Exploitation and the end of the “Golden Era”

*Posted Late w/ Permission from Prof. S

A huge shift in the film industry came about in 1948, which marks the end of the “Golden Age” of film. The “Big 5” studios, RKO Pictures, Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn Meyer, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures, were monopolizing the film industry, which caused The Paramount Decision of 1948 to be put in place. This lost the Big Five a lot of money, and completely changed the way films were made and advertised. Theaters were now required to show a certain amount of independent films, this lead to the beginning of the “exploitation film”. Independent studios began making their way onto the big screen, with a new audience being marketed to, teenagers. Teenagers had never been marketed to, and with television shows on the rise, adults found it much more convenient to stay home and watch television, rather than going out to see a film.

We screened on documentary on this in class this week, called “Schlock!”. This documentary dives into the behind the scenes of what happened with film after the Paramount Decision of 1948. It shows the rise of directors such as one of the most notable and well known directors of the era, Roger Corman. Roger Coreman was under the production company “American International Pictures”, and produced “The Fast and The Furious” in 1954, as well directing movies such as “Day the World Ended” in 1955, “Attack of the Crab Monsters” in 1957, and “Teenage Caveman” in 1958. This documentary goes on to explain the making of exploitation and sexplotations film, and the impact these films had. These films were made very quickly, less than a week from start to finish of the production of these films. They also used young actors and actresses, as the films were targeted towards teenagers, which set off a lot of actors into their careers such as Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, and many others. The Paramount Decision of 1948 along with Roger Corman sparked Drive-in culture, with gave Drive-in theaters their  stereotype of teenagers watching cheesy movies on a date at a drive-in as this brought in a ton of money and notability to low budget independent film makers. Sexploitation was a huge thing at this time. Films where there was little plot, but a lot of nudity were an exciting new kind of film emerging as production code and censorship let up. It was also common for trailers of films around this time to be loud and exciting, but havealmost nothing to do with the film.

Exploitation was often looked down upon by older viewers, as they believed that the films were responsible for the behaviors of the teenagers who were going to view them. The producers of the films of course denied that being true. I think that this era of film absolutely could have had an effect of the actions of these teens, but that it also shaped the way that they saw the world, with this large amount of exploitation films being shown to them all the time, but also shaped a new idea of what film was in this new generation. Exploitation films shut down the monopolization and controlled environment by the Big Five, and made way the big jump of independent production companies.