To B Or Not To B: Can Low-Budget DTV Films Survive, Part 2.

By: John Thonen
Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Veteran producer Roger Corman has taken a different tack from Charles Band in order to keep his ship running through this latest economic storm. 'We are the only independent with two studios, one here and one in Ireland. With the market's weakness, we were overproducing. So I converted the Hollywood studio to a TV series and am trying something I don't think anyone has done before.'

Instead of making fewer and less expensive films, Corman has ventured where few B-producers have gone: television. The producer's first TV series is an action-adventure show for the syndicated market, where such B-movie-inspired shows as Xena and Cleopatra 2025 have found a home. Spun off from two popular Corman DTV movies, Black Scorpion features a sexy, lead character who fights crime in a scanty leather costume, fishnets and stiletto heels. The series is reportedly campy fun and laden with stock footage from the Corman film library.

Where Corman has broken new ground with his series is in terms of the overall production. 'Usually, you just produce a pilot and try to sell the series from that. The problem is that you typically spend 2-3 times more on that pilot than you will on an episode of the series, so the stations buying it never really know what they are getting. What we did was finance and produce 22 episodes, a full season of the show, and then began to sell it. That way, what the stations see is truly what they get.'

While Band and Corman have their own methods for surviving during these lean years, Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray have different philosophies. 'You have to go where the money is,' says Wynorski. 'I don't know that video really matters anymore. The majors have really taken that over, too. When I started at New World, we did newspaper ads, trailers and posters to promote the films. You can't do that in video. The only way to make the renter aware of your film is a couple of inches of box art, and it's hard to compete when some big-budget movie has it's 3 inches of box art on the shelf 50 times and yours is one box on the bottom left. I don't even aim my films at video anymore. I really aim at a TV market, both foreign and domestic.'

While Corman feels the day of the video star is fading, Wynorski feels that B-movie stars still exist. 'Daniel Baldwin, Shannon Whirry, Dolph Lundgren, Jeff Faheythose names still work on cable and the foreign market.'

That foreign market, adds Ray, cannot be underestimated. 'There is still a theatrical market for a lot of these films overseas. When we shot The Prophet [a Don 'the Dragon' Wilson action tale] in India, you'd be amazed at what was playing there. Stuff that was sub-par direct-to-video fodder here, was playing in theaters there. You go to Germany, you'll find out that Michael Duddikoff [star of the American Ninja series and dozens of other low-budget action films] is still a very big star there.'


Of course, as Jim Wynorski points out, the foreign market has it's own problems. 'You have to stay away from comedy. It doesn't translate. I love comedy; it doesn't travel well. The comedy I sneak in has to come from character rather than jokes. Otherwise, the foreign markets just don't get it.'

The foreign market, Ray shares, also has other differences from the U.S. market, many of which are major changes from the breasts-and-blood-strewn heyday of video. 'The foreign market has gotten very prudish on sex and violence. It's reached a point where it's like back in the Jimmy Cagney days. You know, you shoot somebody; they grab their stomach and fall down. No blood squibs. No gore effects. You just fall down.'

Ray explains that this change is part of what brought about the current spate of what are called 'hardware' films in the B-moviemaking industry. 'That's why there's been a trend towards hardware films. Where the action and violence involves these big objects, stealth fighters and trains and ships, instead of people. Of course, there's people in these planes and subs who are dying, but that's apparently OK.'

The 'hardware' films Wynorski and Ray mention are one of the few bright spots for today's B-movie independents. Olen Ray elaborates on this sub-genre's place in the history of B-movie-making. 'The 'B' market has always had phases. When I started in the business, the trend was for rip-offs of big budget movies. The Italians in particular made dozens of Road Warrior and Terminator type movies. So did the Phillipinos. Slasher films were it for a while, then erotic thriller and then family films, like my Invisible Mom, which did gangbusters overseas.'

Ray doesn't deny that following these trends can be creatively stagnating. 'You basically keep making the same film over and over until you run out of ideas. Then you still keep making it over and over until you run out of customers or find a new trend. Today, it's 'hardware' films.'

To make 'hardware' filmsessentially action epics done on a budgetthat audiences in the U.S. and overseas will accept, is largely a matter of illusion, creative deception, and rigid cost controls. 'When video crashed in '96,' explains Wynorski, 'the foreign buyers were saying that they wanted bigger films, but they still wanted to pay what they had been paying. So how do you do that? The answer is to get footage from big moviesshots of jets and subs and missilesand then concoct a story around that footage.'

Olen Ray elaborates: 'The trick is to make a movie for a million bucks that looks like a $6-million movie. To do that, people are raiding stock footage libraries all over town. Taking scenes from other movies and then shooting new cockpitor whateverscenes. The script exists chiefly to connect all the stock footage.'

'I like doing them,' shares Wynorski. 'It's a challenge to see how you can integrate this stock footage, which is somebody else's work, and still keep my story and characters. You can't just have a lot of tanks shooting at each other. You have to be involved with the people in the tanks.'

Ray opines that not everyone applies the same effort as his friend Wynorski does to make the patchwork quilt appear seamless. 'Sometimes, it gets out of hand. A fighter pilot in a blue jumpsuit has a dogfight. He lands, goes into a hanger and changes into a yellow jumpsuit and goes back up for another fight. And it's all because the guy in the next piece of stock footage is in a yellow jumpsuit. I've seen stuff that bad.'

Charlie Band conserves his economic resources by frequently working in Romania, where U.S. dollars can buy a lot of production value. Roger Corman executes a similar trick through his Ireland-based studio, which benefits greatly from numerous tax breaks and funding aids provided by the local government. Wynorski and Ray rarely venture outside the U.S. with their productions, but, as Ray explains, there are ways to control costs.

'You try and reuse anything you can,' he says. 'There was this sci-fi movie, Ravager, and they had built a pretty nice set for the interior of this spacecraft. So, when they're done, they sell the set to Andrew Stevens [a former actor in films like The Fury, who is now a successful producer-director of B-movies], who paid like $2,500.00 for it. Then it gets used as the inside of a space station in Scorpion One and as the control room of a sub in Crash Dive and a couple of other sub movies. Then it's an underground CIA lab in my film The Prophet, and eventually it's repainted again and becomes Santa's workshop in Secret Santa [released on video as Dear Santa], one of my family films. Hell, I used it in five films, and I know it was in at least a dozen others before they finally tore it down.' Ah, if only our government was so cost conscious.

Based on their present efforts, it seems unlikely that Corman, Band, Ray or Wynorski will fail to survive the latest economic challenge to face the B-movie industry. But what of the future? What brave new world will these filmmakers, and the low-budget impresarios, who follow them, find as a home? Ray and Wynorski will likely follow the trends, as they have in the past, content to be in pace with their industry, but rarely ahead of it. Roger Corman, the oldest of our commentators, prefers to look further ahead and has his eye on new consumer technology.

'DVD has been a bit of encouraging news lately,' he tells us. 'It's still a small market, but it's growing pretty quickly, and our sales in that area have been quite good. The popularity of digital satellite receivers is another fresh area, as they are creating a lot of channels, and something has to be put on them. The majors aren't geared to rapidly creating cost effective programming like those channels will need. We are.'

Charlie Band also sees his long-term future in the near future of home entertainment. 'I'm something of a 3-D pioneer, I suppose, with Metalstorm ['83] and Parasite ['82]. I think with high definition TV and DVD, the 3-D world will open up again, so we did a weird little one called The Creeps, recently, and I hope to do about one a year. I think when Hi-Def happens on a large scale, there will be a lot of interest in them.'

Ever the risk-taking entrepreneur, Band is perhaps the most visionary of the group and may, as he was at the birth of home video, be the most prescient. 'I think we're in the same place today, with the 'net, as we were then with video. The difference is that everyone is aware of the new technology, but I don't think too many realize how powerful and all encompassing it's going to be.'

Band envisions a near future when Full Moon will no longer have to rely on video stores or cable TV to deliver his product to fans. 'I'd love to cut out the middle man and reach the fans directly. I believe there will be a real, Full Moon network on the Internet, and they're will be all sorts of fun stuff there. I'm very excited about a lot of what's happening. I believe new media will fuel low-budget filmmaking, and we'll be delivering stuff in a very efficient way. You can produce, promote and then broadcast something directly to the people who want to see it.'

Band hopes to soon launch a preliminary version of his Internet broadcasts through the popular Full Moon website. 'I've got in mind to shoot a series of episodic web-casts that are like the old serials, a story told in parts. We'd premier a new one every week or so and use them to stir up interest in, and to introduce fans to, a new movie we'd be releasing involving the same characters.'

Band hopes to try out his concept with the next entry in his popular Subspecies franchise, due to be directed by Ted Nicolaou later this year. 'It still boils down making good programming, though I hate to use that word. I don't want to sound like we're turning out widgets, but I just don't know what else to call them. 1, 2, 3 minutes longthey aren't features.'

Band clearly has a lot of faith in what future technology will deliver for his type of filmmaking. 'The world is very different than it was in the '70s when I started. Then, the cost factor was prohibitive. Just post-production alone was very expensive. Today, it's digital. Very cost efficient. The tools are infinitely cheaper.'

However, in Band's view, the new technology will only serve to bring the B-movie industry full circle. 'It will level the playing field again, but it brings it all back to that one tricky element that has always been what this business was really about. The talent to make something people want to see.'