Welcome to the MedLibrary.org Wikipedia Supplement on American International Pictures -- Please Click to Return to Front Page

This article or section relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations of additional sources. (April 2008)

American International Pictures

Fate	Absorbed into Filmways
Successor	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Founded	April, 1956
Defunct	1980
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California
Key people	James H. Nicholson, Samuel Z. Arkoff
Industry	Filmed entertainment

American International Pictures was a film production company formed in April 1956 from American Releasing Corporation (ARC) by James H. Nicholson, former Sales Manager of Realart Pictures, and Samuel Z. Arkoff, an entertainment lawyer. It was dedicated to releasing independently produced, low-budget films, primarily of interest to the teenagers of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Nicholson and Arkoff and formed ARC in 1955,¹ with their first release being The Fast and the Furious (1955 film).

Contents 1 AIP personnel 2 Emphasis on teenagers 3 The ARKOFF formula 4 AIP's 1960s output 5 The Corman Poe cycle 5.1 List of the Corman Poe films 6 AIP-TV 7 AIP Records 8 Later years 9 Notes 10 References 11 External links

AIP personnel

Nicholson and Arkoff served as executive producers while Roger Corman and Alex Gordon were the principal film producers and, sometimes, directors. Writer Charles B. Griffith wrote many of the early films, along with Arkoff's brother-in-law, Lou Rusoff. Later writers included Ray Russell, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Floyd Crosby, A.S.C. famous for his camera work on a number of exotic documentaries and the Oscar winner, High Noon, was chief cinematographer. His innovative use of surreal color and odd lenses and angles gave AIP films a signature look. The early rubber monster suits and miniatures of Paul Blaisdell were used in yn AIP's science fiction films. The company also hired Les Baxter to compose many of its film scores.

Emphasis on teenagers

When many of ARC/AIP's first releases failed to earn a profit, Arkoff quizzed film exhibitors who told him of the value of the teenage market as adults were watching television.² AIP stopped making Westerns with Arkoff explaining: "To compete with television westerns you have to have color, big stars and $2,000,000".³

AIP was the first company to use focus groups^{citation needed}, polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. AIP would question their exhibitors (who often provided 20% of AIP's financing⁴) what they thought of the success of a title, then would have a writer write a script for it.⁵ A sequence of tasks in a typical production involved coming up with a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955-1973⁶ to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally actually writing and casting the film.

The ARKOFF formula

Samuel Z. Arkoff related his tried-and-true "ARKOFF formula" for producing a successful low-budget movie years later, during a 1980s talk show appearance. His ideals for a movie included:

• Action (exciting, entertaining drama)
• Revolution (novel or controversial themes and ideas)
• Killing (a modicum of violence)
• Oratory (notable dialogue and speeches)
• Fantasy (acted-out fantasies common to the audience)
• Fornication (sex appeal, for young adults)

Later the AIP publicity department devised a strategy called "The Peter Pan Syndrome":

a) a younger child will watch anything an older child will watch;
b) an older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch;
c) a girl will watch anything a boy will watch
d) a boy will not watch anything a girl will watch;
therefore-to catch your greatest audience you zero in on the 19-year old male.⁷

AIP's 1960s output

Beginning with 1963's Beach Party, AIP created a new genre of beach party films featuring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. The highly successful and often imitated series ended in 1966 with the 7th film, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. Many actors from the beach films also appeared in AIP's spy-spoofs such as Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and car racing sagas like Fireball 500 (1966). During this time AIP also produced or distributed most of Roger Corman's famous horror B movies, including such films as X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes, The Raven, and The Terror. Composer Les Baxter was hired by AIP to do a variety of original film scores as well as rescoring European made releases such as Goliath and the Barbarians.

In 1966, the studio released The Wild Angels starring Peter Fonda, based loosely on the real-life exploits of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. This film kicked off a subgenre of motorcycle gang films that lasted almost ten years and included Devil's Angels and The Born Losers, the film that introduced the Billy Jack character. The psychedelic and hippie scenes of the late '60s were also exploited with films like The Trip, also with Peter Fonda, Riot on Sunset Strip, Wild in the Streets, Gas-s-s-s, and Psych-Out with Jack Nicholson.

AIP is well known for being the major U.S. distributor for Kadokawa Pictures and Toho Studio's Godzilla and Gamera (kaiju) movies of the '60s and '70s. AIP also distributed other Japanese sci-fi movies like Frankenstein Conquers the World, Monster From a Prehistoric Planet, and Yonggary, Monster from the Deep.

The Corman Poe cycle

In the early 1960s, AIP gained some kudos by combining Roger Corman, Vincent Price and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe into a series of visually impressive horror films. This series of movies made AIP an American counterpart to the British studio Hammer Films and its famous Hammer Horror line featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

The original idea, usually credited to Corman, was to take Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher", which had both a high name-recognition value and the merit of being in the public domain, and thus royalty-free, and expand it into a feature film. Corman convinced the studio to give him a larger budget than the typical AIP film so he could film in color and create lavish sets^{citation needed}.

The success of The House of Usher led AIP to finance further films also based on Poe's stories. The sets and special effects were often reused in subsequent movies (for example, the burning roof of the Usher mansion reappears in most of the other films) making the series quite cost-effective. All the films in the series were directed by Roger Corman, and they all starred Price except The Premature Burial, which featured Ray Milland in the lead (it was originally produced for another studio, but AIP acquired the rights to it^{citation needed}).

As the series progressed, Corman made attempts to change the formula. Later films added more humor to the stories, especially The Raven, which takes Poe's poem as an inspiration and develops it into an all-out farce starring Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre; Karloff had starred in the 1935 version. Corman also adapted H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" in an attempt to get away from Poe, but AIP changed the title to that of an obscure Poe poem, The Haunted Palace, and marketed it as yet another movie in the series. The penultimate film in the series, The Masque of the Red Death, was filmed in England with an unusually long schedule for Corman and AIP. The film, inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, looks much more opulent than the rest of the series.

Although Corman is generally credited with coming up with the idea for the Poe series, in an interview on the Anchor Bay DVD of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, Mark Damon claims that he first suggested the idea to Corman. Damon also says that Corman let him direct The Pit and the Pendulum uncredited. Corman's commentary for Pit mentions nothing of this.

List of the Corman Poe films

1. House of Usher (1960)
2. The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
3. The Premature Burial (1962)
4. Tales of Terror (1962)
5. The Raven (1963)
6. The Haunted Palace (1963)
7. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
8. The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

AIP-TV

In 1964, AIP became one of the last film studios to start its own television production company, American International Productions Television (a.k.a. American International Television or AIP-TV). ⁸ AIP-TV at first released many of their 1950s films to American television stations, then filmed unsuccessful television pilots for Beach Party and Sergeant Deadhead, made several colour horror/science fiction television movies by Larry Buchanan that were remakes of black-and-white AIP films, and sold packages of many dubbed European, Japanese, and Mexican films produced by K. Gordon Murray and foreign-made live-action and animated TV series.

In order to allay the fears of cinema owners who feared current releases would soon end up being shown on television, AIP issued a statement retroactive to 1963 that the company would not release any of their films to television until five years after cinema release unless the film had not made back its original negative costs.⁹ AIP-TV also filmed specials of promotion of AIP films such as The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot (1965) and An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1972), both with Vincent Price.

AIP Records

AIP started their own record label in the late 1950's to release tunes used in their movies. There were a number of soundtrack albums as well.

Later years

In the 1970s, AIP began to produce more mainstream films such as Bunny O'Hare, The Amityville Horror, Love at First Bite, Meteor, Force 10 from Navarone, Shout at the Devil, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Mad Max. The increased spending on these projects, though they did make some money, contributed to the company's downfall. AIP also produced some of the 1970s blaxploitation films like Blacula, and Foxy Brown. In a throwback to the old "studio days", the company is credited with making Pam Grier a household name, as all of her '70s films were made under contract to American International.

In 1979, with the retirement of Arkoff, AIP was sold to Filmways, Inc. and became a subsidiary production unit thereof renamed Filmways Pictures. Filmways was later bought by Orion Pictures Corporation and Filmways was disbanded except for the distribution arm. Orion films were previously released by Warner Bros. Today, a majority of the AIP library is owned by Orion's successor company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Notes

1. ^ Johnson, John Cheap Tricks and Class Acts, 1996, McFarland, p.265
2. ^ Samuel Z Arkoff Biography - Fancast
3. ^ Doherty, Thomas Teenagers and Teenpics Unwin-Hyman 1988, p.126
4. ^ Doherty, Thomas Teenagers and Teenpics, Unwin-Hyman 1988, p.35
5. ^ Doherty, Thomas Teenagers and Teenpics, Unwin-Hyman, 1988, p.156
6. ^ Albert Kallis - bio
7. ^ Bean, Robin and Austen, David U.S.A. Confidential p.215 Films and Filming November 1968 quoted in p.157 Doherty, Thomas Teenagers and Teenpics Unwin-Hyman 1988
8. ^ American-International Television (AIP-TV) [us]
9. ^ Heffernan, Kevin Ghouls Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 2004, Duke University Press, p.167

References

• Mark Thomas McGee, Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures (McFarland & Company, 1995) ISBN 0-786-401370.

External links

• American International Pictures at the Internet Movie Database
• Deep Dark Thoughts: American International Pictures
• Partial Horror and Sci-Fi filmography
• Article on AIP
• It Conquered Hollywood! The Story of American International Pictures
• Albert Kallis poster artist http://www.learnaboutmovieposters.com/NewSite/INDEX/ARTISTS/US/artists-kallis.asp
• AIP logos through the years http://www.closinglogos.com/page/American+International+Pictures?t=anon

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 7 January 2009, at 19:54.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "American International Pictures".

The URL for this specific entry is:

• http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/American_International_Pictures

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.