The Battle for the BS: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema

2012 | Film & TV

The emergence of the double-bill in the 1930s created a divide between A-pictures and B-pictures as theatres typically screened packages featuring one of each. With the former considered more prestigious because of their larger budgets and more popular actors, the lower-budgeted Bs served largely as a support mechanism to A-films of the major studios--most of which also owned the theatre chains in which movies were shown. When a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court antitrust ruling severed ownership of theatres from the studios, the B-movie soon became a different entity. In The Battle for the Bs , Blair Davis analyses how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking. Made by newly formed independent companies, 1950s B-movies took advantage of changing demographic patterns to fashion innovative marketing approaches. They established such genre cycles as science fiction and teen-oriented films (think Destination Moon and I Was a Teenage Werewolf ) well before the major studios and also contributed to the emergence of the movement now known as underground cinema.

Although frequently proving to be multimillion-dollar box-office draws by the end of the decade, the Bs existed in opposition to the cinematic mainstream in the 1950s and created a legacy that was passed on to independent filmmakers in the decades to come.

Blair Davis (Author)