IMAGES: Another popular genre of exploitation was the sex education pictures. How were these different than the wayward women movies?

Felicia: Damaged Lives is a good example because it is not about a wayward woman but in fact a wayward man, a man who, on the eve of his marriage, at a bachelor party, has an evening of pleasure with a party girl. He winds up with syphilis. The film is more specific than the wayward women films in describing his process of getting better. The films in the sex education genre are real specific about the medical treatment of something like syphilis or the condition of pregnancy. They used actual medical reels, medical footage of child birth or images of syphilitic genitals, decayed eyeballs, babies who had contracted syphilis from their mothers. These films are incredibly explicit in showing what they're talking about. It's hard to depict the fall from grace of a girl gone bad, but it's quite easy to make your point about the dangers of syphilis or pregnancy by showing the actual imagery.
 

IMAGES: Yes, on the CD-ROM version of Forbidden Fruit there are some real shockers taken from the exploitation films--footage of actual live births and cesarean births.

IMAGES: The roadshow experience is pretty much gone today, is it not?

Felicia: I think so. We can find links with things today. It's easy to find comparisons with Rescue 911 or America's Most Wanted. But I guess the reason we initiated this whole project was because this is a lost phase of film history. This was an entire genre devoted to things that Hollywood would never touch. And it's pretty much lost, except for companies that are putting these films out on video and giving some access. It's a lost art.

Bret: The means by which they were distributed is another one of the lost arts, not just the films themselves but the way in which they were shown. Even the way in which they were made, on-the-fly, by guys who didn't really have any training in filmmaking who saw a dollar to be made and had a great idea of how to go about it. It's definitely a chapter of history that is pretty much closed. We're just trying to put some part of it on record.
 

IMAGES: Would you then argue that there is something of merit in exploitation movies? That they weren't simply a way to separate people from their money? But that they did provide some type of important service--entertainment, education--no matter how sensationalized they may have been?

Bret: In their own hysterical way, they definitely did. If you're willing to look beyond the campy surface and oftentimes the poor visual quality, [the films] are emotionally engaging. They did serve a function in satisfying people's curiosity, not only their morbid curiosity but also their curiosity about basic things, such as how the woman's menstrual cycle works or what happens in childbirth. How exactly does a person get pregnant. If I get syphilis, do I get a pill? Will it clear up? Or will I get long term treatment? There were serious answers given to legitimate questions. A lot of times these answers were wrapped up in a totally haywire drama of fast-paced teens and a downward spiral.

IMAGES: What spelled the end of the exploitation era?

Bret: Once censorship became more relaxed, it became less necessary for them to wrap up their sensational dramas in this cloak of legitimacy, where they no longer had to address a pressing social concern it order to show someone take their clothes off or to show someone using drugs. You could just make a thriller and have someone doing these things, which in the past they had to disguise as social commentary. Exploitation became sexploitation. For instance, David Friedman and Hershell Gordon Lewis could make nudie movies without any kind of medical lecture or moral lesson. Russ Meyer could make films about whatever he wanted. So the films didn't have to package themselves as legitimate social commentary. And that was what was so good about [exploitation] films. They had to be clever about how they presented things, or advertised things. They had to sidestep around being too explicit. But once it became demystified, once you knew that when inside you'd be seeing some nude women playing volleyball, where's the fun in that? It was no longer a mystery. It just became naked people.
 

IMAGES: I think there was also a greater sense of drama. When the movie was coming to town in the '30s and '40s and you weren't familiar with the title of the movie already, there was a big mystery about what would happen on the screen once the theater lights dimmed. And that mystery started to disappear with the sexploitation genre.

Bret: With a lot of these films, you didn't know how explicit they were going to be. Some of these were pretty tame. There would be no nudity. There would be no explicit drug use. And then the next one that came through town, you might get close ups of rotting genitalia. You might get images of dead bodies. You might get a skinny-dipping scene. You never knew what these exploitation films were going to be like. Even if you sort of know what exploitation films are, there is always this level of mystery of not knowing how explicit it would be.

Felicia: There is quote that we reference in our book, David Chute saying, "The classic exploitation films were flirtatious." And I think that is definitely a quality that these films have. A narrative that is almost like a striptease. You never know what's going to be revealed. It's always quite slow, but that buildup to what's going to happen is all the more satisfying and interesting. Whereas when you have the nudie films, and the sexploitation films later on, that sense of flirtatiousness is gone. It's just pure display. And a lot of the fears that we have about sex, and a lot of the mystery of sex, disappear when those films come into play.
 

IMAGES: I think it was the anticipation that was really getting us there, that we were really feeding upon.

Felicia: Definitely. It was very much built upon what was next.

Bret: Especially when you had [the roadshowmen] coming in a week in advance, plastering the town with posters, building up this intense curiosity.
 

IMAGES: I suspect more money was frequently spent on the advertising campaigns than on the movies themselves.

Bret: If they had been engineered by the studios they wouldn't have been as appealing to us. But the fact that they were made on these low, low budgets--that a step up for them would have been renting a poverty row soundstage, that was like class--by these guys that didn't know that much about film, in a lot of cases. It was a real grass roots movement and it was kind of spontaneous. They didn't do any surveys to find out how these films were going to do. It was a movement that quickly became this distinctive form both in the style of film and they way the films were exhibited. And then, when the time came, it petered out. But for awhile it was a totally unique movement.

Felicia: And they weren't disingenuous about it either. It's not like they were making these films about sexual harassment to garner Academy Awards for their actors. They were trying to make a buck.