How Grindhouse rocked the Hollywood studio system by goin' Old School
The "double feature" format of showing two films back to back first made its appearance in theatres in the 1920s as Hollywood, and all of America was going through a time of serious economic trouble. Due to the Great Depression, people had less money to spend on frivolous things like movie outings. It was during this time that the double bill was introduced, as a way to get audiences back into the theatres by promising an extra movie for their money…this was the B movie.
Often in fact, the B films were used as filler material, used to vary a programme from week to week when a popular A film was held over or a programme of two Bs could be booked into a theatre in order to fill a few empty days in the middle of the week, (Jacobs, pg. 153).
From a critical point of view, the national press had little to do with the success of B films. Advertising for B movies was even more of a haphazard affair, and many B films were not advertised at all (except for outside of the theater they were in.)
Low rent theatres began to sprout up more and more as the Hollywood system spat out an ever-increasing number of B movies. Some theatres began to specialize only in the B film, never showing an A movie (Taves, pg. 321). At this point, in the 1930s, this meant that the culture surrounding the B film was arising, and at this point, the name "B pictures" began to stand for a specific kind of film…a bad one.
However with the mountains of "bad" films that were released, a few "bad-ass" films began to pop up in this style of film.
As a market for B-style films cropped up, Poverty Row studio began to cater to this audience. At Poverty Row, films were produced in a much shorter time than those made in the mainstream major movie studios, creating a different window of opportunity for the filmmakers to make their projects.
"The Poverty Row" production companies were a group of independently owned studios that existed around LA. Although many of these studios were short lived, there influence across cinema is still felt. Country Western movies, Charlie Chan, and detective movies all sprang out of the group of studios from the 1930s-1950s. It was also a place of redemption as not only young newcomers found a home there, but down and out stars could also find a creative home less free from criticism and over management at the big studios, (Fernett, pg. 33).
The reason the films were considered cheap was not only because of the low budget for the films, but also because of the theatres' strategy of buying these projects at a flat rate as opposed to their buying policy for A films. With the top billed films, the theatres used a different profit-making strategy by earning a percentage of each film's profit. (Jacobs, pg. 152). This meant that the B films had no real incentive to be moneymakers.