult for us, and a lot of independents went under. What saved us is that name branding. It means something. People recognize Full Moon, and it means something to them. There is a certain amount of trust there. We would mess things up if the next Full Moon release was a musical comedy from France with subtitles. This is what we do.'

To continue what Full Moon does, Band tells that he has had to make concessions to the dwindling market for his films. 'We've had to reduce our budgets to be sure we could still be profitable at the end of the day. Otherwise, we wouldn't be around to have all this fun. The results are still pretty good, but we are making pictures for less than we were 10 years ago.'

Band adds that his method for keeping Full Moon's head above water isn't strictly a matter of making cheap movies. 'I'll admit that some of our budgets are pretty thin, and there's only so much you can do with those diminishing budgets. But I'm still avoiding certain shortcuts because I feel you have to do certain things to make it feel like a movie. It's not all cost cutting. Part of is that there are ways to make a picture today that simply costs less. Part of it is shooting offshoreRomania, for us. Part of it is technology changes that are saving us money in post-production.'