Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972 9780813599052

Citation preview

Hoodlum Movies

Also by Peter Stanfield The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927–63 Horse Opera: The Strange History of the Singing Cowboy Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail

Edited Collections Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era

Hoodlum Movies Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966–1972

PETER STANFIELD

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stanfield, Peter, 1958– author. Title: Hoodlum movies : seriality and the outlaw biker film cycle, 1966–1972 / Peter Stanfield. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017053306 | ISBN 9780813599021 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813599014 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motorcycle films—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—20th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M66 S73 2018 | DDC 791.43/655—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053306 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2018 by Peter Stanfield All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

For Giles “but that’s the way I like it, baby,” Harding

Contents

Introduction: Hoodlum Gestures

1

1

Strange Excitements: The Topical and the Sensational

28

2

Getting Out of Town: The Cycle Unfolds

59

3

After Easy Rider: Modulations and Curious Combinations

97

Nazi Satanists, Vietnam Vets, and Motorcycle Mamas (and Other Such Pulp Delights)

128

Conclusion: Buried in the Sand Forever

164

Acknowledgments Notes Index

175 177 193

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ix

Hoodlum Movies

Introduction Hoodlum Gestures The telephone is ringing You got me on the run I’m driving in my car now Anticipating fun —Alice Cooper, “Under My Wheels” (1971) As a youth, at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll music, I was fascinated by custom cars, juvenile delinquency, teenage fashion, post-war hoodlumism (hanging out with motorcycle gangs), beatniks, modern art, drugs and so on, anything of a perverse nature was top priority. —Michael Davis, bass guitarist of Detroit’s MC5

She may not have shared the same juvenile interests as Michael Davis, yet Joan Didion, the novelist and essayist, was intrigued enough by the specter of postwar hoodlumism to watch nine biker films in seven days before 1

2 • Hoodlum Movies

publishing an account of the experience in a May 1970 edition of her regular Life magazine column.1 In the manner of an anthropologist, she set out to explore a dark continent, which only a “few adults have ever seen.” For her, the motorcycle film constituted a sort of “underground folk literature for adolescents” and a fabricated mythology to “express precisely that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death.” The biker movie is, she wrote, a “perfect Rorschach of its audience.”2 From The Wild Angels in 1966 until its conclusion in 1972, the cycle of outlaw motorcycle films contained forty-odd formulaic examples. All but one were made by independent companies that specialized in producing exploitation movies for drive-ins, neighborhood theaters, and run-down inner-city movie houses. Despised by critics but welcomed by exhibitors unable to book first-run films, these cheaply and quickly made pictures were produced to appeal to audiences of undereducated mobile youths. Plagiarizing contemporary films for plotlines, the cycle reveled in a brutal and lurid sensationalism drawn from the day’s headlines and from earlier exploitation fare. Collectively, these movies portray a picture of America that is the inverse of a progressive, inclusive, and aspirational culture. A nihilistic taint runs through the cycle without providing much in the way of social or aesthetic compensation. Neither on original release nor subsequently have these films accrued cultural capital. In kind, they are stuck with a legacy of negative critical equity. These are dumb, uncouth, loutish films made for real or imagined hoodlums who had no interest in contesting or resisting the entreaties of popular culture. Biker movies are repetitive, formulaic, and fairly indistinguishable from one another. Disreputable and interchangeable these films may be, but their lack of cultural legitimacy and low ambition is a large part of the rationale for this study, inviting questions about seriality and film cycles that are otherwise ignored in histories of 1960s and ’70s American film. Many of the filmmakers involved in outlaw biker movies—Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Laszlo Kovacs, among them— would play a significant role in New Hollywood. The biker cycle was not, however, about the new beginnings and open horizons that films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971), and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) projected. Even as their characters were gunned down or burnt out in the final reel, directors

Introduction • 3

Arthur Penn, Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, and Monte Hellman were seen to be laying to rest the monolithic Hollywood studios, with their hidebound practices that produced irrelevant movies with aging stars—dramas that were far removed from the interests and concerns of the baby boom generation these cineastes played to. The biker picture offered an altogether bleaker vision of the state of things in Hollywood; as they trampled over and despoiled past glories, the films in the cycle held out no hope of better days ahead. Like a murder of crows feeding on the carrion of pop culture, the biker film besmirched all that it touched. While Hopper in The Last Movie (1971), Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show, and Fonda in The Hired Hand (1971) paid homage to the movies made by Howard Hawks, John Ford, and the like, even as they gainsaid the myth of the West, the biker movie merely picked over the genre’s bones for opportunistic story ideas and stylistic gestures. The grandeur of Ford’s Monument Valley or the Rocky Mountain locations of Anthony Mann’s westerns was supplanted in the biker movie by the scrubland surrounding Bakersfield or the dilapidated ranches once used for numerous western film productions and later leased to television companies. A purveyor of national mythologies unequaled in modern popular culture and a cornerstone of American film production that had once accounted for a third of all films produced in Hollywood, as seen through the filter of the biker movie, the western was in a penurious and parlous state.3 Stripped of its epic stature, the landscape no longer represented the promise of change and renewal. The spectacular deserts of California, Arizona, and Nevada were rendered in the cycle as sprawling junkyards, slag heaps spilling over with the detritus of modern life. The Spahn Ranch, where once parts of Duel in the Sun were shot and a key location for Bonanza, among the longest running of the western TV series, had become by the late 1960s the setting for underbudgeted biker movies and a playground and hideout for Charles Manson and his murderous family. Once Manson had made the headlines, producers would exploit this connection and thereby enhance the cycle’s illicit reputation and further sully the image of Hollywood. If in one sense the cycle is the story of the western’s burial, it is also a tale of the end of the star system, providing the last go-around—and perhaps last wage check—for, among others, Gloria Grahame, Jane Russell, Scott Brady, Kent Taylor, and Cameron Mitchell, all of whom looked as if the bottle had taken its toll. Playing alongside these revenants were the

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progeny of Hollywood, child stars now all grown up, such as Russ Tamblyn and Dean Stockwell, or those who were trading on their parents’ names: Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, and Jody McCrea, to name but three. The poor production values of the biker film made sure that this juxtaposition of the old and the young did not symbolize a seamless passing of the blessings of one generation to another but instead suggested a lineage now devoid of charisma, talent, or even just a little chutzpah. In the gathering of the generations, family Hollywood had nothing to celebrate. The image of Hollywood unraveling was compounded by the decentering of American film production by independent companies that had been ongoing since the 1950s, initially away from the metropolis of Los Angeles toward the city’s outer margins and then even farther afield with southernset vigilante movies, such as the Walking Tall (filmed in Tennessee, 1973) and Billy Jack (filmed predominantly in New Mexico, 1971), that pressed hard on the tail of the biker movie in the early 1970s. Eventually, a good part of the exploitation film industry left the United States altogether for cheaper and more exotic Philippine locations. American International Pictures and New World Pictures were the cycle’s key producers, working in competition and sometimes in cahoots with smaller independents such as Crown, Fanfare, and IndependentInternational. Hoodlum Movies records and details the filmmaking community involved with these companies. The temporary creative alliances among personnel are documented and mapped wherever archive materials allowed. For a number of films, there is a great deal of information available; for others, especially those at the lowest end of the production scale, virtually nothing has been recorded, not even a list of play dates. Nevertheless, it is possible to elucidate the extraordinary interaction of a relatively small group of filmmakers who appeared in, scripted, or otherwise worked on the films. The aspiration to document these networks as they formed and disbanded around individual or linked films has been a key activity of the research undertaken for this project. There are, however, no biographies in Hoodlum Movies; nor are there any Rabelaisian tales of seven-day weekends and Sunday mornings coming down. Given the persistent misogyny that the films displayed and the exploitation companies’ commitment to providing fare for male adolescents, there is of necessity more than a passing curiosity in Hoodlum Movies about how a female audience was addressed in the cycle and in its marketing. This is especially so with the subseries of films with girl bikers as the story’s focus

Introduction • 5

and in the role taken by women filmmakers, such as Valerie Starrett, Delores Taylor, and Barbara Peeters. What emerges from the examination of the cycle’s gender politics is a picture that doesn’t mitigate the films’ deeprooted misogyny but does add complexity to the representational strategies that were deployed. Similarly, the rendering of race and class is more nuanced than might be expected of such blatant exploitation movies. That is not to say that these films have a hidden progressive agenda, as has been said of many of Corman’s New World Pictures; they haven’t. But the films’ contradictions and ambiguities are manifold and fascinating, no less so in their use of martial imagery (facilitating the presentation of an uncertain patriotism), and their insistent flirtation with fascist symbols. Watching the seven biker movies in a Hollywood Boulevard theater and in Bakersfield and Tarzana drive-ins, Didion pondered the fascination these films held over her, especially given that they were all the same: “To see one is to have seen them all,” she wrote. Each film meticulously observed the rituals of “getting the bikers out of town and onto the highway, of ‘making a run,’ of terrorizing innocent ‘citizens’ and fencing with the highway patrol and, finally, meeting death in a blaze  .  .  . of romantic fatalism.”4 Her concise description of generic elements grasps the basics of the formula: bikers terrorize a small town or community, have run-ins with the police, and ride to their certain sentimentalized death. “There is always that instant,” she observed, “in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once there, ‘nothing to say.’”5 It was not the narrative repetition that fascinated her and kept her returning to these films but the thought that she was getting an insight into contemporary America that could not be found in the New York Times. The biker film provided her with an ideogram of the nation’s youth, one that offered a far-from-edifying vision. Didion perceived the mute bikers as mirror images of the films’ audience of undereducated working-class youth. Her symptomatic reading of the cycle as representative of a generalized social malaise prefigures scholarly accounts of the biker movie specifically and exploitation films more generally. Similarly, her identification of narrative repetition as a sign of a filmmaker’s flawed aspirations is commonplace in critical reactions. To contend with these received perspectives, Hoodlum Movies focuses on the mode of assembly, circulation, and consumption of the biker movie. This recalibration has the ambition to provide a more inclusive account of the

6 • Hoodlum Movies

function of repetition—the practice of serial production—in commercial cinema than has so far been achieved and to ask more nuanced questions about film’s relationship to the social. Hoodlum Movies is not a celebration of the biker picture as a lost moment or fragment from Hollywood’s storied past nor is it the reclamation of a trove of films rich in untouched cultish pleasures. No such claims or gestures are made here. Ugly beauty cannot be found in the biker film’s thuggish and ungainly form. By this point in time, fan industries would surely have made a loud declaration on behalf of these films if they held any kind of value for those interested in resistant cultures. Beyond a mere handful of critical texts, that work does not exist; the biker film has rarely been used to trash the academy.6 The focus is not on the films as artifacts or relics of pop youth culture but on the opportunity they afford to provide a parallel history to the wellworn tale of easy riders and raging bulls of New Hollywood folklore. The history of the biker movie is insecure; it does not rest on highly creative and excessively remunerated individuals and landmark illustrious movies. Instead, Hoodlum Movies is about filmmakers’ crass pursuit of the sensational and the exploitable. The book is a case study of filmmakers as producers of undistinguished, regulated novelties, and as such it develops the idea of pulp cinema explored in Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson (2011) and the cyclical film theory that grounded the research for The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (2015). Biker films were dramas of hoodlum culture, made for adolescent malcontents. Set in marginal spaces and exhibited in out-of-town drive-ins and dilapidated theaters, the films were about, and watched by, self-obsessed mobile youths going nowhere, cycling back on themselves in endless displays of repetitive inchoate activity.

Hoodlums Everywhere: Moral Panics and Folk Devils In March 1965, the attorney general of the State of California, Thomas G. Lynch, published his report on the Hells Angels*—a “hoodlum group * The Hells Angels (and a small number of film titles) forsake the possessive apostrophe. Outside of quotations, I’ve tried to be consistent in respecting its presence and absence.

Introduction • 7

which poses a threat throughout California.” Six months in the making, the report was prompted by the “alleged rape of two teen-age girls in Monterey last Labor Day weekend.” The names of 463 Hells Angels were supplied to the attorney general by the police, along with those of 438 persons who belonged to other “disreputable motorcycle groups.” Hells Angels gang members alone were said to have racked up “874 felony arrests, 300 felony convictions, 1,682 misdemeanor arrests and 1,023 misdemeanor convictions.” “The club’s general hoodlum activities,” said Lynch, “include gang assaults, gang rapes, gang fights and destruction of property.” The report was given front-page coverage in the Los Angeles Times.7 Designed to spur statewide law enforcement agencies to take all necessary measures to contain the menace of outlaw motorcycle gangs, the report’s more immediately felt effect, whether intended or not, was to provide the news media with a ready-made folk devil.8 Writing in the New York Times, Leo Litwak said Lynch had created a “picture of alarming menace.”9 Depraved hoodlums—unmanageable, incorrigible, vindictive and organized—roamed the California highways in stripped down HarleyDavidson motorcycles. They were dressed like pirates, with full beards, a ring in one ear, shoulder length hair, an embroidered winged skull on the backs of their sleeveless denim jackets, Iron Crosses on their chests, swastikas on their helmets. These weren’t the teen-agers of the usual urban gang, but adults, ranging in age from early 20’s to the mid-40’s. They could strike anywhere in the state, and they didn’t fear the police. The underground in which they were lords seemed dark, rancid, impenetrable.10

The New York Times had covered the previous year’s events in Monterey that lay behind Lynch’s report. It noted that “angry officials” issued “Don’t come back” warnings to “black-jacketed motorcycle riders,” perhaps three hundred in number, who called themselves “Hell’s Angels”: “‘These are not kids,’ Mayor George M. Clemens protested, ‘they are old enough to know better. They’re a crummy looking lot, with their beards and unwashed appearance. We don’t want them back.’” It was the city’s third visit from the bikers during the last two years.11 Lynch’s report fed press attention that was drawn toward the sensational and the salacious, revitalizing older events, such as the 1963 Porterville incident, where Hells Angels purportedly terrorized the town’s citizens. The report also acted as a ready primer into outlaw culture. The

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initiation rituals, which were invariably said to include some unspecified sexual perversion, were particularly prominent in media coverage. The New York Times repeated Lynch’s claim “that any new member must bring with him to the meeting a woman or a girl, termed a ‘sheep,’ willing to submit to sexual intercourse with each member of the club.”12 The reporting on such lurid rites was presented alongside a fascination with the hoodlums’ personal hygiene: “Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of Hell’s Angels is their generally filthy condition . . . Investigating officers consistently report these people, both club members and the female associates, seem badly in need of baths.”13 The Hells Angels “brand,” as signified by the winged skull insignia circled by the club and local chapter names, was described together with members’ decorative and provocative use of “various types of Luftwaffe insignia and reproductions of Iron German crosses.” As one Angel told a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, “When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive as possible. We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us.”14 In May 1965, freelance journalist Hunter S. Thompson, writing for The Nation, provided a fulsome corrective to the exaggeration and distortion of Lynch’s fifteen-page report, “which was colorful, interesting, heavily biased and consistently alarming—just the sort of thing, in fact, to make a clanging good article for a national news magazine. Which it did; in both barrels.”15 Few of the assertions made by Lynch stood up under Thompson’s scrutiny; the number of club members, their criminal activities, their initiation rites, their sexual proclivities, and the infamous Labor Day gang rape were all revealed as shibboleths. Newsweek and Time, according to Thompson, “leaped into the fray with a flurry of blood, booze and semen-flecked wordage that amounted, in the end, to a classic of supercharged hokum.”16 Five months after the publication of Thompson’s piece, the Saturday Evening Post ran an article on the menace. Their reporter, William Murray, covered the same ground as Thompson and noted that the charge of rape against the four arrested Hells Angels had been quickly and quietly dropped. The wrecking of the small town of Porterville, California (population 7,991), in September 1963 was another of Lynch’s key stories about the Angels that was found to be specious. The truth was the cyclists had been escorted peacefully out of town. There was no riot. And of those 1,023 misdemeanor convictions, most were for traffic offenses that occurred over

Introduction • 9

fifteen years. “Still, the impression lingered on that foul deeds had been committed and the authorities had been aroused.”17 The “sacking” of Porterville fit the popular image of outlaw bikers that followed Life magazine’s photo story of the drunken revelries that had taken place in Hollister in 1947, events that formed the basis for the Marlon Brando vehicle The Wild One (1953). The Monterey rape story was a natural adjunct to such reports of outlaw biker pillaging. Subsequently, the Hells Angels figured in any number of news stories that appeared to mirror these scenarios. The most notorious involved the rape of an eighteen-yearold daughter of a police officer. She was lured into a house full of men, some of whom were said to be Hells Angels. When sixteen suspects were rounded up, the victim’s father took the opportunity to shoot one of them. The wounded man was later found to have had nothing to do with the rape. “Ultimately five suspects were indicted,” wrote Murray. “None was a Hell’s Angel.”18 Following the publication of Lynch’s report, the Hells Angels’ 1965 Labor Day run to the resort town of Bass Lake was widely covered by the media. Those expecting a violent confrontation between barbarian bikers and law enforcers supported by the town’s citizens were disappointed. There were no incidents of note, and reporters were left to repeat descriptions of unwashed bikers drunkenly cavorting with one another.19 Nevertheless, three days after reporting on the lack of incident, the Los Angeles Times gave front-page space to staff writer Jerry Cohen’s article on the club.20 Describing the verdant Bass Lake shore scarred by “empty wine bottles and mashed beer cans,” he wrote that the “scene lacked logic.” Cohen’s article focused on the president of the Oakland chapter, Sonny Barger: “His deep, tattooed chest was bared to the sunlight which sparkled off the lake waters. So were his muscular arms. Long, matted red hair and beard emphasized the fierceness of his eyes, his gestures—his coarse language.” Barger’s logic, wrote Cohen, was a “series of contradictions”: “‘We Angels live in our own world. We just want to be left alone to be individualists.’ Sonny said. ‘But actually we’re conformists. To be an Angel you have to conform to the rules of our society and the Angels’ rules are the toughest anywhere.” To the police, the Hells Angels had “‘anti-rules,’ a set of regulations which encourage a love of motorcycles—and depraved moral conduct.” “Fascination with motorcycles is the original attraction,” Cohen noted. “The sexual aberrations attributed to members, their ragged,

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dirty dress and wild carousing come later.”21 Lack of gainful employment among members was also highlighted. In sum, the Angels represented a stark and frightening affront to middle-class respectability, mores, and values. As if to quell public anxiety over the threat, the Los Angeles Times reported in August that the outlaws had been contained in the “Valley, as in most of Southern California,” by strong police measures. Space again was left to ask the crucial question, “What personal sociological upheaval makes them worship filth, hate laws and work, turn to the weirdest of sexual aberrations; in other words, flaunt society’s best efforts and become outlaws?”22 The Hells Angels next attracted widespread media attention when eighteen members staged an attack on a seven-block-long Berkeley peace march made up of four thousand protestors in October 1965. In a frontpage story on the antiwar protest, accompanied by illustrative photographs of motorcycle hoodlums, the Los Angeles Times described the bikers as “unkempt and husky” and as “part of a statewide organization notorious for its invasion of small towns.” The melee, though, was limited: an officer was reported to have suffered a broken leg, and a biker needed eight stitches for a scalp cut caused by a policeman’s nightstick. Six gang members were arrested, including Barger. The protest otherwise passed without incident.23 The attack on the peace protestors was cited as representing an unbridgeable rift between the bikers and the counterculture, a relationship that hitherto had been seen as convivial. The violence was also noteworthy because it showed the deep ambivalence in the biker’s own concept of themselves as outsiders. The Times article considered the gang a threat to public order and to small communities, but they were also being hailed by some as “patriots.” In response to the arrests and the news reports, the director of the Republicans for Conservative Action, Fred Ullner, formed an organization called the “Friends of the Hells Angels” to pay for bail bonds and court costs. Presenting themselves as patriots and outlaws added to the Hells Angels’ contradictory identity and helped spread confusion over how to comprehend their outsider status; commentators called both the cyclists and protestors “rebels.”24 In his book-length account Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), Thompson unpicked the differences in the acts of rebellion practiced by the two groups: “The students

Introduction • 11

are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.”25 The clarity Thompson brought to such otherwise confused representations, as well as to challenging the sophistry, exaggeration, and distortion that surrounded the reports of Hells Angel activity in the mid-1960s, was reason enough for the book to be positively received. “Thompson sets the record straight,” noted the New York Times in its review, “in this angry, knowledgeable, fascinating and excitedly written book . . . His prose crackles like a motorcycle exhaust.”26 While most documents that exposed the motorcycle outlaw subculture have largely been forgotten, Thompson’s book remains in print. The sensational subject matter clearly plays a part in its continuing appeal, but it is the author’s self-identified gonzo journalism that commands the saga’s following. The book’s genesis was in a commissioned article for The Nation, “Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders,” published May 17, 1965. Thompson’s remit was to get behind the newspaper and magazine headlines. The book is an extended observational piece that documents the time he spent with the gang. Establishing whether the bikers are innocent or guilty was of little interest to Thompson; rather, he was intrigued by the story itself, how the press made a new folk devil out of the outlaws, and the moral panic that followed. The centerpiece of Hell’s Angels is Thompson’s account of the 1965 Labor Day sortie to Bass Lake, the first major outing by the Hells Angels after the media furor over the Monterey debacle. The bikers were heavily policed and corralled, so Thompson’s report described beer runs through the picket line to local stores and not much else. The story, if there was one at all, was not what happened in Bass Lake but the media’s and law enforcers’ expectation of mayhem and criminal activity. The Bass Lake section was preceded by an account of the making of the menace, with its roots in the loose affiliations of disaffected and alienated World War II veterans who resisted the restraints of legitimate motorcycle clubs and the muchreported troubles stirred up by drunken bikers in the small town of Hollister in 1947, a rumpus that has become the defining event in outlaw biker mythology. At the other end of the book, Thompson detailed the outlaws’ tentative adoption by the emerging counterculture, especially Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey’s embrace of the Angels. Thompson considered the literati’s fascination with the bikers to be a form of cultural and social slumming, with the cyclists playing the new

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primitive for Ginsberg and Kesey’s amusement. Whatever the truth of this construct, Thompson made the case that the Angels were his subject. He, alone, had the inside track into their story. Like Margaret Mead loaded on acid, Thompson practiced a form of popular anthropology. He described and explained the rituals, festivities, social order, sexual proclivities, bonding rites, hygiene habits, dress code, diet, and drug and drink ingestion of the Hells Angels; he documents the raw and the cooked of an original American primitive: “The concept of the motorcycle outlaw was as uniquely American as jazz. Nothing like them had ever existed. In some ways they appeared to be a kind of half-breed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the Wild West. Yet in other ways they were as new as television.”27 He also considered them to be a distorted mirror image of a Hollywood movie: “I had a feeling that at any moment a director would appear, waving cards saying ‘cut’ or ‘action.’ The scene was too strange to be real. On a peaceful Saturday morning in Oakland, in front of a dumpy, Turkishlooking bar, this weird hellbroth of humanity had gathered  .  .  . wearing labels saying ‘Hell’s Angels’ and ‘Gypsy Jokers,’ and now they were anxious to shove off on their annual Independence Day picnic . . . a monster rally too rotten for Hollywood, crude parody of the crazy-cool melodramatic scene that Brando had already made famous.”28 The motley crew described by Thompson may have scared off mainstream American film studios, but even as he was drafting his manuscript, American International Pictures (AIP) and Roger Corman were fast assuring their place in the monster rally. Thompson was not alone in figuring the Hells Angels as a rough caricature. The news media made regular references to the movies and to The Wild One when reporting on motorcycle gangs. Time wrote, The 1954 movie The Wild One was a slice-of-seedy-life picture about a pack of vicious, swaggering motorcycle hoods called the Black Rebels. The characters were too overdrawn and the violence they wrought was too unrelieved to engage the credulity of its audience, so the film passed quickly into oblivion. Last week it was back—in real life.29

Thompson called The Wild One the biker’s The Sun Also Rises—the film was an inspiration and Brando’s character a role model of sorts.30 The movie analogy spilled over to the way he recorded the plain speech of his subjects,

Introduction • 13

which read as if the Angels were attempting to recite a grade-B film script: “We are complete social outcasts—outsiders against society. And that’s the way we want to be. Anything good, we laugh at. We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us.”31 Thompson’s book has enough incidents, character types, situations, rituals, and rites to suggest it was a primer for any number of the biker films that followed, which was to some extent true. Minor details from his account found their way into the movies, such as a description of a quote attributed to Himmler scrawled on a clubhouse wall that ran alongside a print of a Modigliani portrait, which was covered in graffiti. These doodles included images of an Iron Cross, a Star of David overlaid with a swastika, and a bullet hole in the subject’s throat with the projectile emerging from the back of her head. This is all re-presented in the outlaw hangout in Born Losers (1967), a film very loosely based on the stories of the Monterey Labor Day rapes.32 On the other hand, Born Losers might have been quoting from William Murray’s November 1965 cover story on the outlaws for the Saturday Evening Post. Thompson’s description of the Modigliani print and graffiti (and the Angel’s line about being “bastards to the world”) were lifted verbatim from this source; not a word was changed or credited. Numerous other lifts, overlaps, and echoes from Murray’s piece flit throughout Thompson’s narrative (sometimes credited, often not). Whether Thompson was guilty of plagiarism or was simply sharing materials with Murray, the overlaps show how mobile the key elements were in the narrative of the subculture as it began to emerge in the mid-1960s.33 Speaking to reporters, club members justified their use of violence by claiming that others provoked them: “Sure, we have a few violent ones in the Angels. But 99% of the time the other fellow starts it. Then they tell the cops we did it and the cops lock us up.” When contacted by an irate Hells Angel who was tired of being blamed for starting riots, Times columnist Paul Coates responded that he surely didn’t expect readers to be sympathetic. “I don’t care about that,” the Hells Angel said. “I just want people to know that if they don’t bug us, we won’t bug them.”34 The moans about being harassed suggested the speaker suffered from an acute case of arrested development and a habit of quoting bad lines from juvenile delinquent movies. In turn, such quotes as “Why do the cops have to harass like they do? We should just be let to go our own way,” appear to have been adapted wholesale by Corman, who litters The Wild Angels with inane

14 • Hoodlum Movies

dialogue. The maxims Thompson attributed to the outlaws might well have fed straight into a film (or even been lifted from a movie): ‘“Dope Forever . . . Forever Loaded”35 echoes the lines given to Peter Fonda in Corman’s picture: “We wanna be free to ride. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man . . . And we wanna get loaded.” There is a strong suggestion here of a circuit of influence between movies and the public sphere. Members of the Hells Angels would have been in their mid- to late teen years when the cycle of 1950s juvenile delinquency movies was first in distribution, and they would have made a good fit with the demographic those films were aimed at. In 1965, these cyclists, through the news media, returned the bequest of bad dialogue, which was then regenerated in the subsequent cycle of outlaw biker movies. The terrorizing of small towns, the threat and actuality of rape, the spectacle of mass bike runs, the drunken tomfoolery, the wanton violence, the rituals, the display of Nazi symbols, and the interaction with representatives of the counterculture—these core elements from the media’s concocted moral outrage in the face of the new folk devil of the outlaw motorcyclist were relentlessly replayed in the cycle of movies that fed on and bled back into the mythology. For all of the synergies between news accounts, Thompson’s reportage, and the movies, there is little outside of the topicality and sensationalism of the subject matter upon which a story can be formed. A cavalcade of outlaw motorcyclists roaring into town, or down a California highway, is a notable spectacle, as is the violent exhibitionism: the drink and drug-fueled horseplay, fistfights, and libertine sex, both consensual and nonconsensual. But these elements do not in and of themselves make for a narrative. When Bass Lake was a bust and a story was not forthcoming, the writer, Thompson, made himself the center of the saga. The history of the outlaw biker movie cycle is in good part about how filmmakers have also searched for a way to find an appealing tale that can harness the spectacle, sensation, titillation, and thrills proffered by the media’s lurid tales. In a few cases, echoing Thompson’s self-reflexivity, they made the act of filming a biker movie a part of the story, but more often than not, they borrowed from existing narrative forms and types, notably the western, but other action-adventure forerunners were also willfully plundered and slotted together with topical attractions in an offer of the familiar and the novel.

Introduction • 15

Hoodlum Audiences In 1969, novitiate filmmaker Paul Schrader wrote an article for the underground press about an outlaw motorcycle film (with financing from Roger Corman) made by his peers in the UCLA film program. In passing, he had this to say about the audience for biker films: “As in every genre there is a basic level of audience deification. The motorcycle gang members are free, violent spirits which act as surrogate opposition to law, and ultimately to the young viewer’s parents. The motorcycle film is at heart a mama’s boy’s night out. The young viewer’s identification against his parents must be simple, crude, although the very act of identification must not be tampered with or made light of.”36 Foreshadowing Didion’s characterization of the audience, Schrader argued that such films were “depersonalized” because they played to generalized expectations rather than to individual viewers. The movies conformed to the template expected by the audience, who in turn complied with the profile held of them by the filmmakers. For Didion and Schrader, audience and films were mirror images of each other. When Didion described the biker movie as a “perfect Rorschach of its audience,” she meant that the films amply delineated the inchoate desire, frustration, and resentment of its youthful viewers—filmgoers she defined as drive-in regulars who “majored in shop and worked in gas stations and later held them up.” They were the children of “‘hill’ stock,” who held an “obscure grudge” against the world. “It is,” she wrote, “in the commercial cultivation of this grudge that bike movies reveal their rather spellbinding venality.”37 Regardless of her woefully patronizing attitude, there is no doubt that the core audience for these films was working-class youth, yet the correspondence between how the movies are fabricated, distributed, sold, and consumed and the class, age, employment, leisure activities, and interests of its audience all express something far more arresting than mere venality. Writing less than a year after the events he was trying to frame, Sol Stern described the audience that came in thousands to see the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway. These were not the same as the “part-time dropouts of the American middle-class” who had made up the mass of the audience at Woodstock the previous year. The kids at Altamont were a “hard-looking, scruffy vanguard  .  .  . No plastic weekend hippies these, but lots of working-class kids, in shabby army coats and work shirts  .  .  . Altamont, because of its proximity to the Bay Area industrial center and

16 • Hoodlum Movies

because it was free, attracted more working-class kids, kids in the street . . . those kids just making the shift from wine to grass.” They were “the kind of kids you see at drive-ins.”38 Recalling her “wasted years” as the 1960s morphed into the next decade, sociologist Donna Gaines writes about the “high school kids, townies, college dropouts and assorted fuckups” who “pursue sex, drugs and rock & roll as the ends, not the means, to personal liberation.” She’s describing Led Zeppelin’s core audience, of which she is one, as the “tough-guy commandos of candy stores and parking lots, culturally stranded, misfit between the doo-wop crews of the early Sixties and flower power. Lumpen hippie scum, fights, scars, the draft.” They represent an intrusion, a “democratization of Woodstock Nation.” To the countercultural elite, these “working-class kids” were “an unpleasant influx . . . into the cultural mix.” These youths were not looking for “transcendence,” “deep meaning or communion,” and in “Led Zeppelin’s grubby, velvet-ruffled sex bombast,” they found a music that “slammed [them] right into the Seventies.” A new soundtrack for “America’s youth culture was gurgling up, a mutant strain out of the belly of Zep.” They were not the children of the age of Aquarius, the middleclass, university-educated youth who grew up on the Beatles and graduated listening to a soundtrack of Jefferson Airplane. Led Zeppelin’s fans were mostly “white males, nonaffluent American kids mixing up the old-school prole values of their parents, mass culture, pagan yearnings and Sixties hedonism.”39 According to the Los Angeles Times, Led Zeppelin’s appeal was attributable to an increased use of barbiturates and amphetamines by their fans that rendered them “responsive to crushing volume and ferocious histrionics.” “In other words,” writes a biographer of the band, their fans were “seconal gobblers and Boone’s Farmers . . . Led Zeppelin was déclassé, low-rent, sleazy cock-rock with no redeeming social values.”40 These are “kids who just don’t believe that mass culture is all that disappointing,” writes Gaines. “They don’t intellectualize their pleasures.”41 Suburbia, for this sociologist, is where utopian aspirations meet entropic disdain. In Gaines’s book-length study of “fucked up” white suburban kids, she looks at the generation that succeeds her own. In the late 1980s, the skilled jobs and factory settings that claimed the school dropouts of the late 1960s and early 1970s were no longer on offer, just low-paying work in the service industry, “demanding little discipline and skill.”42 In this environment, a career in the military was appealing: “For those shipwrecked in the dead-end towns of suburbia

Introduction • 17

the recruiting station looms as an island of possibility.”43 “The relationship between military service and the rocker’s imagination is long and strong. Biker culture came right out of World War II, and its most famous rightwing boho organization, the Hell’s Angels, has a place in every suburban rocker’s heart.”44 Whatever the antiwar rhetoric of their favorite bands, these “burn-out” kids remained patriots, just like their older brothers and uncles. The paradox between being self-identified “losers” and staunch defenders of the American way is echoed in the biker cycle, most emphatically in the repeated figure of the Vietnam veteran as outlaw hoodlum. In his account, Thompson wrote about the shifts and changes in labor and industry that forged the motorcycle outlaw: I realized that the roots of this act were not in any time-honored American myth but right beneath my feet in a new kind of society that is only beginning to take shape. To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old “individualist” tradition “that made this country great” is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are—not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with. The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment . . . and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity, a temporary phenomenon that will shortly become extinct now that it’s been called to the attention of the police.45

Thompson’s image of the biker as a redundant industrial worker is matched in Gaines’s Led Zeppelin fan and in Didion’s drive-in audience. The latter’s particular disdain for, and fear of, the hoodlum audience was something shared by critics writing for trade and popular press alike and echoed the moral panic produced in the face of the threat posed by the Hells Angels. These critics considered the cycle of motorcycle films as essentially illegitimate and its audience as unruly: “At best, Cycle Savages is a film without talent, a credible story line, subject matter of interest, or anything else which might save it from being simply a horrible film,” wrote a critic at Film TV Daily, concluding that the picture “might do well in a drive-in situation where most people don’t watch the film anyway.”46 The view of the drive-in audience and of the bikers portrayed in the films they were watching (or not watching, as the case may be) is that of a young,

18 • Hoodlum Movies

easily distracted mob of undereducated, disengaged, narcissistic malcontents. No one seemed to be gainfully employed, yet all seemed to have disposable income. They were mobile but looped only in circles, without direction or ambition—so too the hoodlum movies and their characters: “At their low-budget best, a couple of the earlier motorcycle flicks had a raw, awkward vitality which the budget limitations enhanced rather than defeated. They gave you some insights into what made some basically sad cats go. If there were big chunks of sex and violence, there were also glimpses of loneliness, alienation, a real enough, if misplaced idealism, the forlorn use of speed and daring as sexual substitute.”47 Youthful bravado, however, soon became boorish and boring, tedious in its repetitions, just as with the films themselves. Film critics were writing the cycle’s obituary almost as soon as it was formed: “Cycle Savages comes at the end of Motorcycle Series . . . Boldly limping into the theatres after the motorcycle craze has all but been put to bed. Trundling along with near flat tires to a dispersed box office line sliced even thinner with its R rating . . . an unintentional ‘parody of the motorcycle breed.’”48 The wishful reporting of the cycle’s demise was an attribute of the critical consensus that the outlaw biker film was the unwanted bastard offspring of a film industry in decline or an invasive virus spawned in the suburbs and rundown inner cities that had grown into a malign tumor that would consume the healthy host if it was not shut down. The critic’s desire for the cycle’s termination echoed Didion’s observation that a death wish lurks in the psyche of every hoodlum character in a biker movie. Fittingly, the cycle began in death, with a news item in Life magazine of a funeral for a fallen Hells Angel.49

Run, Angel, Run: Serial Production A Roger Corman production with distribution by AIP, The Wild Angels (1966) kick-started the biker cycle. With its subject and storyline evoking recent news reports, the film rapaciously exploited the subculture of Californian motorcycle gangs.50 The run of movies that followed in its wake quickly gathered intensity—seven in 1967 and the same number in 1968, nine in 1969, eight in 1970, peaking with ten in 1971, and then declining and finishing with four in 1972. Originally seeking to benefit from the notoriety of the Hells Angels, Corman’s film was developed under the

U.S. The Wild Angels poster: “Their credo is violence . . .”

20 • Hoodlum Movies

working titles of Fallen Angels and All the Fallen Angels, but the release title went for a broader reference set by invoking the seminal outlaw motorcycle picture The Wild One (1953), effectively fusing the past and present. Films in the cycle all confected variants on “wild” and “angel”; The Wild Angels begat Devil’s Angels, Hells Angels on Wheels, Wild Rebels (all 1967), and Angels from Hell (1968). Having “angel” in the title was almost obligatory right up and until the end of the cycle. In 1969, there was Hell’s Angels ’69, Naked Angels, Nam Angels (a.k.a. The Losers), Run, Angel, Run!, and with barely a pause into 1970, Angel Unchained, Angels Die Hard (a.k.a. Violent Angels), and Black Angels before thinning out in 1971 and 1972 with Angels Hard as They Come, Bury Me an Angel, Pink Angels, and Angels’ Wild Women. In between, the Devil and the Hells Angels motorcycle club are further given their due with Hell’s Belles, Satan’s Sadists, Hells Chosen Few, and Hell’s Bloody Devils. Elsewhere, “savage” offered a novel replacement for “wild,” providing (limited) variety with Savages from Hell, The Savage Seven (both 1968), and Cycle Savages (1969). The repetitive titling of the films is indicative of the process of maximizing seriality within a cycle. As defined by Umberto Eco, seriality is a repetitive art form and practice, which include the retake, the remake, the series, the saga, and the intertextual dialogue. The latter, he writes, “is a didactic work that takes account of the idealized rules of its own production.”51 Intertextuality is defined by, and reflects on, repetition as formula. The reflective aspect, whether parodic or self-affirming, promotes correspondence between examples. This dialogue in turn produces a logic where examples from the series authenticate each other, confirming the value of their shared conventions. These conventions are never fixed but are open to modification. In his theory of formulaic film as a repertoire of generic conventions, Steve Neale argues that conventions are always in play and that they are never exclusive. The repertoire, he contends, will always exceed what an individual film can use, which guarantees variation, however limited, within the formula.52 Outside of the films themselves, recognition of the intertextual is commonplace within press reviews of formulaic movies. Following a screening of The Glory Stompers (1967), one of the first half-dozen films to follow The Wild Angels, a critic, again expressing a wish for an end, wrote, “The cycle is over. The law of diminishing returns has been ratified, you might say, by the American International release, The Glory Stompers now

Introduction • 21

vrooming city-wide and kicking up dust but no excitement  .  .  . Formula has taken over from immediacy and you get that curious but not unfamiliar feeling of being in the presence of a film based not on life but on other films.”53 Self-reflexivity (films referencing films) and intertextuality (through exchange, the shaping of one film by other films and other texts) are essential components of seriality, but repetition is also subject to drivers and influences ignored by Eco: industrial and market forces are equally profound in their impact on the interchange between films. In her study of the recurring figure of Fu Manchu, Ruth Mayer writes that seriality arises from “concrete formal, material and institutional foundations.”54 Silent film historian Rudmer Canjels underpins this idea when he argues that serial forms of movies are “dependent on production and distribution possibilities and conventions that are often directly linked with the perceptions of the film industry itself on how a feature could function best.”55 Canjels claims that the narrative conceits and the formal devices of serial film—its repetitions—are imbued in their production, distribution, and reception. Seriality is never just a question of form and content. Within and outside of a cycle, actors and character types, stories and sequences, formal and stylistic elements are shared and repeated, borrowed and stolen. This process of interchange is part of the concept of seriality, but it is only an element. Following the direction taken by Mayer and Canjels, Hoodlum Movies deals with the mechanics of serial production and the aggregate of its many parts. It is not just the films that are significant; the demands of the marketplace are equally compelling. Paramount to the story told here is the ability of filmmakers to work within a context of exchange, to supply a particular type of picture in an effective and economical manner, one that meets the need of exhibitors and satisfies the intended audience. Mayer acknowledges that popular culture is produced collectively, but she argues that such an activity needs to be understood “within a larger network of cultural meaning making.”56 She is wary of assigning the dynamics of serial production to substitutes for an author, such as publishing houses, studios, readers, or fans. Across the cycle of biker movies, filmmakers formed creative alliances and partnerships, where knowledge and experience were exchanged and put to work, but they were not the sole authors of these films. In the collective process of making a film, interchangeable and standardized parts are modified, tailored, by skilled workers. Like the

22 • Hoodlum Movies

designers and the mechanics who build custom motorcycles, these filmmakers found value in working with and altering preconceived forms. They did this within an institutional framework that provides services and materials that determine the range of creative choices and decisions. Film is an industrial art, but it is not a conveyor-belt product designed to be indistinguishable from others in the run, as if each movie was struck from the same template. Discussing the issue of management and the division of labor within a studio system that is conceived as a producer of regulated narratives, Janet Staiger stresses the need to understand that this does not presume that Hollywood was an assembly-line operation.57 It was instead a “collective mode of manufacture”: “Serial manufacture of a standardized product resulted in a collaborative work situation in which craftspeople jointly mass produced a great number of remarkable (and admittedly, not so remarkable) films.”58 On the same topic, David Bordwell writes, “Film production can’t be standardized to the degree that highoutput manufacture is. It’s an error to consider Hollywood as an ‘assemblyline’ system . . . Hollywood employs an artisanal mode of production, in which each worker adds something distinctive to the result, and the ‘product’ is a complex blend of overlapping and crisscrossing contributions. Marx called this mode of production ‘serial manufacture.’ Instead of rigid standardization, differentiation is built into the system, and the differences aren’t all blueprinted via central command.”59 As represented by the biker cycle, serial manufacture carried out by small, middling, and large independents was a collective mode of production, but it was distinct from other types of collaborative filmmaking. It was not the in-house studio-defined operation that Staiger discusses, which resulted in outputs such as Universal’s horror pictures, MGM’s Tarzan films, or Republic’s Gene Autry horse operas. Division of labor is an essential organizing principle within the studio system, as it is in the exploitation sector. Job roles in the latter, however, are of necessity more flexible and are supplemented by dedicated networks of specialist providers who supply the products and services otherwise beyond a small collective’s resources. These networks offer significant support, providing, for example, insurance, transport, and catering; equipment hire, such as lights, sound gear, and cameras; the processing and printing of film stock; and the services of marketers, distributors, and exhibitors who deliver financing, promotion, and access to audiences.

Introduction • 23

It would be wrong to conceive of studio or independent films as if they were this season’s model of car with a number of standardized, predefined configurations and specifications. Distinctiveness matters even for exploitation films, though it matters a whole lot less than it does for a mainstream film with pedigree actors, high production values, access to first-run houses, and a marketing strategy designed to sell its individuality. Conversely, exploitation films, such as biker movies, are not bespoke objects. Neither mass-produced nor uniquely individual, exploitation filmmaking is instead analogous to forms of customization, where enthusiasts, highly skilled individuals, and service companies work together in temporary creative alliances to reconfigure stock parts into a novel whole. Similarly, networked exploitation filmmakers assembled biker movies not to the order of a fixed, preconceived ideal but to a norm that, at a superficial or stylistic level, is open to modification. In a press release for the MGM television series Then Came Bronson (1969–1970), featuring a motorcycle-riding ex-reporter trying to make sense of his life after the suicide of a close friend, are a list of the modifications made to a Harley-Davidson Sportster: “The front wheel was replaced with a 21″ aluminium rim carrying a 300 × 21 ribbed tire. The front fender was changed to a chrome platted bobbed piece and the headlight nacelle, or housing, was removed and a chrome sports light replaced it. A HarleyDavidson CH gas tank replaced the standard one and the oil tank and rear shocks were chrome plated. A kick starter was added although the Sportster carries an electric starter.” The seat was replaced with a custom leather one, and a short chrome handhold was mounted behind the passenger seat. The chain guard cover and the voltage regulator cover were chrome plated. The rear fender was bobbed five inches and the taillight replaced with an old-style English light. The motorcycle was repainted with a specially mixed formula that is called, from this point on, Bronson Red. The final touch was the addition of the Bronson “Eye” insignia to the gas tank.60 The modifications on the Sportster are all relatively minor: a change of wheel, shorter fenders, chrome plating, new rear light, and gas tank with a bespoke paint job. Yet the changes are sufficient enough to suggest they make the bike “individualistic.” The Bronson custom job was undertaken by Bud Ekins, motorcycle dealer and stuntman, who played a significant role, alongside other riders and customizers, in the biker cycle. Automobile customizers, like

24 • Hoodlum Movies

exploitation filmmakers, work within prescribed limitations—a custom motorbike still needs to be rideable, and an outlaw biker movie still needs to tell its story. Move too far away from a given framework and you have a pile of unconnected parts. Planning is paramount; little is left to chance. During assembly, elements can be modified, even individualized, but what’s possible will be constrained by time, materials, skill, budget, and convention. The end result should promote the subject’s unique features, but the framework and alignment of parts will in effect differ little from other examples. A movie’s component parts are the conventions drawn on to produce sequences such as chases or fights. These conventions may be as fixed in their form and function as a V-twin engine, unsusceptible to a radical overhaul but adaptable to the surrounding parts that can be modified, like a fuel tank, which is open to surface decoration, resizing, and shaping so long as it can still contain liquid and be fitted to the bike and perform its key function. Film scholars Zoe Wallin and Karina Aveyard have considered the way serial manufacture works across a cycle of films made by a temporary alliance of creative personnel. Specifically, they consider the Ranown cycle of westerns produced by Harry Brown, directed by Budd Boetticher, scripted by Burt Kennedy, and starring Randolph Scott made between 1956 and 1960. Independently produced, these midbudget films “combined the exploitable technological elements of color and widescreen with ‘adult’ themes and complex characterizations in an effort to compete with television.”61 Running at approximately eighty minutes long, films in the Ranown cycle were designed to fit either the top or bottom half of a bill. The context for the planning and design of these films is the breakup of the American film industry as a vertically integrated system of production, distribution, and exhibition. The majors now concentrated on financing large-budget films, thereby producing fewer pictures. This rationalization of production created a demand from neighborhood and small-town exhibitors for more modestly priced pictures, which was met by independent film producers. Taking into account the impact of demographic shifts, such as the postwar baby boom, migration to the suburbs, increases in disposable incomes, and competing forms of leisure activities, Wallin and Aveyard consider the Boetticher-Scott films to be an example of a production strategy set up to capitalize on such market opportunities and shifts in consumption habits.

Introduction • 25

This run of films was not, they argue, “sustained by a topical social discourse” or by the box-office success of an individual title; nor did the films’ form and content evolve, as is often assumed to happen within cyclical models. Neither did the films “lose audience interest through an increasing irrelevance of content. Instead, the cycle ended once it was no longer needed to fulfil its market function.”62 The determining factor behind the cycle was “industry decision-makers’ perceptions of the profit potential of a given film type.”63 Having been designed to fulfill an identified market need, the cycle ended because that need was no longer there: “The oversaturation of the market, ever-growing competition from television Westerns, and growing orientation towards ‘event’ pictures made it difficult for such cross-over Westerns successfully to differentiate themselves and maintain audience appeal.”64 A variant on this model is seen in the contemporaneous production of a cycle of movies with hot-rodding as their subject. This short-lived series ran between 1956 and 1958 and, like the biker film, is distinguishable by its use of interchangeable titles—Dragstrip Riot, Dragstrip Girl, Hot Car Girl, Hot Rod Girl, Hot Rod Rumble, Hot Rod Gang, and Hot Cars. The cycle exploited a topical issue—the moral panic about mobile youth with an intent to speed—but while this framed and informed the cycle’s content, it did not determine why the films were made. The hot-rod cycle is intimately tied to the rapid building of drive-in theaters, which hit critical mass in 1956–1957, running parallel with the peak years in the production of the films. When attendance at drive-ins dropped, there was a corresponding decline in the cycle. Filmmakers only exploited the moral panic about hotrodding when it could be used to sell films to youths sitting in cars in driveins. The site of exhibition, the market, provided the essential determining factor in the formation of the cycle, maximizing and shaping its exploitable potential.65 Though the mode of production in the 1960s and 1970s exploitation movies emulates some aspects of earlier forms of low-budget, nonstudio filmmaking, such as that documented by the film historian Eric Schaefer, it also differs in a number of important ways. Schaefer notes that the “classicera” exploitation film (1919–1959) can be distinguished from the dominant studio model of production not only in terms of labor and financing but also through four unique aspects: recycling, padding, square-ups, and hot and cold versions.66

26 • Hoodlum Movies

In biker movies, content is recycled, but there are few instances of film elements being reused from earlier productions, nor is stock imagery from specialist film libraries much on view. Around the more spectacular actionoriented scenes, significant padding is apparent, most notably in the use of liberal footage of motorcycles moving languorously through vast empty landscapes, though here “padding” might be seen as an attraction in and of itself rather than something to be endured. The choice of landscapes ensures that the sequences become, in their own way, spectacular. There are no square-ups—hypocritical apologies or excuses, a moral message to justify prurient imagery—the biker film instead revels in a coarse amorality, in disruptive, antisocial, animalistic behavior. Outside of a nominal number of films, title variations were not in circulation at any given moment, at least not until these films found new audiences through their distribution on VHS tape. Neither on original or subsequent release were radically distinct censored or uncensored versions—hot or cold iterations, as Schaefer calls them—put into distribution. The social problem, sex, and titillation movies that Schaefer documents were not conceived as being part of a production cycle. In the biker movie, cyclicality and seriality are production principles. The film cycles of the 1960s and 1970s are distinctive in their strategy of reiteration that pertains not just to their content and form but also to their production, circulation, and consumption. There was undoubtedly a financial incentive behind this strategy because, for the cycle’s producers, the biker movie held the allure of realizing profits that far exceeded the returns that earlier exploitation filmmakers could dream of achieving. Regardless of its display of brutality and vulgarity, the biker film was condemned by film reviewers because it was formulaic: “It is amateur night by professional money-makers, with these two films which look and smell alike, have been produced and directed by the same person (Al Adamson) and even have overlapping in the cast . . . Both films are absolutely unmitigated garbage.”67 Interchangeable and thereby indistinguishable, made for profit by inept personnel, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, who travel between productions and thereby further ensure an undifferentiated product, biker films are trash—devoid of any appreciable cultural capital. While the uniqueness of individual films and the professionalism of the filmmakers can be debated, the films’ lowly cultural status is unarguable, not least because they were conceived as products to be sold on their boorish and ill-mannered appeal. The biker film was assembled in

Introduction • 27

order to offend—that is, to attract a youth audience because it provoked their elders and betters. Unlike the products of the Hollywood studio system, the biker film was rarely imagined as being inclusive and universal in its appeal—quite the opposite. Like the hot-rod film before it, the biker film was produced to meet the needs of a specific market. It was not chance, serendipity, or simple temporal simultaneity that took these films about mobile youths into drive-ins; they were expressly designed to circulate within economic border regions and to move through rundown inner-city theaters and edge-land open-air cinemas. In their subject matter and as objects, biker pictures were conceived as marginal movies, shown in cinemas that required a steady flow of product to satisfy their habitual patrons, who paid for a type of film that most readily served their purposes. Inasmuch as this is true, the films provide an uncertain reflection of their primary consumers, not because characters and audience are equally venal, but because the films’ youthful viewers treated movies with the same lack of respect a fictional outlaw biker shows to law enforcement figures or bourgeois citizens. The disorderly and distracted audience refused an authoritarian appeal to be fixated on and respectful toward the projected images and amplified sounds. As their want demanded, they turned toward their companions, and looked at themselves, ignoring the screen, which was even then displaying unruly hoodlums, equally self-absorbed. In defining seriality, Mayer places her emphasis on reconfiguration rather than on novelty and suggests that the devaluing of originality is one reason for the form’s taint of illegitimacy: “It is no accident that the lexicon of the serial mode in popular culture is replete with such terms as sprawl, growth, dispersion, and excrescence rather than exclusively relying on associations of linear unravelling, careful design, or microstructural complexity.”68 Like its featured characters, the biker film can be said to revel in a lack of cultivation, in low pleasures, and in the absence of respect shown toward figures of authority. As a film genre with an uncertain lineage, commentators and reviewers alike responded to it as if it were an unloved stepchild—symptomatic, I would argue, not of the nation’s lost youth as Didion thought but of an atrophied Hollywood production system that had long lost the ability to regulate and promulgate an image of itself that might appeal to a universal audience.

1

Strange Excitements The Topical and the Sensational New Orleans is the home of the blues But California’s my home with Mary Hughes —The Yardbirds, “Psycho Daisies” (1966) The Wild Angels is a hard-hitting drama dealing with the topical subject matter of outlaw motorcycle gangs. —AIP press release, August 11, 1966 They come like a wolf pack on wheels . . . Dirty, deadly and dangerous. Their badge is the swastika, their colors black and red. They are a living legend of violence and strange excitements for they hate everything—and everyone—but each other. —poster blurb for The Wild Angels 28

Strange Excitements • 29

The title of The Wild Angels gestures toward a movie antecedent—The Wild One—and a contemporary social manifestation, the Hells Angels. The compact between fictional filmic aspects and highly charged topical subject matter was a long-standing characteristic of American International Pictures’s marketing strategies, especially in its cycles of pictures oriented toward its youthful audience and featuring juvenile delinquents. In the early years of the 1960s, the company toned down the sensational aspects and focused on films that celebrated the consumption habits of America’s teenagers. It did this most notably in a series of beach movies. Dated June  14, 1966, an AIP press release recorded The Wild Angels’ first public screening and described its impact, even before the fact, as “controversial.” The New York premiere was attended by company president James H. Nicholson; vice president Samuel Z. Arkoff; its star, Peter Fonda; and starlets Mary Hughes and Salli Sachse. Fonda’s father, Henry, made a notable appearance among the two hundred guests. The evening’s entertainment was supplied by the Roger Stanley Trio and singer Bobby Diamond. The film’s pressbook announced, “This new American International release should attract as many movie fans as its ‘Beach Party’ series of a season ago, and is certain to create more controversy.” The Wild Angels was the first release in the company’s much-touted “protest” series, which was designed to signal a new product line for youth audiences with little interest in the beach movies that had been a mainstay in recent years. AIP’s use of “protest” as a marketing tag was designed to evoke an air of the countercultural, but it was decidedly apolitical. The company’s director of motion picture and development, Deke Hayward, told the Los Angeles Times, “The next big area for teen-age films is protest. Teen-agers empathize with protest because they are in revolt against their parents.”1 Variety followed up on AIP’s new promotional gambit and also interviewed Hayward: In terms of young people’s tastes today in music, film, etc., there appear to be cycles when they become socially conscious, or more aware of what’s going on in the world. This change was paralleled in their music. “Just listen to some songs coming out now,” he said. “I don’t want to go to war, etc. If our public wants more serious subjects, we’ll supply them.” The company, however, is following the pattern of all other major film companies and avoiding “protest” subjects that might backfire at the box office.

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There has been, and evidently will continue to be, a reluctance to make films dealing, seriously or dramatically, with [the] U.S. political situation, the war in Vietnam, civil rights protest . . . Whether this is just avoiding a touchy subject, or a touchy audience, is a moot point. But such films are not being made, nor are any planned.2

The Wild Angels may have been apolitical, inasmuch as it avoided comment on the divisive issues of the day, but by dramatizing a subject that elicited outrage, manufactured or real, it could not evade being received as social commentary, however inarticulate its message. The Wild Angels’ pressbook described the picture as “an agile, galloping film with moments of pathos that will shock and bully audiences into alertness and thoughtfulness.” Such a claim for a film’s positive social impact is a time-honored tactic used to justify the barefaced exploitation of sensational subject matter. The movie was served up as a cautionary tale, intended as a spur to public action. Roger Corman’s track record for making socially engaged movies was mobilized in the film’s marketing, with the pressbook recalling his 1962 civil rights drama The Intruder.3 But if this suggests a didacticism on behalf of the filmmakers, a worthy but dull execution, then the pressbook counterpromotes Corman’s role in the success of the company’s series of horror films adapted from Poe’s stories. Variety produced a report on the film that was little changed from the press releases provided by AIP. The picture, it noted, is a “facet of life, unpleasant as it may be. Aside from the film’s claims to or worth as art, AIP is demanding that it be recognized as a work of topical importance and one that is actually newsworthy.”4 “Real-life outlaw cyclists” appear in the movie, drawn not only from the Venice chapter of the Hells Angels but also from Satan’s Saints, the Coffin Cheaters, and the Iron Horsemen. To help those lacking in knowledge about the subculture, the pressbook summarized the language, rituals, and customs of outlaw bikers and assured that the film would fully document the cult. It suggested that Corman used restraint in his portrayal of outlaw bikers, especially compared to their depiction in Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, “which has met with the highest critical acclaim as literature from such diverse periodicals as NYT and New Republic. Two artists with a single theme and subject. One puts it on film, the other puts it on paper . . . Art today is disturbing. As is life . . . This is a world of Berkley [sic], and the sit-ins; a world of Andy Warhol and The Chelsea Girls—Brillo-Boxes-As-Art syndrome, of Marshall McLuhan and

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his Medium is the Message; of Knock Knock and Frisk laws; of roasted banana peel scrapings as poor man’s Pot—and of ‘Wild Angels.’” The pressbook’s stress on the film’s topicality is weighed against its homage to The Wild One. Brando’s film is fêted, but the celebration is counterbalanced by a critique of the static shots of motorcycles landlocked on studio soundstages. Conversely, The Wild Angels was “filmed entirely on location” and involved “the movie audience in the action as realistically as Cinerama.”5 Hollywood lineage and its associated glamour were evoked in the film’s publicity by the casting of Peter, the son of Henry Fonda, and Nancy, the daughter of Frank Sinatra. The rebel credentials of supporting stars Bruce Dern and Marc Cavell were used to assert a balance of authenticity. Dern, it was reported, was denied a trial for an Olympic sporting team because he refused to trim his sideburns, and Cavell proved that “ugly guys can make it” in Hollywood—“Movie fans will hate him” even as they admire him for his acting talent.6 Outside of the usual ballyhoo over the film’s stars and supporting cast, exploitation was based on the topicality and novelty of a controversial subject, on the director’s past record of producing movies with a social conscience and his reputation for providing galloping entertainment. Marketing The Wild Angels as controversial was made easier by its selection as the Venice Film Festival’s opening picture. The festival ran from August 28 to September 10, 1966, and its decision to open with Corman’s movie had little to do with whatever merit was seen in it by the selection committee or the festival’s director, Luigi Chiarini; it was included due to the limited availability of American films. Members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, which classifies films for exhibition) and its corollary, the Motion Picture Export Company, had withdrawn their product from contention, fearing negative advance publicity and adverse reviews. Nonmembers, such as AIP, helped fill the gap. Mainstream American reviewers were appalled that such a “sensationalist view of one small aspect of American life, replete with purposeless violence,” was being used to represent the United States.7 The Wild Angels, however, was not in competition with Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar, and Vadim’s La Curée, which starred Peter Fonda’s sister, Jane, in various states of déshabillé. Neither was The Wild Angels the most controversial film in the program. Nudity was very much on the minds of the critics and on the festival’s screens. The Swedish entry, Night Games, shown only

An Italian The Wild Angels (I Selvaggi) poster fostered the idea of Fonda and Sinatra as a romantic couple.

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to press and jury, set the pace in this regard. Mai Zetterling’s permissive Fellini-esque study of an impotent man held the festival’s critical attention, even as Pontecorvo’s film took the grand prix.8 Trade press reviews of The Wild Angels invariably noted the film’s topicality—“a subject frequently in the headlines”—and its suitability for the “exploitation trade and situations which relish their action raw and violent.”9 AIP’s shift into “protest dramas,” away from beach movies and horror, was also part of the story told.10 Its “documentary style” rendering was commented on, whether or not reviewers’ recorded their distaste for the subject matter. “No one,” wrote the Motion Picture Herald scribe, “will leave the theatre without feeling he has seen a slice of life—dirty stupid and appalling as it is.”11 A similar sentiment was echoed in the Hollywood Reporter: “Even necrophilia, the most loathsome of perversions, is presented with detachment.”12 Regardless of the film’s tastelessness, the trade press agreed that a “lush take . . . is indicated” at the box office.13 On August  15, Boxoffice reported that the film would be AIP’s top grosser for the year and was running 100 percent ahead of expectations.14 The Wild Angels opened in select hardtops (cinemas with a roof ) and, making the best of good weather, in drive-in theaters in August through October, then in December moving into neighborhood venues. The August 11 AIP press release announced news of its popularity: “Currently the biggest box office hit in American International history, the hefty shocker dealing with outlaw motorcycle gangs opened to a fantastic $49,693 first day in Detroit multiple bookings and pulled a tremendous $87,214 for its first seven days at seven theatres in Minneapolis. In Kansas City, the picture grossed $73,202 for the initial week in an eight-theatre multiple booking.” The August 23 press release records that in Chicago it “smashed all previous records in its first five days at the Loop Theatre here with a whopping gross of $38,103,” overtaking the record held by Zorba, which registered $20,183 in a seven-day period.15 Reports in Boxoffice add substantially to this list, logging takings at South Dort Drive-In, Flint, Michigan, as $21,869 in its first six days, and it took $17,499 in the first twelve days of its run at the most marvelously named of all open-tops, the Lust DriveIn of Newport News, Virginia. This box office action was repeated in Omaha, Cedar Rapids, Augusta, Corpus Christi, Edmonson, and Baltimore, among many others.16 The impressive box office returns continued throughout August and into the following month.17 There were more openings in September, among them forty-two Eastern “airers” and hardtops

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and thirty Southland theaters and drive-ins in California.18 The New York Times reported, “The Wild Angels was conceived last March, shot in April and publicly shown for the first time in June, a remarkable feat for a color feature photographed entirely on location . . . New York is the last major domestic territory remaining for the film to play.”19 The daily press was impressed with the film’s box office action and equally condemnatory of its portrayal of contemporary youth culture. The New York Times wrote about the controversy surrounding the forthcoming Venice Film Festival screening and recorded that the film was first shown at the West Forty-Second Street Selwyn Theater on a double bill without courting press attention and then, also without fanfare, jumped to adjacent Forty-Second Street theaters, the Lyric and Liberty. Its reporter noted, “Nazi insignia are worn by members of the gang, and the girls wear stretch pants, tight jerseys and bikinis. All the members, men and girls, have long hair.” There was also a passing mention of cuts to some release prints. The orgy scene was said to have been re-edited to appease the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, though it still received a B rating— “morally objectionable in part for all.” AIP, however, were not members of the MPAA, so the film was not submitted for a seal. In the film’s defense, Corman countered in the Times that it reflects well on the United States, “because it shows we can present some of the less attractive aspects of the contemporary scene.”20 In her review of the film in the Christian Science Monitor, Louise Sweeney was as unimpressed with its attractions as her colleague at the Times: “When Peter Fonda vrooms in on his motorcycle in the opening scenes of The Wild Angels, the feeling is unmistakable: this is where the action is. What kind of action is something else: shocking, obscene, raw, profane . . . [It] makes a big play for the young audience with its motorcycle a go-go theme . . . its rock ’n’ roll beat and emphasis on rebellion. But Wild Angels is not a teen-age treat, and young movie goers should not be exploited by it.”21 While echoing the concerns heard elsewhere, the critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was “an exciting, original film that captures an authentic slice of contemporary life.”22 These sentiments were also held by the film reviewer at the Herald Examiner, who believed it was “well made and astonishingly honest.”23 Conversely, the critic at the Citizen News found it reprehensible in its concentration “on orgiastic behavior and wanton destruction.”24 When the film moved from “grind houses on 42nd Street” to “neighborhood theatres” in December, Bosley Crowther reviewed it for

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the New York Times: “It is an embarrassment all right—a vicious account of the boozing, fighting, ‘pot’ smoking, vandalizing and raping done by a gang of ‘sickle riders’ . . . Mr. Corman has shot the whole thing in color and in a cinéma verité style that makes it resemble a documentary. Boy, what a Christmas season show.”25 In keeping with the film’s dual appeal as topical exposé and sensational exploitation, there was some debate in the press over which angle had the most (or least) credence. In the Saturday Review, Hollis Alpert primarily objected to the film exposing and not explaining the phenomena of outlaw bikers: “It is precisely because the meanings are not there in The Wild Angels, because nothing is shown of the psychological or social background, that the film is faulty, and in a sense irresponsible. For, with excrescences such as these, it is not enough, ever, to merely show the surface; an umbrella of meaning is required.”26 Responding to his criticism, letters from the journal’s readers made the case for the film’s authenticity in attitude and representation: “[It’s] an important statement on a very real, though admittedly unpleasant, minority segment of American life.” Readers also responded in a similar manner to a Newsweek review that called it “an ugly piece of trash,” arguing that “the film is valuable for providing some insights into the psychology and sociology of the Hell’s Angels who so disturbingly resemble the Nazis whose insignia they copy.”27 Even if a coherent position on the bikers was absent from the film, in interviews, at least, Corman showed he was adept at offering an understanding of his protagonists’ actions and motivations: “‘These people are not unique,’ Mr. Corman continued, ‘and they are not particularly young. Most of the Hell’s Angels are in their late 20’s or 30’s. They are all the stupid, ignorant people of the world who are rebelling against the highly mechanized, specialized society that has gone by them. They are people without place, without status. In this respect, they are like hoodlum outcasts all over the world.’”28 Corman’s rationale was echoed in Thompson’s book: “Motorcycle outlaws are not much in demand on the labor market,” which demands skills they don’t possess. “In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians, and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell’s Angels are obvious losers, and it bugs them.”29 Los Angeles Times staff writer Kevin Thomas was one professional commentator who did find worth and value in The Wild Angels.30 He compared the film with its extreme opposite, Claude Lelouch’s “Nouvelle Vague-ish experiment” A Man and a Woman: “Corman’s film is as straightforward,”

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he wrote, “as Lelouch’s is convoluted. Indeed, The Wild Angels is an excellent example of the classic Hollywood style, which is to say the story is told as rapidly and economically as possible, avoiding all camera tricks that might divert attention from the action.”31 In his extended review, Thomas used Corman as a means to explore the idea of style and art in Hollywood as revealed through newly minted auteurist studies. Thomas’s take on Corman as an auteur suggests just how rapidly (and in some quarters enthusiastically) Andrew Sarris’s theory of movie authorship was imbibed by mainstream critics with cinephilic predilections.32 In a New York Times profile of Corman, Vincent Canby wrote about the critical split over the film and the director’s status as hack or artist: “While most critics seem to brush off the film as just another ‘exploitation’ picture, there is a small but highly articulate group that is hailing it as the best work to date of the newest cinema auteur—the work of a filmmaker with a vigorous, highly personal cinematic style.”33 The majority of contemporary cinephile musings on the film tended to place it not within a discussion of auteurism but within the wider context of cultural or social entropy. The review in Film Quarterly followed the popular line on the film and suggested the appeal of its “hoodlum bikers” was to the “savage in every suburbanite, waiting by his TV for McLuhan’s new tribalization . . . The image of such a group is a frightening glimpse of unmet needs raging into the open.”34 Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, the best known of the period’s high-brow critics dealing with low-brow subjects, thought the film also said something about the poor state of contemporary cinema: “It’s part of the function of a movie critic,” wrote Kael, “to know and indicate the difference between a bad movie that doesn’t much matter because it’s so much like other bad movies and a bad movie that matters (like The Chase or The Wild Angels) because it affects people strongly in different ways.”35 In the Village Voice, Sarris commented on the film’s lack of density and detail to compensate for an uneven script and atrocious acting, which he suggested are Corman’s trademarks. Fonda, he wrote, “destroys the mythos of the motorcyclist with his bad artiness.” But for all that, he thought it audacious in its attack on conformity, “a lyrical leap toward liberty, the subject and substance of politics and cinema.”36 In trade and mainstream press and in film journals, The Wild Angels was regularly compared to Kenneth Anger’s experimental Scorpio Rising (1963), a “phantasmagoric . . . necromantic view of the horror and charm of the motorcycle set, with its fetishistic leather and chains, its primitive rites and

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its death-sex-leader syndrome.”37 The overlaps were myriad: like The Wild Angels, Anger’s film was focused on the rituals of biker gangs, a homosocial environment with contingent homosexual overtones, Nazi regalia refashioned as pop culture iconography, and a pop music soundtrack, but where most critics found redeeming value in Scorpio Rising, they found little of worth in Corman’s movie.38 The New York Post’s Archer Winsten considered The Wild Angels to be “bad cinema,” but whether you “like it or not and I didn’t—Kenneth Anger did it a lot better.”39 Hollis Alpert concurred with Winsten: “Presumably having seen Kenneth Anger’s experimental film about leather-jacketed motorcyclists, Mr. Corman was moved to make a feature-length study of the creepy breed . . . [It is] bereft of social purpose, satire or meaning.”40 Kael also thought Corman had “fed upon Scorpio Rising.”41 She considered it an example of Hollywood’s interest in the avantgarde when there is money to be made from emulating the outré. And as film critic John Simon noted, The Wild Angels earned a “sort of art taint” by being shown in Venice.42 AIP producer Arkoff believed the film’s “art taint” to be vitally important to European marketing and a positive reception.43 But none of this gives any credence to the notion that The Wild Angels can be considered an “art film.” For an underground film, Scorpio Rising garnered significant press attention, which was partly due to a police action against the film on charges of indecency. The action led to a California Supreme Court case, which Anger won. Critical responses to the film were pronounced, whether positive or negative. In the latter camp, Newsday called it a “repulsive, violent, sick fantasy about human flotsam which takes itself and its subjects far more seriously than I do”; the New York Post gave it a flat dismissal as “naughty exhibitionism”; and in equally terse terms, the New York Daily News critic dismissively wrote, “It belongs underground.”44 Elsewhere, the film was more positively acclaimed. The New Yorker found that Anger had made a “strong” and “beautiful” movie despite its “unpleasant” subject matter.45 In the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight noted the irony of Anger being given one of twelve coveted Ford Foundation fellowships for creative filmmaking only a few days after the film was withdrawn from Los Angeles’s screens. Scorpio Rising, he thought, was an important document on homosexuality and its urge for death. For Anger’s protagonists, he said, “death alone is ennobling—not life, not art, not culture.”46 Both Scorpio Rising and The Wild Angels reference The Wild One (1953), and the latter’s debt to the Brando picture was noted in responses to the

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film as often as it was for Anger’s. The Wild One has a unique reputational cache, having been produced at the forefront of a trend in juvenile delinquency films and because no other significant movie until Corman’s had made the attempt to represent motorcycle gang culture. The Wild One was based on a Frank Rooney story, “The Cyclist’s Raid,” published in Harper’s magazine in January 1951. In turn, Rooney drew on a 1947 Life magazine page devoted to hoodlum motorcyclists running riot in the California town of Hollister.47 The film opens with a foreword: “This is a picture of shocking violence. It couldn’t have happened in most American towns . . . but the fact that it happened in this town, and in this way, is a stern warning that it must not happen again.” Whatever credibility The Wild One had as a cautionary tale, it was its sensational subject matter that sold it at the box office and stirred up publicity. Trade press reviews unanimously condemned its exciting aspects while predicting strong box office returns. The Hollywood Reporter noted that “its main appeal would seem to be to those lawless juveniles who may well be inspired to go out and emulate the characters portrayed.”48 The subject matter of all three films was problematic for film critics and social guardians alike, but the filmmakers’ artistic pretentions gave both Scorpio Rising and The Wild One some protection from critical attacks. Aside from one or two dissenting voices that claimed auteur status for Corman, The Wild Angels was not received as art. Variety wrote, “The Wild One is an artistic picture for hoodlums. The real-life counterparts of the leather-jacketed vandals . . . will buy it. City houses that draw on this type of patronage can do business, probably will, although exhibs should bear in mind that this class of audience is credited with the cost of vandalism in theatres. Otherwise, it will be a tough selling job to attract the mature filmgoer who usually buys artistic pix.”49 The British art critic Lawrence Alloway also referred back to The Wild One in his review of The Wild Angels, suggesting that Brando played his part like Jean Gabin in a leather jacket. “The Wild Angels,” he wrote, “is without such echoes, though there is a suspicion that Peter Fonda dreamed of them in a couple of scenes. However, motivation in The Wild Angels is like songs on 45’s about motorcycling or surfing.” That is, the film forms itself in the shape of a pose, makes a blank statement, displays an action without real consequence. It is like many pop songs, he suggested, which “have typical rather than personal referents, obviously, and the extent to which they become personal they touch on our statistically shared rather

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than private roles.” The film’s script, he argued, was “similarly impersonal” so as to incorporate acts “typical of outlaw motorcycle gangs.”50 Alloway is not making a value judgment, suggesting the qualities of Brando’s film are preferable to Fonda’s. Rather, he is delineating the terms on which each film is to be viewed: the former has aspirations to transcend its topicality, and the latter is wholly embedded within the day’s sensational headlines. Brando’s presence, the film’s high production values, and a script overly self-aware of its own ambition to be more than just a vehicle for cheap sensation support Variety’s suggestion that The Wild One had artistic pretensions. The imposed or implied connections to Anger’s and Brando’s films and the Venice festival appearance may have given The Wild Angels an art taint, but it was its artlessness that overwhelmingly concerned contemporary critics. “Beach party movies are out with the ‘in’ crowd of teen-agers,” ran a February 1966 news item in the Los Angeles Times. “Protest pictures are in.”51 Between August 1963 and the summer of 1965, AIP released seven pictures focused on teenage romance, comedy, music, and dance, five of which had a beach setting: Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. These were seasonal films about teenagers on vacation, released in the summer months to holidaying youngsters. The first four beach pictures featured the starring partnership of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. He appeared only briefly in the fifth film, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. She alone starred in Pajama Party (1964), and he went solo in Ski Party (1965). The technical and creative staff on the series were all AIP regulars. With a background in television, William Asher directed all five beach movies and had a hand in three of the screenplays. Leo Townsend, Robert Dillon, and Lou Rusoff were among the other writers. Les Baxter and Al Simms were the musical supervisors on all but Ski Party. Art direction on the series alternated between Daniel Haller and Howard Campbell, Eve Newman was the editor of five of the films, and Floyd Crosby was the cinematographer on four of the seven. The core cast of supporting actors included Harvey Lembeck (as Eric Von Zipper), John Ashley (as Ken, Johnny, or Steve), and Jody McCrea (as either Bonehead, Deadhead, or Big Lunk). Female support was given by Mary Hughes (six out of seven), Patti Chandler (in five out of seven films), Donna Loren (four out of seven), Candy Johnston (four out of seven), and

An Italian variant poster for The Wild Angels (I Selvaggi), which puts the emphasis on Sinatra’s curves.

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Delores Wells (three out of seven). They in turn were supported by a chorus of regulars in bikinis and shorts. To counter the repetition of actors, scenarios, locations, comic scenes, dances, and chases, novelty was built in through the use of guest music stars—Dick Dale, Little Stevie Wonder, Leslie Gore, and James Brown— and with cameos from studio-era Hollywood actors, such as Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Keenan Wynn, Mickey Rooney, Brian Donleavy, and Dorothy Malone. Comedians Don Rickles and Morey Amsterdam were regularly featured. “These are busy pictures,” said Arkoff. “They don’t even have to make sense if they move fast enough—so long as nobody stops to analyze until he’s on his way home.”52 The five films in AIP’s beach party series are extraordinarily self-contained and endlessly self-referential about their own status as serial productions. Inevitably, at some point in the proceedings, Avalon

Promotional still for AIP’s Pajama Party. Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) sits astride a Honda along with two of the film’s “Pajama Girls.” Mary Hughes (one-time girlfriend of the Yardbirds’ guitarist Jeff Beck) is the blonde sitting on the handle bars.

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will turn to the camera and inquire, “Do you believe this?” The first entry in the cycle, Beach Party, used a cameo from Vincent Price to stitch in a trailer at the end of the film for his forthcoming AIP picture, Haunted Palace (1963), and also referenced The Pit and the Pendulum (1961): “Bring me my pendulum kiddies, I feel like swinging.” The end titles of Muscle Beach Party provided a forum for a trailer for Bikini Beach. Though self-enclosed, the AIP films were part of a much larger cycle: approximately forty beach exploitation movies were produced by a variety of companies between 1963 and 1966.53 In a contemporary interview, Arkoff said of the formula, “There are no parents  .  .  . no school, no church, no legal or government authorities, no rich kids or poor kids, no money problems—none of the things that plague young people today. For a kid who’s been harangued by parents and who’s been told to put out the garbage or do the dishes before going out to the movies, this is Never-Never Land.”54 The fantasy of teenage romance at the beach developed in a space unencumbered by parents but where other adults were persistent in their intrusions. The generation gap was enhanced by using aging Hollywood actors who played dupes or villains rather than guardians of the teenagers. The youngsters effectively policed their own conduct, both social and sexual. They were chaste. Despite the absence of parental control, this sexless teenage world was under constant adult surveillance. A trope running throughout the series is the older generation’s voyeuristic study of teenagers, with the guest star assuming the role of a peeping tom. By casting Robert Cummings in Beach Party as an anthropologist studying teenage subcultures, the anxiety or guilt the film’s audience might feel in the pleasure taken from peeping at fetishized bodies is displaced. His profession helps justify and legitimate the surveillance of the youngsters. In its title alone, “Peekaboo Sex, or How to Fill a Drive-in,” Life magazine’s long article covering the “beach-bikini film cycle,” highlights the voyeuristic side of the films’ appeal. Noting the cycle’s similarity to the chaste Rock Hudson and Doris Day romantic comedies, which also used “the leitmotiv of unrequited passion” and an “unyielding defense of celibacy,” Alan Levy wrote, “The camera moves with abandon, making the viewer feel he is watching good-looking, vibrant youngsters through one-way glass. The girls are luscious and the boys are lithe.”55 “Kids realize sex play exists,” said AIP’s Louis M. (“Deke”) Heyward, “but they don’t like movies to get involved with it,” he explained. “A boy

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watching a movie and sitting next to a girl with whom he’s necking will be embarrassed. Even today’s dance steps are pretty damn puritanical.”56 The twist is the default dance in the series, enabling, even on the dance floor or the beach, a strict sex segregation—male and female bodies are kept apart when they might otherwise be at their most intimately entwined.57 The beach scene is portrayed as a white teenage world in which the origin of the twist in black culture is effaced. Through the inclusion of black entertainers (e.g., Stevie Wonder and James Brown), racial motifs unobtrusively reverberate, but outside of their contained performance, they do not interact with the series’ regulars. The singers are as segregated from the white characters as the men are from the women. Other than the guest stars, the films have an entirely white cast. Still, racial traces nonetheless resonate in the trope of the primitive. Under the scope of the anthropologist, the youngsters are defined as the culture’s throwbacks, which is parodied in Bikini Beach by featuring a surfboarding chimp owned by a millionaire who believes his pet is more intelligent than American teenagers. Buster Keaton’s witch doctor character, Bwana, in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, offers another version of the taint of the primitive. The figure of the juvenile delinquent, so crucial in AIP’s earlier cycles, is similarly displaced. The comic character Eric Von Zipper, a parody of Brando in The Wild One, is an overaged, ineffectual troublemaker—a rebel without a clue. Compensating for the displaced prurience, racial mixing, and willful delinquency—the things that might give the stories a frisson of excitement—the films promote the idea of conformity through consumption, especially of leisure time. Teenage consumption habits sit at the very heart of the beach movie. In the final film of the series, the surveillance trope is enacted by casting Mickey Rooney as a talent scout. He is searching for a young couple to act as models in a marketing campaign for Honda. The company is selling lightweight motorcycles to teenagers, a two-wheeled equivalent of the surfboard. The last Avalon and Funicello beach movies were made for the 1965 summer season. In the new year, AIP’s director of product development explained, “We have left the beach to Universal, Columbia and other studios which won’t find much left there. The beach pictures ran their course.”58 Fickle teenage tastes apparently played their part in AIP’s decision. A portent of the change to come was already present in the third film of the series, Bikini Beach, which featured an English character named Potato Bug. He’s a pop star—the girls love him, but not the boys. The

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mop-top British invasion he represents is further parodied by the instrumental surf band the Pyramids, who at one point don Beatle wigs. Despite being the butt of the joke, the Beatles were the future and surf combos the past. The nouvelle vague–influenced Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), made the beach movie look as passé as their records made surf music sound. In March 1966, Variety reported on AIP’s production plans, noting that the company felt it could no longer “romp around forever in invisible bikinis, or dress up in Edgar Allan Poe glad-rags to play spooks.”59 Three months later, the trade journal continued the story: “From Sand in Bikini to Sand in Machinery: AIP on ‘Protest’ Kick.” It reported that the company was “swinging to the other end of the teenage cycle now that the ‘beach’ brand has used up most of its potential,” and it was gearing up for “a series of ‘protest’ films.”60 As the company’s director of development explained to the Los Angeles Times, the “protest” tag was little more than an expedient exploitation of the generation gap: “Among the movies we are planning for the coming season are subjects about stock-car racing, Fireball 500, and one about Hell’s Angels—a type of motorcycle club, both of which represent a protest against society.” AIP “always assumes the teen-agers’ viewpoint,” he said, but he also added that the protest films would be “moral tales.”61 Both films featured stories of mobile youth, but there the comparison ends. Fireball 500 starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The context of stock car racing represented no more than a change of location in creating a break from the couple’s earlier beach movies. The Wild Angels was, by comparison, a radical departure for AIP. Among the papers left to the Margaret Herrick library by Howard R. Cohen, who wrote the screenplays for the Young Nurses (1973), Vampire Hookers (1978), and Emmanuelle 5 (1987), are notes on a 1970 treatment for an unproduced outlaw motorcycle movie, Bikers in Outer Space. It was a science fiction comedy musical in which Frankie Avalon tries to bed Annette Funicello. Having finally discovered his libido, Avalon’s amorous intentions are blocked by Funicello, who has become “totally imbued with the Madonna-Whore complex.” She eventually decides that a virginal image is the more marketable attribute, so he must remain frustrated. Meanwhile, outlaw bikers—wearing big coats, Davy Crocket hats, Nazi insignia, and so forth—are searching for the Hole in the Universe, the ultimate nirvana.62 The concept is 2001: A Space Odyssey meets beach movie meets biker film—the corruption of an innocent age-of-exploitation

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picture by a gnarly, sexually promiscuous and predatory present and a metaphysical future. Like actual examples of the motorcycle film, Bikers in Outer Space lacks originality even as it employs an acute self-awareness of its antecedents. Such self-consciousness had been apparent from the beginning of the cycle. From wholesome beach movie to offensive biker film, the shift in genre and tone undertaken in AIP’s production plans would prove to be economically canny. In March 1967, Variety reported that The Wild Angels had taken $6 million domestic gross on a $300,000 investment and had just realized $30,000 in its Paris opener over a February weekend.63 In an attempt to capture further exceptional box office returns, AIP had ready for release or in production The Trip, Riot on Sunset Strip (both 1967), Psych-Out, and Wild in the Streets (both 1968). This tranche of forthcoming “protest” films from AIP was augmented, in 1967 alone, by three biker movies: Devil’s Angels, Glory Stompers, and Born Losers, which the company either produced or partially financed.64 Under the heading “Series of Movies on Cyclists Near: Small Company Finds Gold in Hoodlums’ Behavior,” the New York Times was confident that another film cycle was about to unfold: “The Wild Angels, the controversial and profitable drama about an outlaw West Coast motorcycle gang, is prompting a new film series from American International Pictures . . . They made five beach films and eight Poe shockers, and attempted to combine the two genres in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. That, however, was a flop . . . These kids are in revolt. They aren’t the surfing type.”65 Discussing AIP’s break from its earlier cycle of beach party specialties and a lack of a moral worldview in The Wild Angels, the film critic of the Saturday Review wrote, “Bikini beaches exist, too, but no one takes movies about them seriously. Their appeal is to adolescents, and they are made for ‘exploitation’ purposes only, for a fast buck, in other words. And this is the use to which the same firm is putting The Wild Angels.” Gang members are all portrayed, he wrote, as being on the “low-side of intelligence . . . A few were homosexually inclined . . . and behaved as they did for psychopathic reasons as well as because of parental and social neglect.” But “with social excrescences such as these, it is not enough, ever, to merely show the surface.” Instead, he argued, “an umbrella of meaning is required.”66 By not giving an explanation for his characters’ actions, Corman, the columnist wrote, was being morally derelict. The lack of compensating moral values and the display of nihilism were something entirely new for AIP, going a good step

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beyond what Deke Heyward had suggested were the limits his company was attempting to represent with the teenage “protest against society.” Though it wholly corrupted the moral certainties of the beach movie, the cycle’s break with earlier AIP fare was neither as decisive nor as absolute as The Wild Angels might suggest. Kevin Thomas’s Los Angeles Times review of Devil’s Angels called it a “sequel” to The Wild Angels, though not as good as the “first instalment.” “Actually,” he wrote, “it is more like a remake, a variation on the theme of the first film.” The Devil’s Angels lacked the qualities of its forerunner, he argued, because repetition diminishes the impact of the original and the director was not as accomplished as Corman. The film’s real failure, he suggested, was its “self-consciousness.” This aspect weakened any claim to authenticity that it might have made in its portrayal of outlaw bikers, as it had for The Wild Angels. The Devil’s Angels knowingly and determinedly tried to make itself a “little more attractive, a little more likable, and . . . appealing.” In the process, “history repeat[ed] itself,” echoing the Dead End Kids’ transformation into the Bowery Boys. The “sequel” exploited and softened the impact of its predecessor, presenting the outlaw bikers as cartoon figures who “act like Beach Party cut-ups in Halloween costumes.”67 Whether Devil’s Angels was conceived as a pastiche, sequel, remake, installment, or variation, it broke with The Wild Angels by returning the lost voice of morality (however compromised). Typically in AIP pictures, morals were ventriloquized by the female lead. In the first cycle of biker movies, she was cast, costumed, and groomed as if playing a part in a beach movie. The casting of Nancy Sinatra, with her blonde backcombed hair, in The Wild Angels; or Elizabeth James, shod in a matching white ensemble of kinky boots and bikini, in Born Losers; or Beverly Adams, wearing a mod outfit and boyish short hair, in Devil’s Angels were all designed to appeal to the girls in the audience. The film’s producers were assuming that their putative female audience looked at movies as fashion guides: “It isn’t often that a girl pours herself into her levis, zips up her leather jacket, dons her calf-length boots and climbs astride her motorcycle as one of the ‘chopper’ gang—in a coiffure designed by the world-renowned Vidal Sassoon. It happens however, in American International’s Devil’s Angels.” This is the opening paragraph in a column from the film’s pressbook, headlined “Chic Beauty Is Motorcycle Co-Star.” Adams was married to Sassoon, another suggested exploitation angle. Elsewhere in the pressbook, the appeal of other female cast members is highlighted.

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John Cassavetes and Beverly Adams in a publicity still for Devil’s Angels. She looks out of place in this milieu, but he looks no more authentic.

Under the heading “Exploitation: Motorcycle Fashions” are photographs of the female leads, one in a bikini, standing astride custom motorcycles. Beneath the images, exhibitors are urged to use “the photos of this bevy of motorcycle bunnies for local merchandising tieups with motorcycle shops and women’s wear stores.”68 The images visually confirm the story that sits under the heading “Trio of Beauties among Angelic ‘Devils’ in AIP’s Devil’s Angels.” This piece of bally promises not to let down the movie-going public who are “familiar with the past efforts of American International and its collection of highly successful bikini pictures . . . Ogling material would not be left out.”69 As much as the distorted and overamplified instrumental surf music— Dick Dale on steroids—defined the first run of biker movie soundtracks, the female lead and supporting cast accentuated the cycle’s uncertain break with its beach movie antecedent.70 The Hollywood Reporter recognized as much when it noted that the soundtrack of the Born Losers “is more of the same twangy post-surfer loop that unreels beneath AIP films.”71 “We keep our eye on the female buyer,” said an AIP executive, “because the female is the principal buyer of records and it’s the girl who decides which film she and her boyfriend or husband are going to see.”72 The review in New York’s

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The Devil’s Angels pressbook suggests the film has a dual appeal to men and women. The female star is a mannequin for modish fashions and a fetishized object of desire drawn from a beach movie.

Morning Telegraph of Devil’s Angels confirmed this bid for female interest while finding in it further cause to critique the film: “Even less impressive is Beverly Adams who seems more concerned with not smearing her makeup or losing one of her artificial eyelashes (all the motorcyclists’ women are too clean to be credible).”73 Before her showcase in The Wild Angels, Sinatra had appeared in a number of youth-oriented movies, including For Those Who Think Young (1964) and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). Adams had appeared in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, playing the object of every beach boy’s desire as conjured up by Keaton’s witchdoctor. Such casting connections made the link between biker and beach movies tangible. Sinatra, James, and Adams may have seemed out of place and stylistically at odds with grease, beer, and biker culture, but female characters in American formulaic cinema rarely carried the weight of imparting authenticity. John Wayne’s costumes in westerns, for example, were remarkably consistent throughout his career, with only minor modifications made from film to film and within any given film. The costumes worn by his female costars changed between scenes and, as vogue dictated, between pictures.74 Wayne represented stability, the women faddishness. Relative to

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the men’s, the descriptions of women’s costumes, bodies, and hair in the screenplay for The Glory Stompers is detailed and substantive; descriptions of both men and women are conservatively gendered: Nancy, a slender, elegant-looking girl in her early 20’s with flowing blonde hair, dressed in hip-huggers, blouse and white boots . . . Joanne, a slender girl in her early 20’s, with long dark wind-blown hair. She is attractive but has a hard look about her, and it is evident that she knows her way around. Her costume consists of a sexy black outfit; skin-tight denims, blouse, and knee length highheeled boots . . . Darryl Hudson, a tall, muscular youth in his mid-20’s, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, T-shirt, and a sleeveless denim jacket with the words “Glory Stompers” and the club emblem on the back . . . Chino, a lean, bearded youth in his mid-20’s, dressed in denim jacket, leather pants, and motorcycle boots.75

Equally gendered and generic is the dialogue, which is like the patter Shadow Morton might have scripted for a Shangri-Las recording session or, more appositely, like something from a beach movie: . . . I want something better than being a Stomper’s girl . . . (she notices his hurt expression) Darryl, I still love you . . . but I want a man I can depend on, not someone who runs around with a pack of over-aged delinquents. DARRYL: (shrugs helplessly) But you don’t understand . . . Nancy, they’re my friends . . . They’re like family.76 NANCY:

These trite and banally delivered sentiments contrast sharply with a kidnapping scene, undertaken with the intention to sell Nancy to a Mexican pimp, and the subsequent ongoing threat of sexual violence. The filtering into the biker film of beach movie elements threatened to undermine generic cohesion; however, it was so routine during the cycle’s initial run that it suggested filmmakers did not see narrative stability and unity as outweighing the potential appeal to both sexes that could otherwise be realized. A review in Variety of Hells Angels on Wheels supports the suggestion that the first tranche of films in the cycle were somehow perversions of earlier exploitation types, which offered the novelty of corrupting the beach movie’s innocence: “As is now expected of these cycling pix, the girls are too clean and too pretty. One new gimmick is the suggestion of perversion

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among both the cyclists and their girls . . . The film will make money but it’s not likely to make many friends.”77 Intersecting with the beach movie and the biker film was Southern California’s custom car culture. The figureheads were Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and George Barris. Tom Wolfe covered their story in 1964 for Esquire magazine with the headline “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” which with a slightly truncated title would form the centerpiece of his celebrated collection of New Journalism.78 Like Thompson and his saga about the Hells Angels, Wolfe was documenting a subculture. His story was about the nonsalaried craftsmen, artisans, artists, designers, and illustrators who fundamentally changed the iconography of automobile culture. Emerging out of the 1950s hot-rod milieu, these garage artists helped fashion the look and identity of Southern Californian youth. They brought with them a beatnik’s irreverence for conformity and disregard for the mass-produced but also a sense of pleasure in the vulgar forms they appropriated and customized to suit their splenetic view of an accelerating, materialistic postwar culture.79 Von Dutch’s flying-eye motif, Roth’s Rat Fink, and Barris’s Batmobile are the still-recognizable vestiges of this once vital culture. Roth deftly straddled teenage surf culture and the custom culture of outlaw bikers. His signature style is plagiarized in the set designs of the beach movie, especially in Bikini Beach, in the display of hot cars, and more directly in characters wearing his T-shirts and Rat Fink hats (e.g., Jody McCrea in Beach Party Bingo). When William Murray was looking to make contact with the Hells Angels for his Saturday Evening Post article, a police sergeant told him to go see Roth—“He makes things for them.” When the two men met, Murray was given a tour of Roth’s studio; he caught sight of the drag racer Yellow Fang, which he was told could hit 190 miles per hour in nine seconds; and was shown Roth’s newest creation, a Big Daddy T-shirt with “Hell’s Angels Fan Club stencilled across the front.”80 The outlaw motorcycle film owes a debt to California’s bike and car customizers, most profoundly in the design of the bikes so prominently displayed in film after film. Still unsung, but of importance, was Gary Littlejohn, who supplied bikes to most of the cycle’s major productions, including nearly all those that had AIP support, from The Wild Angels onward.81 He would become a familiar figure in a good number of the films, cast invariably as a member of the pack. Von Dutch would often work on

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Littlejohn’s choppers, doing paint jobs and pinstriping. It was not just with bike design that Von Dutch and Roth left their signatures on these films; they were also hired to provide artwork on Angels from Hell (1968) and The Glory Stompers, respectively. Roth’s full contribution to the latter film is uncertain, but there’s no doubt he designed the silk-screened biker-gang patches. Von Dutch’s signature style is used to good effect in Angels from Hell’s title sequence, with caricatures of the cast and crew; a sheriff ’s shirt covered in medals awarded for being a “petty tyrant” and a “leading bully,”; the film’s star, Tom Stern, preparing to mount a bike with a nude woman substituted for the frame, seat, and forks; and a self-image. His giant portraits of bloodshot, bug-eyed grotesques and figures of female nudes decorate the clubhouse and saloon walls. Dutch’s graffiti embellishes the gang’s garage, and his nude portrait of Ginger, the saloon’s owner, is hung above her bed. A carryover from beatnik, beach, and horror B-movies, the deranged psychotic artist is a regular figure in the early biker films. The wild caricatures of modernist artists in films such as Bucket of Blood (1959), Dementia 13 (1963), and Bikini Beach reappear in Devil’s Angels in the character of Funky (who wears a beret, of course) and as an unnamed painter in Hells Angels on Wheels. The trailer for the latter calls the painter a “new wave pop artist.” He has decorated the Angels’ hangout as if he were constructing a Rauschenberg collage of heavily applied oil paint, automobile and highway detritus, magazine clippings, and graffiti, such as “F.T.W.” (“Fuck the World”). When one of the bikers asks him what kind of painter he is, he replies in a stoned mumble, “I don’t know, man. Toilet seats, baseball fields, armpits, sometimes even portraits.” Mostly, though, he seems to paint the girls’ bodies. Scenes in joints such as clubhouses, garages, and dive bars rapidly became commonplace in the cycle. It’s here that the bikers party and fight. Music invariably accompanies the scenes of their dissolution. Go-go dancers appear with regularity in bar scenes, just as frequently as the biker girls in their black bras do the jerk in clubhouses and around campfires. In the first two years of the cycle, the joint’s location is often in or around the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles. “Founded in 1905,” writes a biographer of the city’s beatnik residents, “as a genteel retreat for estheticallyminded Los Angeles businessmen, it quickly became the Coney Island of the West—and image-wise, at least, things have been all downhill from there.”82 Home to the Holy Barbarians documented by Lawrence

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Lobby card for Devil’s Angels. Biker girls dancing in their underwear at clubhouse parties were a trope established early in the cycle.

Lipton, these bohemians include the poets and writers Alexander Trocchi, Stuart Perkoff, and Charles Foster, who found cheap accommodations in Venice’s run-down housing and a caffeinated culture in its convivial coffeehouses, Venice West Café and the Gas House.83 The areas canals, its colonnaded archways along Ocean Front Walk, and its beachfront and proximity to Pacific Ocean Park’s amusements offered filmmakers in the late 1950s and into the 1970s a suitably dilapidated photogenic environment. The archways can be seen in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) and earlier in the beatnik-inflected psychological horror Dementia, a.k.a. Daughter of Horror (1955). The streets and back lots around Venice and the pier in Santa Monica are used to great effect in Curtis Harrington’s avant-horror Night Tide (1961), starring Dennis Hopper. The canals and beachfront are seen during the rambling walks taken by Kris Kristofferson’s character in Cisco Pike (1972) and as a backdrop for the machinations of Samuel Fuller’s drug dealer in The Young Nurses (1973). The outlaw hangout in Born Losers sits alongside a swampy looking canal and in the middle of a junkyard. When not up in the hills overlooking the coastline, the action takes

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place on or just off the Pacific Coast Highway around Huntington Beach. The opening scene in The Wild Angels is shot along a Venice canal, which evokes the shabby, down-at-the-heels world the bikers inhabit. A young child on his trike turns a corner and comes face to face with Heavenly Blues (Fonda) astride his chopped Harley. A terrified mother pulls the boy away. The image of the outlaw biker monstrously echoes the kid on his trike and fully resonates as a symbol of the threat and menace posed by the Angels just as surely as the juxtaposition arouses an idea of their childish nature and lost innocence. Born Losers somewhat self-consciously evokes the ambiguity the initial cycle of films held toward its immediate predecessors. The female lead, Vicky (Elizabeth James), endures sustained sexual threats from the bikers, who have already raped four teenage girls before turning their attention to her. Against this picture of brutality, the film poster declares Vicky is a “kitten on wheels with her bike . . . her boots and bikini! Out for kicks . . . in for trouble! She’s going to join the . . . Born Losers.” Publicist James Raker drafted further taglines that followed a similar logic: Black Boots! Gold Bikini! And a Red-Hot Bike! With her bike, her boots and her little gold bikini, she’s out for trouble. She’s the spark that turned a small town into a volcano of violence—while the law stood helplessly by.84

Vicky spends much of the film riding a Honda motorbike (like those being sold by Mickey Rooney in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini) around Venice Beach locations. She is dressed in a white bikini, a matching little scarf tied over her bobbed hair, sunglasses, and kinky boots. The image is a mixed message of virginal innocence and sex kitten come-on. The Madonna-whore fantasy figure of Annette Funicello in Bikers in Outer Space finds its objective correlative in James’s character. Almost universally, critics considered Born Losers to be abject. The ambivalence over whether Vicky was an innocent beach girl or a motorcycle mama was partly responsible for the negative response. Delores Taylor—the film’s producer, writer, offscreen narrator, bitpart player, and wife of the star—told Variety she was not happy with the advertising behind the film and the campaign that joined it to AIP’s “cycler begun with The Wild Angels and continued with The Devil’s Angels.” Born Losers was not a “motorcycle meller,” according to Taylor. “Instead

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Publicity still for Born Losers. Vicky sits on a Honda in her allwhite bikini ensemble.

of catering to public’s seeming lust for violence, as per successful James Bond and motorcycle series, Miss Taylor hopes her film ‘helps audiences grow’ as well as entertaining them.” The film’s screenplay was influenced by press reports of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York. According to widely circulated news items, Genovese’s killing was witnessed by a large number of people who failed to respond to her cries for help. The indifference of her neighbors and passersby became the story and was

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the spur for Taylor’s tale. The pressbook’s production notes, alongside citing the Genovese case, claimed that information was compiled on motorcycle hoodlums, and in more than 350 rape and assault cases in which they were supposedly involved, never once was a biker convicted. Despite not liking the way her film was sold, Taylor “reluctantly concedes the necessity of such a campaign in today’s market unless one goes the art-house route, which definitely does not figure in AI’s plans.”85 Regardless of whether Taylor was genuine in her defense of the film, it nevertheless rests on the cliché that today’s problems can be blamed on bad parenting. Mothers and fathers are either absent, bullies, alcoholic, or manipulative. In any case, Taylor’s justification for the handling of the violence held little sway with the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. Its committee did not consider the film to be a serious attempt to deal “with a critical problem in American society”; rather, it was an “implausible treatment” that caused its “realism to degenerate into purposeless brutality and sensationalism.”86 The press, for the most part, concurred with the committee. “A disgusting, cruel, violent, brutalizing, vicious film that any money to be made from it is tainted,” wrote William Wolf in Cue magazine. “It is made all the more distasteful by the hypocritical attempt to cloak it in an anti-violence viewpoint.”87 The critic for Hollywood’s Citizen News wrote, “[It is] one of the most brutal and violently sadistic films ever to emerge from a major Hollywood studio  .  .  . depraved, demoralizing and degrading.”88 Motion Picture Herald called it “disgusting,” “revolting,” and “repelling.”89 The Los Angeles Herald Examiner’s critic provided one of the few positive reports: “Born Losers is a bloody, sadistic, shocking and harrowingly authentic motion picture . . . without doubt the most honest film of its genre yet devised.”90 Variety reported that “hefty grosses” were predicted for the “Sock Hell’s Angels meller with topical theme.”91 By the end of the year, Born Losers had accrued $2,225,000 in rentals in the United States, which made it more successful than the Devil’s Angels, which made $1,600,000, a million dollars less than Hells Angels on Wheels. Most significantly, each of the biker films released in 1967 outplayed the Funicello and Avalon picture Fireball 500, which peaked at $1,600,000. Corman’s youth film The Trip outstripped them all and returned $4,025,000. To put this in perspective, the year’s most successful movie, The Dirty Dozen, took $18,200,000 in rentals.92 Nevertheless, with an outlay rarely going much above $150,000 to $200,000, the biker film showed a profitable return.

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One of the few films in the cycle to be shot on location in South Florida, Wild Rebels starred Steve Alaimo, pop singer and cohost of television’s Where the Action Is (1965–1967). Drawing heavily on the singer’s public persona, the film casts him as Rod Tillman, a stock car driver of some repute. He is incongruously dressed for racing in Chelsea boots and white Levis jeans and jacket. When his car is wrecked, he abandons the sport and takes to the road with his guitar. At the Swinger’s Paradise Club, he joins the house band (played by the local Florida outfit the Birdwatchers) on a blue-eyed soul number. He is recognized by a Satan’s Angels outlaw biker who, using a girlfriend as an enticement, tries to enroll him as a getaway driver for a planned bank robbery. The outlaw gang is only three in number: Jeeter, Banjo, and Fats. They sport sleeveless denim jackets with the club’s colors on the back and the front decorated with swastikas, Iron Crosses, and the like. A large Nazi flag hangs across one wall in their clubhouse. They smoke weed and call everyone “baby.” That they are outlaw bikers is incidental, used to give the film topical color, a marketing angle (tagline: “They Live, Love and Even Kill for Kicks . . . They’re the Wildest of the Wild Ones!”), and an immediacy in invoking a threat of violence and being out of control. More interesting is the figure of the bikers’ girlfriend, Linda (Bobbie Byers), a modishly dressed young woman who hangs out with the cyclists because she is a thrill-seeker. In a scene where she dominates screen time, Linda explains to Rod that she just wants kicks. For her, there’s never a dull moment with the outlaws. She’s free—“no ring on your finger, no home, no snotty nosed brats.” Ecstatically, Linda tells him about “looking death in the face . . . Just you—alive!” She’s on a death trip, which even Rod can figure out. “Are you looking for trouble”? he asks, almost coyly. “Just kicks, baby, just kicks,” she replies with a lascivious smear to her words. Linda’s wayward desire, her promiscuousness—she does not belong to, or want, any one man—and her rejection of the “straight” world of gender norms are the true heart of the movie and an unsettling counter to the biker caricatures and the romanticized image of the wandering minstrel played by Alaimo. Variety, though, called the film a “minor entry for [the] Hell’s Angels market . . . based on the leather jacket set.” The journal linked it directly with The Wild Angels, Hells Angels on Wheels, and Born Losers. Bobbie Byers is dismissed as no more than “distaff interest.”93 Pulled into the cycle through its marketing and reception, the film is, nevertheless, foremost a star vehicle for Steve Alaimo.

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Byers, who had a limited career in the movies, returned to the biker film in another Florida-based picture, Savages from Hell, a.k.a. Big Enough n’ Old Enough (1968), an ultra-low-budget effort that in one overlong sequence consciously pulls the beach movie together with the biker cycle. The bikers and bikini girls occupy separate but adjacent spaces in a scene set on a beach. The girls twist away the day and have their bodies painted while the bikers horse around and guzzle beer. The cospectacle of the bikers and bikini girls is the only justification for the sequence. Variants on such a party scene are commonplace in the cycle. In The Glory Stompers, it happens in a wooded area, where a gathering of the clans, the outlaw motorcycle clubs the Henchmen, Black Souls, Glory Stompers, Wasted, and Joker’s Hell, come together to carouse. Just as in a beach movie, a beat band gives a performance, miming away on unplugged instruments, but the dancing around them is debauched and debased. The wholesome twist has become dissolute, wrenched into an untutored flaying of arms and shaking of hips and tits. Born Losers was the last film in the cycle to attempt to market itself as something other than sensational entertainment. The Los Angeles Times called it “an obscenity in the guise of social consciousness.”94 The caveat accompanying the promised pleasures of so many 1950s juvenile delinquency pictures—that they were the product of responsible filmmakers who were undertaking a social service in the form of a melodrama—was gone. Filmmakers and marketers of outlaw biker films made no pretense that the movies were anything other than cheap sensations. The promotion of The Wild Angels, and subsequent films in the cycle, broke with the romance, comedy, and pop culture approach used for the beach movie and returned to a form of ballyhoo and sensational imagery that had been a mainstay in the marketing of juvenile delinquent pictures during the mid- to late 1950s. The tagline “Beware! Lust is their law  .  .  . Riot their Reason  .  .  . Get out of their way if you can  .  .  . Devil’s Angels” pairs nicely with that of the 1959 delinquent movie The Beatniks: “Defiant . . . Explosive! A pulsating story of modern youth  .  .  . Their password was ‘mutiny’ against society.” And it contrasts with the tagline for Muscle Beach Party (“When 10,000 biceps go around 5,000 bikinis you know what’s gonna happen”) or for Bikini Beach (“It’s where the girls are BARE-ING . . . The guys are DAR-ING and the surf ’s RARE-ING to GO-GO-GO”). Devil’s Angels pivots around three dance sequences: at a clubhouse, a lakeshore, and a fair. These moments suggest an obscene parody of the

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beach movie; instead of drinking sodas, the dancers are chugging back beers and toking on joints, and instead of wearing bikinis, the women cavort around in bras. The dances no longer suggest coy sexuality, policed and segregated; they now look like part of a tawdry burlesque show. Any resemblance to the beach movie breaks down completely when the dancers and bikers frottage with one another in an intoxicated frenzy. Separating and distinguishing the biker film from the beach movies were part of a design of the marketing but also part of a wider breakdown in cinema culture that had for years been defined by mainstream filmmakers’ attempts to appeal to a putative universal audience. Los Angeles Times entertainment editor Charles Champlin gave voice to this state of affairs when he reported on the incongruous double-billing of Devil’s Angels with Africa Texas Style. The latter, “heavy on color and action and empty of sex in any perspiring adult sense,” was clearly family fare, even when advertised as a “busty, lusty romp.” The former “was anything but all-family fare.” The exhibitor had decided that the biker film would sell tickets; the adventure film wouldn’t. “It’s becoming an axiom in some film circles that family pictures don’t play like they used to, maybe because of the inroads of kiddie television, maybe because family fare has become synonymous with pictures so sweet they’re unsafe for a diabetic to watch.” Champlin ended his review with the satirical line that he was off to see a double bill at the Death Valley Bijou of Snow White and Night Games (Mai Zetterling’s permissive picture that was the sensation at the 1966 Venice Film Festival).95 To many film critics, the corruption of the innocent heralded by the outlaw biker picture now seemed complete.

2

Getting Out of Town The Cycle Unfolds And you’ll never hear surf music again . . . —Jimi Hendrix, “Third Stone from the Sun” (1967)

Mobility, as it related to production, cycles and trends, and exhibition and consumption, was the defining aspect of the period’s film culture. From the end of the studio system to before the advent of direct-to-video film production, scholars Will Straw and Robert Read provide contextual brackets for biker movies and other film cycles and the means to understand the dispersal of film production away from Los Angeles during this period. They present short histories of critically neglected films that deal with the unraveling of generic forms, fixed production locations, and sites of exhibition. Straw examines the cycle of city exposé films of the 1950s; Read considers the carsploitation cycle of the 1970s. The former is “noir after the major studios, prestige stars and canonical directors have left.”1 The latter is a late iteration of films about mobile youths aimed at young people who attend drive-ins. Both histories are about the decentralization of American 59

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filmmaking from Hollywood to regions that subsidize production through local finance deals and state tax incentives that help lower production costs. Tracing the lineage of the city exposé, Straw writes, “Originally the mark of a moral seriousness, they now stand for the obscurity of production conditions, for the move towards regionalist, exploitational film making practices which will continue throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s.”2 Discussing the Senate Kefauver hearings concerning organized crime that inspired the cycle, he explores the “rapid decline to levels of production and prestige which run counter to the monumental, nationally resonant quality of the hearings themselves.” According to Straw, The unfolding of this cycle follows the ongoing decentralization of the Hollywood studio system: many of these films are filmed on location, in midsized cities, and use unknowns or performers of low status . . . This is no longer evidence of the deliberate and reformist semi-documentary turn of the immediate postwar period. Rather, by the time of such films as New Orleans After Dark, it will stand for the resurgence of regional film making practices and marginal distribution and exhibition circuits. Most of these films are about peripheral geographical locations, and their own thematic and industrial obscurity works to block their participation in any generalized, moral panic over organized crime.3

Read’s cycle of films arrives at the end of the process of decline discussed by Straw, where the “topicality of the carsploitation film is not simply the car, the chase, or the crash but a combination of shifts in film production and exhibition; the changing relationship between the American consumer and the production of automobiles; and the astounding, gratuitous destruction of cars.”4 More precisely, these films “incorporated the relationship of regionalism, audience, and automobile.”5 Using Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) as his case study, which has a chase sequence that runs for more than half the film’s length, Read cites the Independent Film Journal, which calls it the “ultimate made-for-drive-in movie.” The film was deemed to be particularly exploitable in western and midwestern areas “where stock car racing has the status that surfing once did on the West Coast.”6 The continuing process of decentralized production and out-of-town exhibition is echoed in Richard Nowell’s account of Crown International’s SoCal drive-in movies; he links a cycle of youth-oriented comedy films to their site of exhibition and the teenage audience’s consumption

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habits. Crown was once again reaching out to mobile youngsters through an endorsement of automobile culture now intertwined with sex, burgers, and marijuana. These films—The Pom Pom Girls (1976), The Van (1977), Malibu Beach (1978), and Van Nuys Blvd (1979)—reached back to the AIP beach movies through shared locations and an emphasis on teenage leisure activities that were seen as essentially harmless and uncontroversial. Nowell draws attention to the films’ exclusion from narratives of grindhouse and drive-in cultures, even though they were strong sellers, because they foreswore the lurid and the sensational. He argues that the films echo and play back the self-image of the audience, of youths in cars, making out, smoking a little weed, and eating junk food.7 The link between the drive-in, its mobile, youthful audience, and the film’s subject matter was first articulated in the cycle of hot rod movies produced between 1956 and 1958. The films’ promise to show a thrilling depiction of everyday teenage activities was harnessed to the rapid proliferation of titles in the cycle. In themselves, and in their production, the films mimicked an accelerating teenage culture. In return, audiences consumed these movies as quickly and as thoughtlessly as they did the latest vogue in hairstyles or fad in pop music. On offer was the promise of tempting, irresistible sensations with built-in obsolescence—effervescent pleasures equivalent to consuming a soda and a burger. Teenage interests provided the subject matter for the hot rod cycle, but it was the site of exhibition—the drive-in—that maximized and shaped its potential for film producers and distributors.8 Nowell makes a necessary corrective to the received notion that drivein exploitation films were essentially one-dimensional in their appeal. This observation needs to be seen in the context of the false-memory syndrome evident in nostalgic accounts of the drive-in experience that scholar David Church investigates.9 Drive-ins, it has been said, have long had to suffer the condescension of the big movie producers and distributors who refused to provide them with first-run features. But as Church reveals, open-top exhibitors were also discouraged from playing these films by distributor demands for a 70 percent return on box office takings for new films, hence the drive-in’s dependence on old studio products and the latest exploitation pictures, which came at a fixed cost. Added to the perception that drive-ins programmed second-rate features, the outdoor theater’s appeal to cost-conscious working-class family audiences further devalued its cultural capital, just as its social worth was undermined by the widespread belief

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that within the semiprivacy of a car’s confines, such locations encouraged libidinous activities, intemperate behavior, underage drinking, and wanton drug consumption. Church argues that “Hollywood films made up a larger amount of drive-in programming than exploitation fans often assume”: “Though some drive-ins would offer special programmes (such as dusk-to-dawn horror shows one night a week or ‘action shows’ during weekends), daily offerings tended to be of mixed appeal. When exploitation films appeared, they were often double-billed with another exploitation film of an adjacent genre, with the resulting programme appealing to different, but overlapping, youth audiences.”10 The carsploitation cycle described by Read and the teenpic films considered by Nowell are an aftereffect of the outlaw motorcycle movie, maintaining the emphasis on mobile youth even as one cycle embraces a more enhanced set of thrilling sensations (the multiple car crashes) and the other avoids such hyperactive spectacles. Both cycles reject the brutality of the biker movie, replacing it with an emphasis on comedy. Another aspect of the drive-in’s disreputable image was the widely held stereotype that its audience was principally rural. Church cites trade press coverage of the films examined by Nowell as typical in evoking this idea: “Made to titillate farm boys in small towns and for fast playoffs at drive-ins” was how the Hollywood Reporter cast the appeal of The Pom Pom Girls.11 In good part, this perception was confirmed by cycles of films principally produced for the drive-in circuit. In order to take advantage of regional film production opportunities, writes Read, “many exploitation film productions were relocated to various regions across the United States, primarily in the South, Southwest, and Midwest, and to communities immediately outside the Los Angeles city limits.”12 Read argues that the films made by these companies “incorporated the relationship of regionalism, audience, and automobile” and played on the “stereotypes of everyday life in the South and Southwest, including regional vernacular and slang, rural poverty, moonshine production, local criminality, government corruption, and most importantly car culture.”13 This shift in sites of production and the location for film narratives was fully rehearsed in the biker cycle as it established its formula and conventions and worked in a limited repertoire of variation and modification. Aside from the three AIP biker pictures—Devil’s Angels, Born Losers, The Glory Stompers—two further motorcycle gang films were released in 1967:

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Hells Angels on Wheels and The Wild Rebels. Both films were from independent producers and distributors: respectively, Fanfare with U.S. Films and Cornet Pictures with Crown International. The five films were given regional releases in this order: 1 2 3 4 5

Devil’s Angels (April) Hells Angels on Wheels (May) Born Losers (August) Wild Rebels (August) The Glory Stompers (November)

When the Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas called out the second AIP biker film, Devil’s Angels, for being trite in its borrowing from The Wild Angels, he was taking part in a critical trope that would run the full length of the cycle. Variety called the film a “carbon copy” in its reuse of sequences from The Wild Angels and The Wild One and suggested it was a “watereddown version of the earlier ‘protest’ film and [was] likely to hasten the end of this particular genre a bit faster than originally planned.” It predicted “a much shorter money run with its protest-type films than [AIP] did with the previously successful comedy-terror and beach features. It maybe that the generation of filmgoers they’re seeking is growing up faster than the people who make their films.”14 The Devil’s Angels was produced by Corman and scripted by one of his regular collaborators, Charles B. Griffith—of Bucket of Blood (1959) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960), to name only two examples. The film earned a first-time credit as director for Daniel Haller, who had led the art department on most of Corman’s Poe adaptations and on a number of AIP beach movies. The film’s story is modeled on The Wild One and The Wild Angels but also owes a debt to media reports about the Hells Angels. John Cassavetes played Cody, leader of the Presidio motorcycle club the Skulls. This band of outlaw cyclists had once been a gang to reckon with. Five years earlier they had been two hundred strong, but now they number no more than thirty. When one of their members is involved in a fatal hit and run, Cody sets the Skulls on the road to search for Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall. Toward the end of the day, they stop at Brookville, which is holding its annual picnic. The small town’s attractions include a funfair, a beauty pageant, and the sheriff, with his head in the stocks, having tomatoes thrown at him by teenage girls in bikinis. The hoodlum cyclists make

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merry on the rides. The town’s elders call them “animals,” “filth,” and “adult delinquents.” One of the beauty contestants, Marianne (Mimsy Farmer) looks longingly at the motorcycles. She accepts an invitation to ride behind an outlaw. Early in the evening, after the bikers have been corralled at the lake shore, she hangs out with the gang. The sheriff, played by Corman regular Leo Gordon, fears Marianne has been raped, and a vigilante committee is formed. Having been escorted out of town, the Skulls return with their confederates, the Stomper motorcycle club, and proceed to sack Brookville. They run riot, bully citizens, tear down flags and decorations, get drunk and high, and generally horse around. Cody, however, has had enough. He tries to get his girlfriend, Lynn (Beverly Adams), to leave with him, but she’s no longer interested in his woebegone search for the Hole in the Wall. Like her equivalent in a good number of films in the cycle, Lynn just wants kicks—a good time. Having lost Lynn and control of the Skulls, Cody removes his colors and, all alone, rides out of town. The sum of Devil’s Angels’ attractions includes the gang’s persecution by the law for terrorizing citizens, being a sexual threat to teenage girls, and, not least, trashing a small town. These spectacles are enhanced by their fulsome involvement in drinking, drugging, and horseplay and embellished by an iconography of antiauthoritarian gestures and symbols. Like the gang’s hangout in The Wild Angels, the clubhouse walls are covered in Nazi emblems and insignia. On the back of a door hangs a large poster of a heavily defaced Brando in The Wild One. The soundtrack by Mike Curb, who was the supervising producer responsible for the majority of AIP biker soundtracks, with performances by Davie Allen and the Arrows, is built on overamplified guitars and manic bongo banging. These are the pieces of the film, shared with other movies and stories of bikers, on which critics based their accusations of repetition and cliché. Collapsing the space between Arizona and Northern California locations, the film opens with riders moving down a dirt track beside a U.S. Air Force junkyard while a gang member drags his hungover self out of the carcass of a jet fighter and onto his bike.15 The scene evokes a correspondence between flyers and bikers, albeit degraded, as does Cassavetes’s costume of leather flyer’s cap and goggles and his rakish white silk scarf. The sequence continues with a montage of cyclists spilling along the roads around Cabrillo Beach, San Pedro, and closes when the riders converge on the club’s hangout on the edge of a desert town. As the gang prepares

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to start out for the Hole in the Wall, they ready themselves in a long line. Cinematographer Richard Moore, who also shot The Wild Angels, poses a thirty-second tracking shot of twenty-nine motorcycles, riders, and their partners. The view of forty or so gang members and girlfriends, the roar of the machines being kick-started and the revving of the engines, creates a marvelous spectacle. This particular scene, and the film as a whole, is immeasurably enhanced by Richard Bruno’s costume designs. He had previously worked on AIP beach movies and would later head the costume and wardrobe departments on the biker films The Savage Seven (1968) and Hell’s Belles (1969). Today he is best known for his contribution to some key films from New Hollywood, including Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Hired Hand (1971), Chinatown (1974), and Heaven Can Wait (1978); for working alongside Martin Scorsese on New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1982), The Color of Money (1986), and Goodfellas (1990); and for his involvement in the gangster movies Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and The Untouchables (1987). For the Devil’s Angels, Bruno raided a costume store. The headgear alone is magnificent, with bikers wearing German military helmets (the coal-bucket-shaped and spiked pickelhaube varieties); wide-brimmed U.S. cavalry hats; Confederate Civil

Cassavetes (third from right) surrounded by a motley crew of bikers.

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War kepis; flying caps and goggles; fur Hussar caps; an unkempt, very large, busby-style Cossack headdress; a French beret; and Davy Crocket hats made from skunk skins. With all the usual Nazi and other military insignia attached to leather, sheepskin, buffalo hides, and denim, the Skulls, in all their raggle-taggle glory, are a sight to behold. As every biker in the film knows, but is unwilling to admit until the pillage of Brookville, the Hole in the Wall doesn’t exist; it is just an idea. But the quest for this mythical place, unknown to lawmakers and peace officers, gives the Skulls’ leader, Cody, an existential distinction. He is no philosopher, but like Brando’s and Fonda’s characters before him, and like many in the cycle to come, it is a distinction that allows the story to find some kind of resolution. The leader must reject the gang on the same grounds that the gang has rejected society. The lived contradiction of being a rebel who obeys the rules of a club, even an outlaw club, is eventually faced. The outlaw will forsake his tribe; left only with his angst, Cody rides off alone to continue his private search for the Hole in the Wall. The New York Times critic called Born Losers, only the fourth biker film to be released, “a trailing catchall of most motorcycle film clichés to date.” He thought the film “gangrenous.” His colleague at the Daily News ranked the film as an amateur effort, “like watching a high school production. Some recite their lines, others overact.” Furthermore, “the dialogue is trite, at times blunt. Editing interrupts continuity in spots without eliminating superfluous shots that reveal the mechanics of the scene.”16 Repetitious, poorly made, and morally putrescent: with few exceptions, this would be the critical stance toward the cycle. The identification of the films as a cycle is as much a critical construction as it is a fact of production, distribution, and exhibition. Film scholar Zoe Wallin argues persuasively that cycles are “constructed not only through the production methods that were informed by prior features and distributors’ calculations, but in the act of articulation that identifies the individual pictures as part of a larger body of films.”17 Each new biker film elicited more or less the same (hopeful) pronouncement that “the cycle is over. The law of diminishing returns has been ratified.” This is what Charles Champlin wrote in his review of the sixth biker picture to be released, The Glory Stompers. Echoing his Los Angeles Times colleague, Kevin Thomas, he suggested that “formula has taken over from immediacy, and you get that curious but not unfamiliar feeling of being in the presence of a film based not on life but on other films.”18

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One of the two non-AIP biker films, Hells Angels on Wheels, met a familiar critical fate: “The script . . . consists of the now-expected attributes of the cycling syndrome—much footage on cycle riding, mass raids on service stations and small towns, the conflict with police and town people and through it all, fights, sex and fights. The abrupt ending, on an illogical note of violence, gives the impression that the script and budget both gave up at the same time.”19 Reviewing Devil’s Angels and Riot on Sunset Strip as a double bill, Variety reported that the former “follows in the wake of such profitable ventures as Wild Angels and Hells Angels on Wheels and all the other films dealing with the repulsive characters that have populated such affairs, this one differing from the others only in that it presents a new set of faces, a couple of new names for the gangs, and just to start things off with a bang, a hit and run fatal accident.” Skulls and Stompers “try to take apart one of those small towns that seemingly always provide the setting for these affairs . . . Trouble is neither of these pictures are as shocking or as sensational—or even erotic—as their first prototypes used to be. On the other hand, maybe we’re getting used to motorcycle desperadoes and flaming youth, and they’re becoming a bore.”20 Fanfare Film Productions, with producer Joe Solomon, followed up Hells Angels on Wheels with Angels from Hell. AIP picked up distribution. Hells Angels president Sonny Barger was held over by Solomon as a consultant on the film, but Solomon dropped Barger’s gang for the Madcaps motorcycle club, Bakersfield. Barger’s Angels had beat up some of the Madcaps in a bar scene in the earlier film. Jack Starrett also stuck around, reassuming the character of Police Sergeant Bingham, now promoted to captain. Stu Phillips again directed the music. Carried over from the supporting cast of The Glory Stompers was Saundra Gayle, who in that picture played a head-to-toe leather-clad mama with raven-black hair. In Angels from Hell, she rides behind the gang’s vice president, Smiley (Ted Markham). Critic for the New York Post Frances Herridge noted the continuities, complaining that the only good thing about the film is that it keeps “a lot of actors employed. They are the same cats who appear in most of these motor-cycle gang sagas . . . The ingredients are mostly the same—violence, drinking, loose sex and lots of sadism.”21 With fewer than half a dozen biker films on release, Angels from Hell is remarkably self-reflective, and not only in its casting choices, which carry suggestions of seriality. In an undermotivated scene, the Madcaps ride to

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Hollywood to reconnect with an old member who is now a successful film actor. They catch the attention of his producer, Saul Joseph (no doubt a stand-in for Joe Solomon), who declares he has a “great idea—why don’t I make a motorcycle picture?” He asks his assistant to “find out what these motorcycle gangs are all about. You know the sex, the orgies, all that stuff.” He tells her to “capture some of that dialogue we hear here.” The producer promises to use some of the gang members in his next picture. While Angels from Hell is clearly intent to repeat elements that its producers felt contributed to the success of Hells Angels on Wheels and the other films in the cycle, it also looks to provide novelty. The cavalcade of bikers in the opening sequences of Hells Angels on Wheels is repeated in Angels on Wheels, but the procession of bikers is here realized in the particularly novel way of shooting from the rear of the line, facing the oncoming cyclists, rather than from the front and side. The camera car then accelerates forward to reveal, two by two, the whole pack. Alongside the display of the cycle’s regular novelties of bikes and stunts are the now conventional scenes in bars, clubhouses, and garages; confrontations with the law; drugging and drinking; horseplay; fights; and libertarian sexual congress. What shifts is the featured music that accompanies these scenes. Stu Phillips dropped the overamplified fuzz guitar motif used in the 1967 movies and replaced it with a psychedelicized soundtrack, which features the vocal groups Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the Lollipop Shoppe. In keeping with this shift, the film has a key scene where the bikers mix with a community of hippies, who resemble strolling medieval minstrels. To their peril, the hippies, who are also hassled by “the man” for being different, mistake the Madcaps for fellow travelers. The leader of the Madcaps, Mike (Tom Stern), has returned from fighting in Vietnam. In a pretitle sequence, he aids a black biker who is being beaten by two barroom racists. While no doubt showing that Mike sides with the underdog and against bigotry, he plays the Samaritan because the victim is a member of an outlaw motorcycle club, Soul 7. Being a onepercenter is more important to Mike than race. He may be a decorated veteran, but his loyalty is to the brotherhood of bikers, not his country. When one of the Madcaps is killed, Mike plans to use the publicity he will generate for the funeral as a means to attract and recruit an army of a thousand bikers. His megalomaniacal vision is short-lived when he is shotgunned from his bike by a policeman. Superimposed over the image of his prone body is the line “‘Come now, and let us reason together.’ Isiah 1, 18.” It is an

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empty homily; the film has ably demonstrated that there can be no coming together, either with bikers or between bikers. The box office returns for the first tranche of biker films not only motivated modestly financed independents, such as Fanfare, to return to the topic, but they also persuaded underfinanced producers to get on the bandwagon. With distribution from Thunderbird International Pictures, David L. Hewitt was the producer behind American General Pictures and Borealis Enterprises, which were responsible for the release early in 1968 of Hells Chosen Few. Hewitt specialized in ultra-low-budget titles; Wizard of Mars (1964), Psycho a Go-Go (1965), and Journey to the Centre of Time (1967) are among his credits as producer. His filmography barely gets into double figures. Trans-International Films released Savages from Hell, a.k.a. Big Enough n’ Old Enough, in the spring of 1968, which was one of twentysix titles the company distributed between 1961 and 1974. The majority of their releases were imported low-cost European films. Producer K. Gordon Murray was the man behind the company. The director was Joseph Prieto, who had only one previous credit, Shanty Tramp (1967), with Murray again producing. Both Savages and Tramp make use of motorcycle gangs as a topical threat, especially sexual, in a fairly perfunctory manner. Hells Chosen Few is fully focused on a bike gang, but it too uses the outlaws as more or less topical motifs emptied of meaning beyond their emblematic status. The film opens with a troop of cyclists riding along U.S. 101 South on their annual run. The local police expect four hundred outlaws to show up and are corralling them at the north end of a beach. The town’s sheriff is a drunk who accidentally kills his daughter’s boyfriend. He blames the outlaws and arrests their leader, Willie (Gary Kent). The outlaw’s long-estranged brother, Jo ( Jody Daniels), is a marine flyer and Vietnam veteran who joins Hells Chosen Few so he can find the killer. Once the setup is in place, most of the film plays out in a bar decorated with huge Nazi flags. Here the bikers expostulate on the murder, threaten one another, dance to the jukebox, drink and carouse, and undergo, offscreen, the initiation of a new mama. Jo falls for Sharon (Kelly Ross), his brother’s woman and, aside from a little lovemaking, does no more than talk and hang around waiting for the pieces to fall into place. There’s a short diversion to an amusement park, where the outlaws fool around on the rides and Jo gets into a fight. The sheriff ’s drunkenness leads to his daughter eventually calling Jo and telling him the truth of what happened. Willie is released and subsequently rapes Sharon. At the closed amusement

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park, Jo stalks Willie and then strangles him with a drive chain. The film ends with Jo behind bars and the casket with Willie’s body being taken from the morgue by outlaw biker pallbearers, none of whom were featured earlier in the film. “Hells Chosen Few, they live fast, die young and nobody cries” is the tagline used in the film’s trailer. Hiding behind its clichés, the film’s existence was recorded by the trade press only in the published playlists of regional drive-ins. It was not reviewed in either Variety or Boxoffice. It is a film full of poses and gestures that signify nothing more than its own construct as a series of emblematic images and sequences—bikers go on annual runs and terrorize small towns, especially by being sexual threats. Hassled by the law, they like to fight, drink, take drugs, and carry out initiation rites, which include free sex. Their denim jackets, clubhouses, and bars are decorated with Nazi symbols, which are also emptied of meaning. Reputedly, the film was fashioned out of two short films Hewitt had acquired: Diary of a Teenage Bride and Outlaw Bikers, a 16-mm movie shot by outsider filmmaker and exploitation movie bit-part player Titus Moody.22 Hewitt revisited the outlaw biker movie, which he mixed with a bootlegging theme, in 1970 with The Girls from Thunder Strip. That film took him four years to complete.23 The illustrations for The Angry Breed’s promotional materials featured caricatures of a surly looking young couple framed by hippies with “Make Love Not War” placards, a bongo-bashing beatnik, a couple making out on a beach, and a large posse of outlaw bikers who run down the poster’s lefthand side. In marketing terms, The Angry Breed belongs squarely within the biker cycle, but its content is something else entirely. The motorcycle gang in the film is only three in number and are led by a Hollywood actor with a penchant for dressing up in Nazi-style uniforms and conducting LSD-laced masque balls, which reverberate to the sound of Davie Allan’s overdriven fuzz guitar. Though benefiting from a larger budget than Hells Chosen Few or Savages from Hell and featuring a fading Hollywood B-list star, Jan Sterling, the film looks undercapitalized, thrown together quickly, and rushed through postproduction. Variety reported that “its destiny is the bottom rung position on action-double bills. It has the look of a mismatch between an out and out sexploitation item and the type of actioner that has proven such a successful formula for American International. But comparison with the latter ends with the statement. For while the AIP sex, youth, and violence

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combination has been, for the most part, brought off with strong technical polish and generally credible performances, Breed in reaching for the same effects winds up as a parody.”24 The Angry Breed was produced by the Beverly Hills-based Commonwealth United Corporation, a real estate holding firm that had diversified into picture production less than a year before the film’s release. In 1969, the company promoted a confident front by putting itself into contention to buy Warner Bros.–Seven Arts.25 The bid was pure hyperbole. After The Angry Breed had been in circulation for a little over a year, its producer, writer, and director, David Commons, took his erstwhile partners to court. He demanded $5 million in damages from Commonwealth United over failing to abide by an agreement involving the film’s sale and distribution.26 The dispute was obviously resolved because in March Variety reported that he had sold his share in the film to Commonwealth, which was then peddling it to TV in seventy markets.27 For the most part, Commonwealth distributed European sexploitation pictures, like Jess Franco’s women-inprison drama 99 Women (1969), as well as nondescript British movies. In December 1969, it announced losses of $22.7 million, and in April 1970, AIP was reported to be taking over the company’s distribution, which would include Ringo Starr’s The Magic Christian and Peter Ustinov’s Viva Max.28 The Hellcats was produced by Gemini-American Productions, which was a front formed by the film’s director, Robert F. Slatzer, and its producer, Anthony Cardoza, who managed only two films between them. Distribution was by Crown International, which had earlier handled The Wild Rebels. The tie-up gave The Hellcats the best access to markets of all of the bucket-shop productions released in 1968. As with Hells Chosen Few, the film burns up screen time with long, dragged-out scenes inside a clubhouse. This hangout appears to have been constructed out of bed linen for walls, old furniture pieces salvaged from a scrapyard, a jukebox, and numerous rock and pop-culture posters. Unlike Hells Chosen Few, the music is barely in sync with the dancing and cavorting, which is far more chaste in its abandon. When timeout is called on the club scene, the party just reconvenes in a park and continues on its protracted way. Only the final confrontation on and around the barges and tugboats in the Port of Long Beach displays any visual imagination and creativity. The review of the film in the Los Angeles Times called it a “mindless low-budget quickie” that “resembles nothing so much as an old Republic serial (the

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washed-out print even has the Cinecolor look of old Roy Rogers westerns).”29 Variety, in its review, published more than a year after the film’s initial release, called it “dull and extremely dated . . . There seems to be at least 30 minutes of cycling and racing while the plot is minimal.”30 Working at the lowest end of the independent production ladder, the four pictures from outlier filmmakers—Hells Chosen Few, Savages from Hell, The Hellcats, and The Angry Breed—were barely visible when first released and today continue to exist only to add numbers to outlaw biker filmographies and catalog material for purveyors of public-domain films, like Something Weird Video. One of the few reviews for Savages from Hell came two years after its initial release, playing in multiples with Angels Die Hard. In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas dismissed the headliner as “tiresome with its familiar bikers versus rednecks plot” and praised the supporting feature as a “West Side Story of the bikers, a veritable motorcycle opera.” He conceded its low production values but wrote, “To put it down for its crudity and amateurishness is to miss its point as a piece of vigorous primitive art.”31 Thomas was very much a lone voice in his interest in such oddities. He served as the Los Angeles Times film critic from 1962 to 2005, making him the longest-running reviewer on a major American newspaper. His work has been neither collected nor anthologized, and what reputation he does have is in recognition of the fact that he was relentlessly upbeat in his critiques. A quantitative analysis of 123 reviews published between 1997 and 2001 reveals that 90 of them were positive, a return that far outweighs his peers.32 Savages from Hell and the like are punk films trying to turn a trick, for the most part held in low standing and esteem, but skanky or not, they are a testament to a producer’s belief in the saleability of the outlaw biker movie. Ill-conceived and poorly executed, Rebel Rousers was cowritten, produced, and directed in 1967 by Martin B. Cohen, Bruce Dern’s and Diane Ladd’s manager. Cinematography is by Laszlo Kovacs (billed as Leslie Kouvacs). An exceptionally strong supporting cast, including Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nicholson, and Lou Procopio (also in The Wild Angels) are behind star Cameron Mitchell and costars Dern and Ladd. The film was prepared on the basis of exploiting whatever notoriety the costars had garnered from appearing in The Wild Angels. Reusing the theme from Born Losers of an indifferent public, Rebel Rousers replaces girls as victims with a middle-aged couple. Whether in the decrepit desert town of Chloride, Arizona, or on a Southern California beach, its key scenes are so haplessly

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directed and the characters and story are so woefully underdeveloped that the film sat on the shelf unsold until 1970. Nicholson’s star by then was in the ascendant with Easy Rider, and Rebel Rousers could be peddled on his reputation alone.33 Born Losers marketing made the claim that it is “more than a tough, hard-hitting drama of outlaw motorcycle gangs and their depredations against society. It is authentic.” Its authenticity is based on the research data the filmmakers collected on “cycle gangs and other renegades” and from which the “big question emerges, ‘Who is really responsible?’”34 Whatever its failings, Born Losers’ producers had conviction. Rebel Rousers made no attempt to answer the question; it didn’t even bother to frame it. The best thing about the picture is Nicholson’s striped prison pants. After the misfire of Rebel Rousers, Dern returned to the biker picture with The Cycle Savages, once again wearing his Belstaff motorcycle jacket and a psychotic disposition. The picture was paired on its New York release with another biker film, Hell’s Belles, which one critic called “a trashy double bill at Showcase Theaters. They add up to three hours of painful tedium.”35 Mike Curb provided the music, and he also stepped up as executive producer, alongside Casey Kasem. The two had previously been credited as associate producers on The Glory Stompers. The executive producer on that movie was Maurice Smith; on The Cycle Savages, he too gets a promotion and is now the producer. The production values are not much better than in Dern’s previous effort or those displayed in The Glory Stompers. There are relatively few location scenes and little motorcycle action. The majority of screen time is taken up in a bar, two apartment rooms, adjacent hallways, and the outlaw bikers’ clubhouse. Filmed on soundstages, the walls noticeably shake when doors are closed or when, during a fight sequence, a stuntman slams into the scenery. Continuity in screen direction and prop placement is often poor. The opening sequence of the bikers horsing around outside a diner was shot silently, and the overdubbed sound is wildly out of sync. Familiar bit-part actors make an appearance, including Walter Robles (Savage Seven), Gary Littlejohn, Mick Mehas (who sports the club colors he wore in Hells Chosen Few), and Randee Lee, a.k.a. Randee Lynne Jensen, credited as “One of the Girls,” who would appear in around a dozen biker pictures. Throughout the cycle, little attention is given to developing secondary characters. Gang members are used as if they were part of a chorus, especially the women, who act as obliging audiences for the tomfoolery.

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The reusing of extras from film to film provides continuity through familiarity, suggesting the outlaw gang has a cohesion that individual films no longer feel obliged to develop or build. Dern’s character is the sole significant figure in his gang; the rest of the hoodlums only exist to give his actions meaning. Other than their appearance, all that is required from them is to respond to Dern with a gesture, a look, or a line of dialogue. In and of themselves, they are no more than a cipher for the collective image of outlaw bikers across the many films that make up the cycle. Chris Robinson plays the Hungarian émigré artist Romko, whose sketches of the outlaws arouse the ire of their leader, Keeg (Dern). He develops an obsessive and psychotic urge to mangle Romko’s hands, which he plans while trying to secure prostitutes for his pimp brother, played by Kasem. Keeg threatens and bullies the sister of one of his brother’s whores, Lea (Melody Patterson), ordering her to get close to Romko. Inevitably, she and Romko fall in love, but Keeg’s hold over her causes problems. At the center of the film is the depiction of the gang rape of Janie, a young woman brought to the club with the idea of making her into a prostitute. Janie’s terror and pain are palpable. She struggles hopelessly against the assault. From Janie’s point of view, slightly out of focus, one leering biker’s face after another moves in on her. Her debasement is watched with pleasure by the gang’s female members. The horror of Janie’s ordeal is juxtaposed by the gentle, consensual lovemaking between Romko and Lea. Earlier films in the cycle had nearly all featured rape as a threat or act, but rape had rarely been shown; it took place offscreen or was hidden by an ellipsis. Cycle Savages lacks the kind of feisty female character that had hitherto been a mainstay of AIP’s biker films, and with its failure to offer competing attractions, such as a compelling narrative, views of motorcycle cavalcades, rowdy behavior, stunt riding, or appealing urban or rural locations, the rape becomes the film’s centerpiece and focus. Though never simply incidental or peripheral, rape scenarios in the early films of the cycle are mechanical and perfunctory, a narrative prerequisite, but in Cycle Savages, it is all that is on offer. One critic wrote that the picture was one of the “season’s most witless assaults on both credibility and the ears and eyes.”36 Another dismissed Hell’s Belles for being trite but suggested it is “at least bearable compared with Cycle Savages. Not content with mere bloody brawls and motorcycle racing, the producer adds sadism, gang bangs, skin

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Bruce Dern (center) looks on approvingly as the biker girls show their enjoyment of the gang rape in Cycle Savages.

exposure, acid, torture and the white slave trade—all thrown into a ridiculously bad script with acting almost as inept.”37 With Fanfare following up Hells Angels on Wheels with Angels from Hell, Richard Rush, the former’s director, moved on to The Savage Seven. Produced by Dick Clark Enterprises and distributed by AIP, the film reunited Rush with Adam Roarke and one of his sidekicks, Richard Anders, who again played a character called “Bull.” Laszlo Kovacs returned behind the camera, Mike Curb once more handled the music, and sound was back with Leroy Robbins. Production management was provided by Jack Bohrer, who hadn’t worked on Wheels but had been a long-standing Corman confederate and had helped helm The Wild Angels and Devil’s Angels. Like Casey Kasem, producer of The Glory Stompers and Cycle Savages, Dick Clark was a television and radio personality who had a long and meaningful connection with broadcasting aimed at the youth market. Their combined three-film intervention into the biker cycle suggests they saw it as another profitable way of accessing teenage consumers. Like Angels from Hell, The Savage Seven showed a high degree of generic self-awareness, though less about its status as an outlaw biker film and more about an inheritance it drew from the western. The title is a distorted echo of The Magnificent Seven (1960). The western motif is carried into the opening panning shot of the Mojave Desert, which stalls when a

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screaming Indian brave leaps into the frame. A scuffle follows with another brave. This is not a life-or-death struggle but two young Native Americans horsing around after work. They are field hands, living hand to mouth in a beat-up shantytown built beside railway tracks. They and their kinfolk are being bullied and exploited by Fillmore (Mel Berger), an obese businessman who wants to flatten their homes and take their land. Into this troubled spot ride a group of outlaw motorcyclists who, in their rough and rowdy ways, turn up the heat to boiling point. Critic Kevin Thomas called it “the first picture protesting the plight of the modern American Indian to come out of Hollywood.”38 On the other hand, none of this was seen by the reviewer for Variety, who thought the “proceedings have no point.”39 The New York Times wrote that it was “completely cheap in its primitive unenquiring, kick-’em-in-the-groin sensationalism, too serious to be lusty and too one note to be interesting.”40 Initially, the gang behaves, he wrote, “like members of the domestic Peace Corps protecting the poor deprived Indians from those nasty exploiters. But movies of social protest do not make-um wampam at the box office. So much for message. Instead, picture wind up in rousing massacre. Urg!”41 Time magazine thought it was just a contemptible exercise in camp: “Disarmed, audiences are presumably free to enjoy the movie in the same way they appreciate the sheer ghastliness of Mrs Miller’s wobbly warbling or the fruity falsetto of Tiny Tim.”42 Playing with ambivalent loyalties, much like The Magnificent Seven, it is unclear if the bikers will side with the townspeople or with their oppressors. The outlaws’ leader, Kisum (Roarke), takes a shine to Marie Little Hawk ( Joanna Frank), who looks a good deal like Cher. Standing between him and her is Johnnie Little Hawk, her brother, played by blue-eyed Robert Walker Jr. Marie is attracted to Kisum’s rugged nature and good looks and equally repulsed by his uncouth and brutish manners. His desire for her is tempered by not knowing how to respond to her innocent, gentle ways. And so, providing romantic intrigue in the classical manner, they move toward and away from each other. “Who are the savages?” asks the film. Is it the shantytown Indians, the outlaw bikers, or the fat capitalist and his minions? The townspeople and the bikers self-consciously play out the roles of cowboys and Indians, though the parts are reversed at the climax, when the Indians set up barricades around their small town while the bikers, some sporting children’s Indian headdresses and war paint, appear on the horizon in a long line, looking down on their foes. The imagery parodies countless westerns. The

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long-deferred confrontation has been generated by the rape and murder of a young girl and the crucifixion of her suspected abuser, “Bull.” The outlaws descend on the town, and a long sequence of stunt jumps and crashes through walls built of cardboard boxes follow. Molotov cocktails and dynamite add fire and bang to the maelstrom. Reshaping the western brought novelty to the film even when the trope of rape is again used as the key threat the bikers carry before them whenever they enter a town. The return of Roarke to a similar role he had in Hells Angels on Wheels and the presence of actors John Garwood, Richard Anders, and Gary Littlejohn, who had played alongside him in Wheels, builds continuity. These actors are joined by bit-part players from other biker movies, such as Gary Kent, who had a featured role in Hells Chosen Few. Many of these performers double as stuntmen, Robert Tessier being a key figure here. In Littlejohn’s case, he not only acted and did stunts, but he also designed and provided the motorcycles. New faces were an attraction in themselves, and in keeping with the casting of the children of Hollywood royalty (Nancy Sinatra and Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels, Jody McCrea in Glory Stompers, and William Wellman Jr. in Born Losers), parts were given to novices Robert Walker Jr., son of Jennifer Jones and the actor who starred in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and Larry Bishop, son of Rat Packer Joey Bishop. The film’s pressbook makes a feature of the actors’ parentage. By being set wholly within a desert location, The Savage Seven breaks with previous films in the cycle and sets up a new norm. The pattern had been to collapse disparate locations as if they were somehow contiguous— The Wild Angels with Los Angeles and Desert Palm; Devil’s Angels with Patagonia, Arizona, and San Pedro, California; and Rebel Rousers with Chloride, Arizona, and Paradise Cove, Malibu. There are no urban, industrial, or harbor sites, no coastal views, no rivers or lakesides, and no beaches in The Savage Seven. While critics dismissed films in the cycle for being repetitious (“By now one would think the vroom would have spun out of the cycle of outlaw motorcycle gang movies, but each week seems to bring another entry”43), lacking intrinsic interest (“a routine cycle gang bang-em-up, with no special production values or story points”44), or being just plain boring (“Angels from a Trite Satire?”45), they still found the time to pause for thought. Discussing Angels from Hell with its Bakersfield locations, the Hollywood Reporter highlighted director Bruce Kessler’s contribution. Noting that he

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had learned his trade working second unit for Howard Hawks and shooting the chase sequences for Bonnie and Clyde, the reviewer wrote, “While the film has a great sense of movement, Kessler eschews the trend to handheld runabout, his apprenticeship with veterans like Hawks evident in his use of a stationary camera, action directed for the frame in angles which are consistently appropriate to character relationship and coverage.”46 Discussing The Glory Stompers, the same critic wrote, “The fourth release in AIP’s chopper cycle, is remarkable as it is the least sado-masochistic . . . Mario Tossi may or may not be a good cinematographer. His work here is simply nervous. The locations, apparently in and around the San Bernardino mountains, are beautiful and impressive.”47 This practice of picking out the locations for praise even when the critic dislikes just about everything else in the movie is echoed in Film Quarterly’s review of The Wild Angels: “Motorcycle material is always beautiful to watch, and on the big screen it takes on some of the sweeping quality we love in westerns.”48 Noting and commenting on the setting became a regular feature in press reviews of films in the cycle, and in particular Laszlo Kovacs cinematography was given generous coverage: “The most depressing thing about [Hells Angels on Wheels] the latest adventure of the Rover Boys is that first-rate color camerawork was thrown away on such trivia. Either cameraman Leslie Kovacs is a still undiscovered film talent or he’s careless about where he points his lens. Beyond the cinematography, which even manages to give over-photographed California highways a new and interesting look, there’s little to recommend.”49 Once again, “Rush has worked with the equally spontaneous, highly gifted cameraman Laszlo Kovacs. Much of the time he keeps in very close to the actors, virtually forcing us to understand them as they perform with conviction.”50 While The Savage Seven left behind beach locations, its soundtrack maintained an unsteady connection to surf music in Mike Curb’s score, here without the guitar fuzz of Davie Allan, but still riding a similar wave. The anachronistic nature of Curb’s contribution is underscored by the use of rock supergroup Cream and, new arrivals on the scene Iron Butterfly. Cream’s “Anyone for Tennis (Theme from The Savage Seven)” is a slice of whimsical British psychedelia. Considering the power trio’s penchant for extended heavy blues jams, it’s a weird choice, especially given its placement within the film, where it is used to underscore motorcycles being thrown around the desert shantytown. More appropriate to this kind of scenario are the two tracks from Iron Butterfly, both sourced from their

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1968 debut album, Heavy. The use of top-drawer rock acts on a soundtrack foreshadows those pulled together in the following year for Easy Rider. Placing the biker picture within a broad cinematic approach to film production that caters to an automobile culture is evident in the West Coast double-billing of the Naked Angels with Pit Stop. Both films were backed financially by Roger Corman, with marketing using corresponding illustrations of speeding vehicles and sexualized images of women. Naked Angels was produced at a cost of around $120,000 and shot on location in Nevada over four-and-a-half weeks during a “fiesta of acid, grass, hash, DMT, [and] speed,” according to its twenty-four-year-old producer, David R. Dawdy, former managing editor of the underground Los Angeles Free Press.51 Apart from two of the lead roles, taken by Richard Rust and Jennifer Gan, actors with solid CVs, the cast and crew were composed of debutantes to feature filmmaking, with many recruited from UCLA film classes, including Dawdy and twenty-three-year-old writer-director Bruce Clark.52 “Practically the whole cinema student corps bopped out to Randsburg, Nevada to extra it up for the big fightout scene,” wrote Nat Freedland in his Los Angeles Free Press column.53 Clearly showing the limits of its budget and talent, the film is roughhewn, “notable primarily,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, “in that its screen Angels are scruffier and more similar to the real animals than some of the prettified bike jockeys who have ridden the vogue.”54 Nevertheless, the filmmakers work with the inherited tropes of the biker movie in often novel and effective ways. The story is as stripped back as any in the cycle; the gang’s clubhouse in a deconsecrated church sets the scene. Following a beating given to him by Las Vegas motorcycle hoodlums, Mother (Michael Greene), a one-percenter, returns to his LA club after a long period of hospitalization. In his absence, Fingers (Rust) has assumed leadership and taken up with Mother’s woman, Marlene (Gan). Reclaiming the president’s colors and Marlene from Fingers, Mother sets about planning a raid on the Vegas outlaws. After a night cruising the strip, the bikers head into the Mojave Desert in search of an abandoned mine used by their foes for a hideout. In the harsh desert environment, pushed and cajoled by Mother, the gang begins to splinter. Before long, Mother is ousted from the pack, and Marlene is reunited with Fingers. Making their separate ways to the mine, the gang and Mother battle the heat and dust. Their common goal of a rumble with the Vegas mob brings them together again, but it is only a temporary rapprochement. The film ends with adversaries vanquished and,

An Italian poster for Naked Angels.

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subsequently, Fingers and Mother having fought each other to a standstill. With his opponent the worst for wear, Mother mounts his bike and rides off alone. Aside from the elemental struggle with the pitiless desert, the narrative drive of the film depends on a dynamic built on the rivalry between Mother and Fingers over Marlene. The triangular relationship is deftly handled and traced with some subtlety. Fingers freely gives Marlene up on Mother’s return, but his desire for her is barely suppressed. For her part, Marlene initially displays an acceptance of the order of things, but her true feelings are just as clearly with Fingers. When another woman makes herself available, Mother shows indifference toward Marlene. Holding only a brutish disregard for her, an attitude straight out of the Mickey Spillane school of romance, he belittles and degrades her. During a bout of animalistic lovemaking in a barn, he slaps Marlene as often as he kisses her. Fingers keeps his cool, fealty to the biker brotherhood seemingly more important than whatever flame he might hold for Marlene. The trial the club faces in the desert tests their loyalty to Mother, but it is Marlene who speaks out against his leadership: “Do you think you can put me on and throw me off like your clothes? You’re wrong . . .” In a fit of pique, Mother turns her out. She now belongs to no one and everyone. He demands the Angels take her, but they refuse his orders and stand united against him. Fingers resumes control and reclaims Marlene and the president’s colors. In beat-up clothes and filthy underwear, the women in their deportment and posturing appear little different from the men. Gone is the modish attire that biker girls wore in earlier examples; in Naked Angels, they look and act like punk sisters. During an evening of getting high and dancing around a campfire, the biker women strip off their clothes. One of them has a tattoo on her buttock: “Property of the Angels.” The image is repeated in the illustrations used in the film’s marketing. The women are treated with utter disrespect, objectified, and owned; the film conforms to the cycle’s heavy-handed and casual misogyny. Yet in that moment when Marlene alone speaks out against Mother, followed by the Angels’ refusal to punish her, the film takes a turn away from the pack mentality common elsewhere. Once again showing a greater sensitivity than his fellow critics to the appeal of the biker movie, Kevin Thomas wrote, “Hungry and thirsty and running out of gas, the gang finds itself experiencing an unprecedented desire for civilization and its amenities. When the feisty Greene’s girl

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A publicity still of a Death Valley standoff between Greene (third from left) and Rust (third from right) and the rest of the sandblasted bike gang in Naked Angels.

defies him, protesting the idea of leaving behind the disabled bike of one of the Angels, Greene finds it impossible to persuade his men to rape her in retaliation, something that might have occurred had civilization been in closer proximity to bolster the illusion of toughness.”55 As usual, Variety was less generous in its appraisal, writing that the director, Bruce, “probably figured that violence and sex were the only two ingredients necessary to break this market. It had both and very little more, with unpleasant characters and virtually no story.”56 Discussing how movie outlaw motorcyclists avoid causing havoc in middle-class suburbs, which might have best helped define their alienation, and instead confine their violent forays “to isolated small towns, remote beaches and backwoods resorts,” film scholar Martin Rubin writes, Biker films are rarely, if ever, set anywhere near the “new frontier” of postwar suburbia (or its later off-shoot, urban gentrification). Instead, they gravitate toward the “old frontier” of the western desert—a frontier now aged and emptied out. Civilisation isn’t at contest here; it has moved on, leaving behind a desiccated landscape of zero-growth communities, scattered truck

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By 1969, the biker girl doing the jerk in a black bra was no longer center stage in party scenes and had been replaced by topless or fully naked dancers in campfire scenes, as in this publicity still for Naked Angels.

stops, crumbling adobe ruins, dusty ghost towns, rusting debris, scrubby arroyos and worked out mines. This landscape has more in common with the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Road Warrior-style science-fiction films than the pregnant promise of the western frontier, not to mention the real battlegrounds, whether domestic or foreign, of the late 1960s.57

The “left behind” spaces discussed by Rubin are there in The Savage Seven, foremost in the Indian shantytown that runs beside the railroad track, and are just as visible in Naked Angels. After a stuttering start, with a poorly lit and composed scene of Mother stealing a motorbike, the film picks up confidence when the Angels reach Las Vegas after nightfall. The scenes along the neon-lit strip are superbly photographed and edited, with additional visual interest provided by mixing still photographs with moving images of the bikers having fun on the city’s sidewalks and rooftops. Over an hour of the film’s eighty-threeminute running time is taken up by desert locations. As the Angels make their hard-fought way toward the mining camp, the few desert inhabitants

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they encounter—a gas station attendant, a holy roller, and a grizzled prospector—are all in some way insane. The desert is littered with civilization’s detritus, car wrecks, and domestic sanitary ware. This dystopic view of an abandoned and inhospitable world provides a natural habitat for the Angels even as it proves to be as unwelcoming toward them as any suburb. As they move off the highways and onto the backtracks, the desert dust encloses them. The Angels merge into the landscape rather than moving through it. The heat and exhaustion take their toll, and a dissembling of the senses follows, indicated by the use of lens flares, fisheye opticals, rapid pulling of focus, violent zooms, Dutch angles, and the like, which after The Trip and Psych-Out, and confirmed by Easy Rider, are the period’s formal tropes used to depict mental disarray. In Mother’s hallucinations, he imagines the Angels as gunfighters in a saloon and their women as dance hall girls. The prospector tells stories of Wyatt Earp, and Mother, in turn, talks in similar mythical terms of the Bass Lake runs. Among the abandoned mine buildings and structures, which the bikers race through as if in an amusement park, the myth of the West turns into a meaningless rumble with the Las Vegas gang. To underscore its somewhat obscure existential theme, the film finishes on salt flats, where the bikers’ travails are made to seem even more insignificant and inconsequential in the dry vastness of the desert. Joan Didion writes that many of the biker films are “extraordinarily beautiful in their instinct for the real look of the American West, for the faded banners fluttering over abandoned gas stations and the bleached streets of desert towns.”58 The Naked Angels catches this atrophy as well as any other film and better than most.59 Naked Angels displays a self-reflexivity of the kind not previously seen in the cycle, less parodic than that used in Angels from Hell, which involved a Hollywood producer wanting to make an outlaw biker picture. Here it takes a modernist turn akin to a nouvelle vague sensibility or, if one is being a little less generous, bucket-shop Brecht fostered in film school. (Note also the homage in the film’s title to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.) During the Angels’ cruise along the neon-lit Las Vegas strip, they pass in front of a series of theater marquees advertising a range of exploitation movies. With Marlene on the back of his bike, Mother looks at the passing attractions. The film cuts to show them superimposed over an image of the theaters with the word “GORE” highlighted. Self-consciously, the movie sets itself within its natural exhibition context. The Hollywood Reporter

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thought this sequence was particularly notable: “Played in silhouette against famous walls of neon and mazdas, and intercut with still photos of the gang’s revels, are among the best in the film, with the gang taking over casino canyon thoroughfares.”60 Later in the movie, Mother—exhausted, out of gas, and desperate for water—hallucinates. In his moment of psychic abjection, he is shown removing the scar makeup from under his eye, peeling off the plastic wad. The image anticipates Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, with its trippy scenes foregrounding artifice in front of the camera. But the piece de resistance of the film’s reflection upon its own status as pulp is when an extraordinary deus ex machina takes place. Out of water and fuel, the Angels appear as if the desert will finally make good on its claim to their bodies and souls, when from nowhere, down a dusty track, a gleaming gasoline tanker miraculously appears . . . It is a moment straight out of the Jean-Luc Godard playbook. The Hollywood Reporter considered the film to have been directed with “some individual style and distinctive imagery” but nevertheless thought it lacked a “recognisable overlay of point of view.” According to the reviewer, it failed to provide that which has distinguished other motorcycle films

The bike gang rides down the Las Vegas Strip past a line of cinema marquees in Naked Angels.

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Gan and Greene overlaid with the word “GORE” in Naked Angels.

from the run of the mill. It was missing “some purpose, some feeling conveyed with regard to the cyclist’s culture, some mirror to the society of which it is a part. It’s generally considered infradig among the under30 to make judgments, opting simply to tell it as it is. It seems dramatically unsound as well. Why make a film if not to present a point of view, direct a response, engage sympathy or make comment? There are snippets of insight and humor here and there, but little more than action of a brutalizing sort and superficial kicks.”61 The film’s nihilism is a conscious ploy, symbolized in the closing scene as Mother and Fingers fight each other for no particular purpose on the stage of Death Valley’s salt flats—a vast barren vista that emphasizes their insignificance. That this film is made by film school hipsters rather than industry insiders is apparent in the choice of the musicians used to write and record the score. The soundtrack is produced by Frank Zappa collaborator Jeff Simmons. The filmmakers have forsaken the pop music grab bag typically fashioned by industry professionals—such as Les Baxter, Stu Phillips, or Mike Curb—and have instead chosen music that is solidly grounded within the period’s rock music. Grungy guitar jams, hard jazz bops, faux greaser

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rock ’n’ roll, and Pink Floyd–esque melody flights are part of the album’s array of contemporary styles. The soundtrack was released on Zappa’s Straight Records, not on Tower Records or the like. San Francisco Chronicle’s John Wasserman wrote that Naked Angels’ score of “rock blues . . . has never been musically surpassed,” a line within a glowing testimony for the film reproduced in trade press advertising.62 Undoubtedly a friend of the filmmakers, he would later call Naked Angels “the best motorcycle film made in the last 10 years,” a list of which would also presumably include Easy Rider.63 Responding to the exaggerated report on the film’s shoot by Los Angeles Free Press scribe Nat Freedland, Paul Schrader wrote that such a free-forall “obscures the most interesting problems of making a first, low-budget film.” Schrader, who would provide the screenplay for Taxi Driver and direct Blue Collar, among others, was, at this point in his career, a recent graduate from the UCLA film program and had roomed with the producer and director of Naked Angels. The original idea for the film, as described by Dawdy, was as a “Western Mutiny on the Bounty on motorcycles.” Unhindered, the inexperienced filmmakers stuck more or less to their script. “But,” wrote Schrader, “as time wore on, certain ‘modifications’ appeared. Minor characters disappeared, and scenes of subtle characterization were deemed too esoteric for motorcycle audiences. Certain subplots were considered ‘confusing’ and replaced by more conventional bike-riding scenes. Detailed optical processes were described as too costly. The limited finances of Naked Angels (Originally budgeted at $50,000 but finally costing $140,000), Corman carefully explained, did not permit thematic indulgences.” Schrader pointed out that Corman controlled the production by controlling the finances. When he was certain that the filmmakers had enough footage in the can for a ninety-minute film, he stopped his support. He later gave “Bruce Clark money to shoot a week of inserts to patch up the film’s shabby plot, but there was certainly no money for less practical purposes.” The end effect was to make the film look “just like all the other motorcycle quickies.”64 The “Corman Method,” according to Schrader, was to find young talented filmmakers, promise them control and offer them peanuts (Clark received $2000 for writing, casting, directing, and editing Naked Angels—a year’s work). The filmmakers won’t complain; other producers won’t even let them fix the lights. Then subtly control the final product by

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limiting financing (setting unrealistically low first budget), and then threatening final cut revisions. Compound the filmmakers’ insecurity by making it financially possible for him to hire only amateurs, thereby forcing him to rely on your “experience.” Make suggestions about what the audience, in your experience, will pay to see, and wonder of wonders, these talented young filmmakers will produce the exploitative product you wanted all along. And at a cost considerably below Director’s Guild and union minimums.65

Schrader was not maligning Corman; indeed, he had some sympathy for him: “I would not be eager to see the original, valuable motorcycle western Dawdy and Clark had planned. They simply did not have the resources or experience to bring such a project to fruition . . . Clark was lucky to convey the direction of a motorcycle, much less any character psychology . . . [He], like many university filmmakers, has very little sense of acting or actors.” Even talented actors would struggle with such a bad script, wrote Schrader, which with its “flat lines” offered no protection for novice performers, and the director, rather than covering their mistakes, “expose[d] them with long, static takes.” Nonetheless, Schrader believed Clark had talent and, as a science-fiction devotee, had an “excellent sense of depersonalized mystery and eeriness.” The problem with the film stemmed from the idea that both Clark and Corman treated the genre of motorcycle films as inferior, Schrader argued: “It can offer no new information. Instead of using the genre, Naked Angels is used by it.” Where the film differed from its contemporaries was in its depiction of “dirt,” where it “violates the genre”: “The conventional motorcycle film must imply sex and perversion, but must not show it. The implication provides the necessary identification, but the actual sex scenes makes the acned drive-in couples embarrassed.”66 After some trimming by Corman so it could receive an R rating (X-rated films are not played in Los Angeles drive-ins), Naked Angels was doing about twice as well as the average biker movie, reported Schrader. The distributor, Favorite Films of California, hyped the picture as “The Box Office Phenomenon of the Year!” and claimed returns of “$136,000 from 14 theatres in San Francisco multiples May 14–20.”67 Corman cut regional distribution deals for Naked Angels with Favorite Films of California, Goldstone Film Enterprises, and Crown International Pictures.68 He had broken with AIP and was on his way to forming New World Pictures. Figuring strongly in the picture was female nudity, “tits and ass,” which would define New World’s brand. AIP remained a little more

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circumspect in its sexploitation—at least with the two biker films they produced in 1969 and 1970, Hell’s Angels ’69 and Angel Unchained, respectively. The former picture opened in Detroit in July 1969 and racked up grosses of $172,486 in the first seven days, showing in ten of the region’s drive-ins. With playdates over five days at three open tops in Louisville, Kentucky, it made $24,680, and on the East Coast, in Washington, D.C., across the same number of days, it topped $42,000, and it had equally strong returns in open-air theaters in the Midwest.69 These figures are impressive for a film with production costs of $375,000 (three times the cost of Naked Angels) that has as its main attraction, or point of distinction, participation from “The Original Oakland Hell’s Angels.”70 The movie was something of a vanity project for the actor Tom Stern, who starred, wrote, produced, and brought in AIP to partially finance the production. Stern’s deal with AIP was described in Variety as “a case study of independent financial agility. Actual production costs ran about $375,000, although it was never in hand at any given moment. However, as is required in independently financed deals like this, there was a completion bond guarantor, in this case Del Webb, whose associate Pat Rooney was named exec producer. With bond, AIP’s guaranteed pickup for £175,000 was bankable for a loan at Bank of America. An outside private industry putting up another $50,000, plus deferments of $100,000, completed the budget. Within eight months of release Hell’s Angels ’69 paid off everyone and was in profits.”71 In its publicity material, the film was sold as offering “one of the wildest robbery plots ever conceived, two wealthy brothers play a deadly game by infiltrating the ranks of the Hell’s Angels with the ultimate purpose of using them for a cover in the spectacular holdup of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.” Marketing relied on the audience’s knowledge of the film’s antecedents and suggested that it maximized those repeat attractions: “Makes the others look tame . . . The latest is the lustiest of all!” Reviews of the film responded to its distinctive elements: “Somewhat different from most of the roaring motorcycle films, this one at least involves a robbery of the Riviera Hotel casino in Las Vegas.” The film’s critics were not generally convinced that these novelties made the effort of watching worthwhile: “How many more cycle films can there be without hopelessly diminishing returns? There is always room for a great one, but the motor does seem run down by now.”72 The Motion Picture Herald reviewer saw a similar play between the old and the new: “In the endless cycle of bike films, Hell’s

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Angels ’69 takes a sharp turn out of its genre midway through the running time.”73 The reviewer for Boxoffice thought that whatever shortcomings the cycle as a whole had, it had “lasted longer than most industry prognosticators expected, due in no small part to the fact that many of these low-budget action programmers have more life and excitement than any number of stillborn multi-million dollar epics.”74 Michael Ross, in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, somewhat concurred: “Hell’s Angels ’69 takes the utmost trouble to find the right way to tell a very simple story. But, nevertheless, the film bristles with more raw excitement and vitality than many other pseudo-hip, semi-virtuosic cycle films.”75 “The unwashed, mangy, illiterate itinerants who straddle their bikes and roam the country, are back with us again,” wrote Nadine M. Edwards for the Hollywood Citizen News. “This time, however, their celluloid capers are less violent, far less revolting and more suspensefully orientated than in the past.”76 In total, the reviews were just as monotonous as the film they lambasted for being repetitive: “Latest wheeler, another trip to tedium, limps along with silly plot, weak direction and weaker performances.”77 Hell’s Angels ’69 brought together Tom Stern and Jeremy Slate as the film’s headliners. Both had previously starred in biker films: the former in Angels from Hell and the latter in Mini-Skirt Mob and Hell’s Belles, as well as having a featured role in Born Losers. The film’s main draw—or “coup,” as the Los Angeles Times reported—was seeing the Hells Angels in close-up.78 This was certainly how Capitol Records saw the appeal of its soundtrack album, which featured images of Stern and Slate inside the gatefold sleeve but put Sonny Barger on the front and Terry the Tramp on the back. The outlaw club’s earlier titular appearance in Hells Angels on Wheels was little more than a set of cameos, mostly shot at some distance, of them riding in formation on highways and crossing the Bay Bridge. In Stern’s film, they have speaking parts and a central narrative role. They appear as jovial oafs, given little screen direction other than to be “themselves” and lark around. In the Morning Telegraph, Joe Rosen posted a devastating review of their participation: “The police couldn’t do much with them. Sociologists didn’t make much of a dent. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters formed only a tenuous alliance between love and leather. It took Hollywood and American International Films, to inflict what may turn out to be a mortal wound on the Hell’s Angels, those mindless and savage two-wheeled hoods whose stronger elements have at times terrorized the West . . . the real Angels of Oakland . . . appear as themselves and in so doing became

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as interesting as the late Leo Gorcey and the Dead End Kids.”79 New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun wrote that only Conny Van Dyke, the female lead, emerged well from the film, “her physical presence superb. Plump, pretty, with a kind of facial nobility that depends more on soul than bone structure, she captures the image of the American lost girl with an indirection that deserves a better movie than this.”80 Like the Naked Angels, the film capitalizes on the site and spectacle of Las Vegas but spends much of its running time in the surrounding desert. Unlike the Naked Angels, Barger and gang are seen cruising the strip mostly in the daylight, and the cameras stay in front or to the side of them, rarely moving among the riders. Before getting off the highways and into the desert in pursuit of Stern and Slate’s characters, the Hells Angels swap their choppers for dirt bikes. The chase is predominantly filmed from a helicopter, so the Angels appear like a small herd of animals moving rapidly over terrain as if in a scene from an African safari documentary. Commentating on these sequences, the New York Times critic wrote that it was “photographed with such concern for getting pursuers and pursued into a single frame that it looks less like a chase than a pleasure ride.”81 Discussing the technical distinctions between the filming of The Wild One and its contemporary manifestation in films like The Wild Angels and Born Losers, Lawrence Alloway wrote that in the former, the cyclists are shown approaching a static camera, but in the latter two films, the “camera pans with the riders, so that its point of view is the gang’s. By matching the riders’ speed the camera shows them, in fact, using the highway like a room, relaxing, talking, drinking as they go. Only the background moves.”82 This is true too of Hell’s Angels ’69, where the bikers flit above the landscape, often in silhouette. In Naked Angels, once the bikers get into the desert, rather than stay above things, they meld into the dust and dirt. They are subsumed by the scrubland. Hell’s Angels ’69’s similarity to Oceans 11 (1960), or some other recent caper movie, was noted in review after review. Kevin Thomas, in the Los Angeles Times, thought the picture was “completely preposterous, blatantly contrived and punctuated with credibility gaps big enough to race through . . . The first third is pretty much like any other motorcycle movie. Then it takes a Thomas Crown Affair (1968) twist and winds up with a Treasure of the Sierra Madre climax.”83 Conceived with the same cavalier attitude that Hell’s Angels ’69 had toward originality and its storylines, Angel Unchained (1970) stole the

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trope of outlaws defending a peasant community from The Magnificent Seven (1960). The Savage Seven had also plundered the same plot line. Unlike Hell’s Angels ’69, the film was wholly produced by AIP and was regarded as the company’s primary contribution to the following season’s cycle of biker movies. Angel Unchained opened in the summer of 1970, five months after Jeffrey Alladin Fiskin submitted his final draft of the screenplay. (He would be retained on a week-by-week basis for rewrites until principal filming commenced on April 13.) The film returned $23,000 in its opening-weekend Los Angeles run.84 Programmed in seven Kansas theaters, playing with second-run biker movies Born Losers and The Losers (a.k.a. Nam Angels), it took in $21,000.85 In four Minneapolis drive-ins, it was paired with Devil’s Angels.86 In Ohio, the picture was shown at five “ozoners” (driveins) and pulled in a “lively” $15,000.87 Teamed with Cry of the Banshee, Angel Unchained played thirty houses in the New York region and gathered $165,000.88 The film was shot over three weeks, with Sundays off, which was a standard AIP schedule for a film. A production office was set up in Superstition Inn, Apache Junction, Arizona, with the surrounding countryside providing the exteriors. The cost was pegged at $410,000, and the film came in on time and on budget. Five to six setups per day were completed, which equates to roughly six pages a day, as dictated by the tight and always demanding timetable. Fiskin’s script is 112 pages; when broken down, it represents eighteen days of principal photography. Forty thousand feet of Eastman color stock was ordered, and a running time of ninety minutes was planned, which allowed for a little under a 3–1 ratio of wasted-to-used film. Angel Unchained was meticulously planned and executed. Grasping a sense of the temporary alliances, creative relationships, and business partnerships—the employment of personnel across a cycle— provides insight not only into filmmaking practice at this point in time but also into the process of serial production. Director Lee Madden is the key figure straddling both Hell’s Angels ’69 and Angel Unchained. AIP clearly considered him to be a crucial part of the project; he not only directed Angel Unchained but also had a hand in the story and a producer’s credit. After his period of employment with AIP, he moved on from directing features to working on industrial films for his own production company, which specialized in making shorts and commercials for automobile

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manufacturers—analogous employment that cannot be an entirely poetical coincidence. His coproducer was Norman Herman, who had recently worked on AIP’s Bloody Mama, which showcased Angel Unchained’s new star lead, Don Stroud, a “Brandoesque performer of extreme competence.”89 Bud Ekins did the bike stunts (as he had also done on Hell’s Angels ’69), and the cinematographer, Irving Lippman, had made a reputation for himself by working on fifty-six episodes of The Monkees TV show; he surely knew how to lens for the youth market. Supporting actors Luke Askew and Larry Bishop had appeared in Easy Rider and The Savage Seven, respectively, and the latter would make another biker movie appearance in Chrome and Hot Leather (1971). Bishop was the son of Rat Packer Joey Bishop, and publicity for the film makes much of this fact, along with the presence of Tim Ryan, son of Robert Ryan, and Stroud’s love interest, Tyne Daly, daughter of character actor James Daly.90 The exploitation potential of familiar names meant the film got notices in the mainstream press, as happened with the casting of Fonda and Sinatra in The Wild Angels, but their presence also put an emphasis on youth. In contrast, and in order to accentuate the generation gap, the casting agent used Hollywood veteran Aldo Ray as a disinterested, elderly sheriff. He was employed for a single day’s filming. The screenwriter, Fiskin, was a novice, but that too could be used. In publicity notes for the film, he is described as “26  years young.” Those same notes suggest marketing should draw attention to the film’s social message: “the search for identity so apparent in so many young people throughout the world.”91 That message was but an echo of earlier films in the cycle. Born Losers’ pressbook, for example, similarly stressed the youthfulness of the filmmakers and the movie’s protest angle: “Born Losers was created by young people who become increasingly angry at simply standing by and watching the spreading decay at the root of society. As the condition seemed to become more prevalent, they had to do something about it. And they pulled no punches.”92 On the basis of the script submitted on March 31, 1970, the Motion Picture Association of America considered Angel Unchained to be a potential “GP” (parental guidance suggested) story, but any extensive use of profanity, plus nudity and unacceptable levels of violence, could bring the film in to an R (restricted—persons under sixteen not admitted unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian) or X (persons under sixteen not

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admitted) category. In order to attract a younger audience than was typically the case with earlier examples in the cycle, AIP worked to ensure it maintained a GP rating. (Hell’s Angels ’69 had received an M—for mature audiences—rating.) Though the film was still suggestive of adult content, a reviewer noted that it somewhat curbed the usual fare of vulgar, violent, and sexually explicit content: “One strange aspect of the film is its lack of violence and the lack of offensive language. This new restraint may puzzle audiences who may be expecting an entirely different sort of movie.” He also suggested that the film did not meet “the new high standard of bike films set by . . . Easy Rider.” Dennis Hopper’s film was rated R, which perhaps pushed the producers of Hell’s Angels ’69 and Angel Unchained to be more inclusive in an appeal to a young audience that wanted to see Easy Rider but was excluded due to its rating.93 The first cut of Angel Unchained was completed by May  20, 1970. Editing notes for amendments generally specified the need to tighten up sequences, scenes, and moments; for example, “First riding sequence is too long. Eating sequence is too long. Trim scene of hippies running.”94 Notes from May 25 were along the same perfunctory lines, suggesting “trims and reversing cuts” alongside a comment that a “‘ballad’ should be used if riding shots are kept long,” and in order to maintain the GP rating, recommendations were made to cut back on explicit indicators of rape. By early June, postproduction was complete, and the film premiered in Minneapolis on August 19, followed by a Los Angeles opening on September 2. Marketing slogans were drafted: “His name was Angel, but he was running a devil’s race . . .” “. . . playing it alone, without his Pack at his back, against the Freaks and the Straights that ruled this slaughterhouse suburb of Hell!” “Hang loose . . . when you make the slaughterhouse run . . .” “This is the hell run that you make all alone . . .” “He cut out from the pack to make his blood run alone . . .” “. . . against the straights and the freaks—and the weirdoes that rule Hell’s Back Alley.”95

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The actual poster taglines were a variation on these drafts: “This is the slaughterhouse run that you make alone  .  .  . When you’ve cut yourself off from the pack to go flat out against the Freaks and the Straights who rule this cozy corner of Hell!” The repetition of the tags, all saying the same thing differently, encapsulates the cycle’s serial nature just as surely as does the formulaic titling of the films. Press reception was neither enthusiastic nor unduly negative and stressed the film’s generic and formulaic elements: “Angel Unchained takes itself too seriously for its own good. Ideally motorcycle flicks should be outrageous, preposterously sure of their purpose. This latest offer from AIP suffers, like its hero, from an identity crisis.”96 The Los Angeles Times film reviewer echoed those thoughts: “Like all the better bike pictures Angel Unchained fulfils the action requirements of its genre, yet goes on to make a social comment. The story of a Hell’s Angels-type trying to drop out is pretty familiar by now, but AIP has freshened up the formula by adding hippies to the scene . . . Angel Unchained has its awkwardnesses, and some of its plot contrivances would draw snickers from sophisticates, but on the whole it’s a satisfying, pertinent effort.”97 “Okay dual exploitation programmer”98 is the best Variety could say of the picture. Angel Unchained opens with the Exiles, an outlaw motorcycle club, lolling around the rides in an amusement park as they await a rival gang for a prearranged rumble. The fairground setting had been seen previously in

Angel Unchained. At the fairground, from left to right, are Don Stroud, Larry Bishop, and Bill McKinney.

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Hells Angels on Wheels and Hells Chosen Few, where the thrill of the rides was equated with the movie’s own delights. Madden’s film strives for a more symbolic reading—the bikers as overgrown children. Stroud’s character, Angel, has had enough of these childish ways; leaving the gang, he sets off in search of his inner self. At a one-pump gas station in the Arizona desert, he encounters a hippie, Merilee (Tyne Daly). After he protects her from the town bullies, she takes him to a commune. The land and plants are as scrawny as the hippies who are tilling the soil, but among these flower children, Angel finds solace, peace, and love with Merilee. The idyll is short lived when the town’s rowdies drive their desert buggies through the commune, tearing up the land like a herd of stampeding cattle ruining a squatter’s plot of dirt in a western. As others did, the critic for Women’s Wear Daily saw the film as an updated horse opera or, more precisely, as a “wagon train movie. The settlers played by hippies, are surrounded by the dune buggy riding younger set of the country town . . . They are rescued by the cavalry, played by a motorcycle gang.” This was not a recommendation; he dismissed the film with a terse “That’s all, folks.”99 The refashioning of the Magnificent Seven’s story and the key locations among the tall saguaro of the Arizona scrub land certainly invite a comparison with the western. But something is wrong with this picture. Like the figure of the psychedelic Indian (Pedro Regas), who bakes peyote-laced chocolate chip cookies, it is a West despoiled and corrupted. This is not a frontier theater, where civilization plays out some primal confrontation with savagery; it is instead another iteration of Rubin’s left-behind spaces. There’s no future for the hippies, the bikers, the redneck cowboys, or even, so it seems, Angel and Merilee. With the death of the commune’s leader (Askew) and the land and buildings in ruin, the film ends without an indication that this story has anywhere left to run.

3

After Easy Rider Modulations and Curious Combinations Well it’s 1969 OK, all across the USA It’s another year for me and you Another year with nothing to do —The Stooges, “1969” Plan ahead, cast medium high, shoot fast and furious and on a low budget, aim for the action market and never stop to look behind you. —producers of Satan’s Sadists (1969)1

Discussing the booking of Hell’s Angels ’69 into New York’s upmarket DeMille Theater, critic Joe Rosen wrote, “Apparently, the success of Easy Rider, a major film with a biking theme, has prompted a try at the big money in New York. One is curious to see whether the relatively sophisticated young people who make up much of the film audience in the City 97

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go for it.”2 Such was its critical and box office impact: the release of Hopper and Fonda’s film appeared to change the ground over which the biker film traveled, not least in the class of the audience it attracted. The debt was not all one way. Easy Rider was beholden to the biker film, and not just for its choppers. The cast and crew of Easy Rider had held formative roles in the cycle. Fonda had starred in the first of the biker pictures, The Wild Angels; Hopper had headlined in The Glory Stompers; Jack Nicholson, alongside Sabrina Scharf, had featured in Hells Angels on Wheels, which Laszlo Kovacs had lensed; and Robert Walker had a lead role in The Savage Seven. It was no surprise, then, that the initial reviews of Easy Rider invariably contended with the legacy of outlaw biker movies. The Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin began his column with an upbeat summary: “The whole cycle of cycle pictures, Wild Angels, Hells Angels on Wheels and all the others, have had at their best a raw, brute vitality, a gaudy urgency, a message of social alienation and deep discontent which kept transcending the exploitational formulas, the melodramatics, the distorting simplifications of character and event.”3 Having set the groundwork for his review by giving a positive spin on the cycle, he then moved in on Easy Rider: “On the face of it . . . it is to what has gone before as the calculus is to third grade arithmetic . . . Easy Rider is an astonishing work of art and an overpowering motion picture experience.”4 The distinctiveness of Hopper’s film depended on the idea that as art, it could have a transcendent impact on viewers. Earthbound and quotidian, the films in the biker cycle could never aspire to such lofty heights. Champlin listed lesser points of difference, such as the cycle’s dependence on a hero who resorts to violence to solve problems, whereas Easy Rider’s protagonists were “unassertive men of peace adrift in a society they find conformist in its violent fear-hatred of their easy, shaggy unorthodoxy.”5 But it is the claim made for Easy Rider as something other than just another movie on which its critical appeal will rest. Not every critic was convinced Easy Rider had much in the way of cultural capital. In the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris, more circumspect in his praise than Champlin, drew yet another comparison between the film and the biker cycle: “Motorcycles, materialism, misanthropy, and murder . . . That the American Dream has come to resemble a quickie production out of American-International does not in and of itself transform every vavoom on the screen into a meaningful statement.”6 The Christian Science Monitor thought the hoopla over Easy Rider was unwarranted but noted

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it was “the most arty and recent of a series of Peter Fonda motorcycle and drug epics  .  .  . a colourful wrapping on a rather nasty package.”7 In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that it was a “statement” movie, “a motorcycle drama with a decidedly superior air about it.”8 The critical debate, in essence, was over whether it was a thinly spruced up exploitation film or a genuine work of art. With the other films in the cycle, there was no ambiguity. Within the critical camp that found value in Easy Rider, Penelope Gilliatt, in the New Yorker, wrote, “Easy Rider is constructed like a ballad with a recurring fourth line.”9 This observation was shared by her fellow critic, Judith Crist: “Borrowing the ballad form used so subtly in Bonnie and Clyde, Hopper makes each incident a verse in itself, set off by the refrain of the cyclists gliding through open country.” The use of a folk form as a structuring device had never been claimed as an attribute of the biker film, nor had its inarticulateness been seen as a virtue: “The reviving thing about [Easy Rider] is that it doesn’t explain, it embodies.”10 Gilliatt wrote, “The cant of cool is here made eloquent.”11 Biker cycle pictures were never considered to be cool, only, at best, hot-headed. In the course of his study of New Hollywood, Nicholas Godfrey traces the emergence of a cycle of films that followed in the wake of Easy Rider’s box office success: well-known films such as Five Easy Pieces and Two-Lane Blacktop, alongside now neglected pictures like Strawberry Statement and Last American Hero. Movies that belong to the biker cycle are not listed in his catalog of titles. This is not an oversight on Godfrey’s part, just a tacit recognition that the exploitation film operates within a different sphere of influence. This is not to say that the films in the biker cycle were unaffected by Easy Rider but rather that they exist outside of the New Hollywood moment, wherein young, progressively minded filmmakers remonstrate with figures of authority, engage with the era’s cultural and political turmoil, and take up the opportunities presented by a film industry in disarray—a Hollywood renaissance that drew upon European art cinema traditions and remade the face of American film into what some have called “the last great American picture show.”12 “It’s as if Peter Fonda,” wrote the New York Post critic, “having acted in motorcycle epics of the sleazier sort, decided to do the real thing himself.”13 Part of the film’s claim on authenticity was not just in its self-conscious artfulness but in its sense of self as a statement on contemporary life—“a man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.”14 And, in part,

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it achieved this through sly, knowing comments on American film, most pointedly in those calculated moments where it meditates on representations of the West. Rather than adopting western affectations, the usual fare of the biker cycle, Easy Rider was construed as a critique of the myth of the West.15 Gilliatt wrote, “It is beautifully simple. It goes almost like the country’s traditional frontier myth, but run backwards . . . They are travelling not away from sophistication but into it . . . Their trek east is a myth truer to the country’s extant frontier-pushing impulse than the plot of any Wes tern.”16 The early stages of Easy Rider use the trope of “left-behind” spaces. Among the crumbling adobe ruins, roofless shacks, abandoned cars, rotten paperbacks, and unidentifiable junk and detritus, Billy (Hopper) fantasizes about being out in the wilderness, surrounded by Indians. Aside from the cowboy boots worn by him and Wyatt, and his beat-up Stetson, buckskin shirt, and fringed jacket, the western is suggested in his playing cowboys and Indians with the commune’s children and via the overstrained symbolism of the changing of a motorcycle wheel and a horse’s shoe. The landscape the two riders traverse most fully evokes the western, especially the stopover in Monument Valley. The location insistently arouses memories of John Ford’s frontier dramas, including My Darling Clementine, starring Henry Fonda in the role of Wyatt Earp (after whom Peter Fonda names his character). Of this sequence, Nicholas Godfrey writes, “Easy Rider reduces the iconography of the Western to a travelogue of visual pleasures, something to be gazed upon from a passing motorcycle.”17 It’s a fair comment, but then Billy and Wyatt are never more than tourists, passing through, and the frontier has long since faded into history. By the film’s end, the two riders are surrounded and the wagons have been circled, only the brutes are rednecks, not redskins. In his study of class and masculinity in New Hollywood, Derek Nystrom extemporizes on the politics of Easy Rider and the killing of its counterculture protagonists by blue-collar rednecks. He argues the American working class “served as the face of the forces” arrayed against the counterculture, which took the form of blue-collar, middle-aged reactionaries up against middle-class, youthful radicals. This representational strategy “rendered the younger generation of the working class all but invisible . . . Of course, it is with just this sort of generational self-definition that the New Hollywood conceived of and presented its films—and itself. As they triangulated their narratives of youthful disaffiliation through working-class

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characters and experiences, the most visible New Hollywood youth-cult films helped encode these class identities with generational accents.”18 Working-class youths may have been unseen in the films of New Hollywood, but they were highly visible in hoodlum biker pictures. Writing for The Village Voice, rock critic Robert Christgau gave Easy Rider’s soundtrack high praise: “[It is] the only film I know that not only uses rock well—though that is rare enough, but also does justice to its spirit.” For Christgau, rock music defined the age. In “glorying the outcasts and detesting and fearing the straights,” the filmmakers had to, if they were to be honest and true to the day’s youth culture, use “real music” and not a faux rock soundtrack from a commissioned hack.19 Biker movies had used prerecorded songs by known artists, notably Cream and Iron Butterfly in The Savage Seven, but according to scholar Jeff Smith, Easy Rider set a precedent in using “rock music as a structural and ironic counterpoint.”20 Pop culture critic Howard Hampton, however, rejects the idea of the film being honest and complex in its use of contemporary music. He denounces the middle-of-the-road hegemony from which Hollywood viewed rock music; Easy Rider was a “wedge into a youth market far more than a subversion of any ‘Establishment.’ It was in the truest sense a fashion statement: slap some indiscriminate rock, long hair, and love beads on that hegemony and presto, it would become ‘far out,’ daring, radical.” As a contrast to “the dreary, trite relics of erstwhile hipness” (The Fraternity of Man), the weight of significance (The Band), or the “marvel of blank self-righteousness” (Roger McGuinn and the Byrds) of Easy Rider’s soundtrack, Hampton, echoing Nystrom’s class-based critique of the film, offers Creedence Clearwater Revival’s album Green River: “There was everything Hooper and company missed, ignored or trivialised—the paradoxes of race and the uneasy allure of a country where freedom and violence were chronically intertwined.”21 For the outlaw motorcycle audience, the soundtrack of choice was less likely to feature the Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow” or the Electric Prunes’ “Kyrie Eleison” than Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues,” Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” or CCR’s “Run through the Jungle.” This was rock music for the “comedown era” of Naked Angels, Manson, and Altamont, not the highs of Woodstock laced with the melancholia of Easy Rider. For the most part, the films in the cycle that followed Easy Rider simply ignored its bourgeoisification of its tropes. The cycle’s protagonists remained steadfastly of the hoodlum persuasion. You have to belong

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to rebel. The outlaw biker had few if any affiliations outside of the gang, so rebellion was never more complex an equation than quitting the club. When you are already on the lowest rung of the aspirational ladder, there is nowhere from which to drop out. Following Hells Angels on Wheels and Angels from Hell, Joe Solomon and Fanfare Film Productions further added to the cycle in 1969 with Run, Angel, Run!, starring William Smith, who had made a name for himself in television’s Laredo (1965–1967), and Valerie Starrett, wife of the film’s director, Jack Starrett, who, as an actor, had featured in Solomon’s previous biker pictures. Under the pseudonym V. A. Furlong, Valerie also cowrote the screenplay. Run, Angel, Run! is the story of an outlaw breaking away from the gang, a trope that Kevin Thomas thought “increasingly familiar,”22 though at this point it had only been used in The Mini-Skirt Mob. Having sold an exposé on his outlaw motorcycle club, the Devil’s Advocates, Angel (Smith) is featured on the cover of Like (a magazine that looks like Life). Angel is in jail, waiting for his girlfriend, Lauri (Starrett), a dancer and prostitute, to raise his bail by working extra shifts on Sunset Boulevard. Free, the pair head north from LA on 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, to claim his $10,000 payment for the Like exclusive, which is deposited in a San Francisco bank. Angered by the magazine story, the Devil’s Advocates are soon in hot pursuit. Before long, the gang has cornered Angel and Lauri beside some railroad sidings. Using a split screen process, the editing builds rapidly toward the two main stunts that featured heavily in the film’s trailers. The first has Lauri jumping from the back of a bike into a moving boxcar. The second has Angel landing the bike onto the same train’s flatbed. Both stunts are undeniably thrilling. As the train takes them north and away from their pursuers, they encounter a new threat. Three hobos share their boxcar and attempt to rape Lauri. A sheep rancher helps the couple set up a home and provides honest work for Angel. Through their rather hapless, but heartfelt, attempts at homemaking, the couple find tranquility and a sense of fulfillment with the rancher and his family. When the Advocates discover their hideout, their peace is shattered: the bikers violate the rancher’s daughter and then beat up and presumably also rape Lauri. “Sex and violence are more implied than blatantly exploited,” wrote Thomas, who thought of the film as a “jazzy kind of action picture” and “a surprisingly poignant love story between two people you come to care about.”23

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The Hollywood Reporter provided a summary report of Fanfare’s, Solomon’s, and Starrett’s efforts on earlier biker movies and gave its approval of the star and featured turns, but it saved its most fulsome praise for the technical side of things. Noting the use throughout the film of “flash preview cuts in lieu of scene dissolves,” it considered this technique to be an effective and economical alternative to “high-priced opticals.” Discussing the split, or multiple, screen sequence, which “involves a chase around a speeding Southern Pacific train,” John Mahoney wrote that “multiple frame action can be graphically composed in such a way as to make action orderly but static,” but the “design here increases conflict and tension in countermovements and the juxtaposition of massive image and smaller covering action that is dizzyingly precise.” Cinematographer John Stephens, he recorded, did “laudable second unit work for Grand Prix . . . [and] devises a series of special mounts to provide a new sense of participation and perspective in the cycle riding sequences.” The film, he concluded, “owes much of its commercial strength in an action market to the especially daring stunt action, coordinated by Bill Catching.”24 In a passing remark in his review, Mahoney suggested that the final rumble between Angel and the Advocates was “analogous in its way to the homesteader-outlaw clashes of the western film.” Producer Joe Solomon considered the appeal of the biker movie for young people to be the same that “Westerns had in the past. We’ve proved that with the box office receipts we’ve gotten on them.” Solomon was described by the Morning Telegraph reporter Leo Mishkin as a “chunky, gray-haired man with glasses . . . a veteran film man.” Solomon, he reported, came from a family of movie theater owners and theater printers in San Francisco who had a background in publicity and promotion before setting up Fanfare. “We aimed our pictures at drive-in theaters first,” he told Mishkin, “and after we hit it big, we went in for the so-called hardtop theaters—the regular film houses. And we made it big there. Motorbike movies are able to show the emotions and frustrations of today’s youth. These kids brought up on television, and with Marshall McLuhan as their Guru, can easily discern between what’s real and what’s imitation on the screen.” And Solomon had plans to make a biopic of Sonny Barger—“Whatta guy!” he said.25 Solomon was in New York on a promotional jaunt with Smith and the Starretts. Newark Evening News reporter Daphne Kraft interviewed Valerie Starrett and asked about her ideas for the screenplay. Starrett

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This advertisement for Run, Angel, Run! showcases the figure of William Smith surrounded by the film’s main attractions: the stunts, the cavalcade of bikers, barroom brawling, rape, and go-go dancing.

responded, “I wanted to show two young people in for kicks who never needed anything or anyone and show how, in a different situation, they do have feelings. Motorcyclists have been stereotyped in films.” Regardless of whether or not the film is just “drive-in bait,” and even if “the movie is not well received,” Smith tells Kraft, “the producer will gross $3 million. If it is well received, he’ll gross $6  million or more. There’s a built-in motor audience in America.”26

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“I think you’ve seen too many motorcycle movies,” says Ann-Margaret to Sid Haig in C.C. and Company as he tries to drag her into the back of a car. In the film, exploitation regular Haig (Spider Baby and Pit Stop) wears headgear plundered from the set of an Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan picture. Filmed on location in Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, the core of the film is centered on a motocross race, which provides high-speed bike action, stunts, and pratfalls. Ex–football star Joe Namath plays a member of the Heads motorcycle club, which is led by Moon, played by Fanfare’s outlaw biker in residence William Smith. Unlike Smith in Run, Angel, Run!, Namath gets to quit the gang and win the girl. C.C. and Company was the only film in the cycle to be produced by a major company, Avco, and with his supporting role, Smith had shown he’d outgrown Fanfare’s budget-line affairs. His new status was consolidated by starring with Tom Baker in Corman’s New World Pictures’ Angels Die Hard (1970) and the following year’s stretch with AIP in Chrome and Hot Leather. Variety wrote of the former that it was “a good exploitation programmer in a genre which seems on a decline.”27 Obviously, Roger Corman did not share this pessimistic view of the cycle’s waning; the film was one of three biker pictures he would release through his production and distribution company in 1970–1972. New World Pictures was launched in June 1970 with the announcement of four films before the year’s end and another in 1971. The principal stockholders were Roger Corman, his brother Gene, and theaterman and producer Larry Woolner. Angels Die Hard was their first feature release, followed by Student Nurses. None of the pictures would be X-rated. Budgets for the films were pegged between $500,000 and $800,000, with $3  million committed to production. Three hundred prints would be struck for each title, or at least that was the ballyhoo.28 In reality, budgets rarely exceeded $200,000, and around one hundred prints were struck. Speaking to a Boxoffice reporter about his experience as an exhibitor, Woolner noted that “two main factors stand out in making value judgments: The type of campaign organized by the distributor and the title of the film. ‘Good titles are the main attraction of many pictures, especially in the action field . . . The title is of prime importance for films playing drive-ins, even more so than walk-ins.’” He preferred “a fresh picture booked directly into a drive-in theatre to a big budget, highly promoted, audience-drained film after it had played the shopping center luxury hardtops.”29

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Corman had moved on from AIP because he was not getting the financial rewards he considered to be his due and because Nicholson and Arkoff interfered with the final cut of his films, taking the edge off the sex and violence.30 The release schedule New World programmed for 1971 followed the biker and nurses’ pictures with Do Unto Angels (released as Angels Hard as They Come) and Graduate Nurses (released as Private Duty Nurses). The lineup included four horror films; two women-in-prison films, both shot in the Philippines (The Big Doll House and Women in Cages); and one final biker pic, Bury Me an Angel.31 The new company and its pictures quickly proved their worth and helped consolidate Corman’s reputation as a canny filmmaker of exploitation fare. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times in 1972, Corman boasted that all eleven New World releases had returned profits. “I think it has worked for a number of reasons,” he told Kevin Thomas, “but let’s break it into two main ones. First, our pictures are inexpensive. No picture is costing over $200,000, so we’re controlling costs. Second, by having our own distribution company we can control costs that way as well. If you’ve ever looked at a major distribution report you’ll see costs that are unbelievable . . . They order too many prints. Every 100 prints costs about $50,000. We’re controlling playdates so we don’t open in multiples simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles.”32 This strategy of scheduling distribution region by region, as was being practiced by Independent-International Pictures and others, was a cost-control exercise, but it also explains why critics, reviewing exploitation films late into their release pattern, complained about poor and damaged prints that had already been through the mill before reaching either coast. With an acute appreciation of the popularity of dramas about nurses and women in prison at the box office, Corman pulled back on the biker films and put his capital into developing these new formats. In his interview with the filmmaker, Thomas noted, “New World does not produce all the pictures it releases. But it has produced the bad—for example, The Big Doll House, a trashy women’s prison picture filmed entirely in the Philippines—as well as the good (or more accurately, the not bad); for example, Private Duty Nurses, a heady Jacqueline Susann-type tale that was very well made and entertaining.” Discussing his latest protégés, Jonathan Demme and Joe Viola, who were responsible for Angels Hard as They Come, Corman told Thomas that they were presently in the Philippines, making a film with the working title The Prescription Revolution (released

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as The Hot Box), which was “somewhere between The Big Doll House and Private Duty Nurses. There’s this group of nurses who are kidnapped by guerrillas and end up in a revolution in a Southeast Asian country . . . This to me is exploitable . . . a little bit of statement, a little bit of sex.”33 Thomas’s piece is titled with all the excess of an exploitation film poster tagline: “Roger Corman—Director Who Changed the Face of Hollywood.” It just lacks an exclamation mark. Corman was so feted not due to his own films but because of the opportunities he had given to some of the most lauded filmmakers of the day, including cinematographers Haskell Wexler and Laszlo Kovacs; directors Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, and Peter Bogdanovich; and actor-directors Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper. Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Kaplan, Stephanie Rothman, and Gale Ann Hurd, among many others, would follow in their traces:34 “‘Roger takes tremendous risks with newcomers,’ said director Jack Hill, ‘and he gives responsible jobs to women.’”35 Corman’s behind-the-scenes production work on Naked Angels helped set his agenda for New World Pictures, especially his use of untested and cheap talent. In its review, the Hollywood Reporter discussed the film’s anonymous backer, “a veteran exploitation film maker who makes a practice of investing in the future of young talents, and coincidentally contributed to the prototypical formula of the chopper film cycle.”36 Filmed in and around Kernville, near Bakersfield, Angels Die Hard consolidated a fair number of the outlaw biker tropes, including scrubland and desert locations, junkyards (a thirty-acre pop-art collection, according to the film’s pressbook) and abandoned mines, campfire scenes with topless gyrations from the gang’s mamas, run-ins with small town officials and the attention of the community’s teenage girls, a funeral for a fallen comrade (with the novel salute of pissing onto his coffin), a barroom ruckus, and for the climax, a rumble with a vigilante mob carrying rifles and burning torches. Where the film shifts, post–Easy Rider, is that the motorcyclists are framed as the victims, not the perpetrators of outrages. At the film’s end, it is revealed that the sheriff had run an Angel off the road after the biker, echoing Hopper’s character, gave the lawman the bird. A suggested promotional angle frames the film “as the logical extension of the old Western frontier myth . . . Our story is the classic portrayal of an outlaw gang taking revenge on a small town, but here it turns out the law is far more corrupt than the ‘outlaws.’”37

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The nude campfire scene, shown here in a publicity still for Angels Die Hard, is one of the many repeat attractions in post-1968 biker films.

Though William Smith would be the main draw for fans of the biker film, top billing was given to Hollywood novice Tom Baker. If he had any kind of reputation, it was through working with Norman Mailer and Andy Warhol on off-Broadway productions and experimental films and for his friendship with the Doors’ Jim Morrison. A year prior to the film’s production, Baker had been arrested with the singer for being drunk and disorderly aboard a flight bound for Phoenix, Arizona. The producers clearly hoped to exploit his notoriety and hip associations, but if this did happen, there are few traces of it in the film’s clippings from trade and mainstream print.38 Outside of Easy Rider and the odd film that had hip connections, such as the Naked Angels, biker pictures were simply not covered by the alternative and counterculture press, like Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Free Press. The readership of those papers, those educated past high school, were simply not the same as the audience who got their kicks at the drive-in. Kevin Thomas’s review summed up the critical consensus on the film, which even he found “tiresome with its familiar bikers vs. rednecks plot, souped up with much arty camera work and not, unfortunately, redeemed

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by the likable presences of the ever-reliable William Smith and the spacedout Tom Baker, none other than Warhol’s I, a Man. The big problem is that though the bikers help rescue a child from an old mine shaft, a sentimental ploy if ever there was one, they are otherwise presented as unhesitating rapists and marauders. Therefore, it is tough to go along with their alleged moral superiority over their hick adversaries.”39 In June 1971, Joe Solomon announced to the press that Fanfare had acquired worldwide distribution rights to Werewolves on Wheels and would release “the motorcycle-horror item” in July.40 Boxoffice described the picture as a “drama of an outlaw motorcycle band in conflict with a cult of Satan worshippers.”41 The film was in release for more than a month without trade press screenings, which Variety thought was a mistake, “a pre-judgment unworthy of the product.” The journal considered this “cycle drama with werewolf and Satan-cult modulations” to be a “curious combination.” The picture, it decided, “is too metaphysical for its superficial exploitation market, yet the odd combo of genres, laced with obvious improvisation and some good yocks, will provide escapism in that type of playoff.” Takings, it predicted, would be good for an “off-season” release.42 The Hollywood Reporter echoed Variety. Craig Fisher wrote, “[Werewolves is] obviously designed to make money, and it just as obviously will. It’s a mixture of elements—a thoroughly calculated exploitation feature that uses the framework of a biker and fills it in with bits of Satanism and straight horror sequences of loose, improvisatory humor.”43 The story is of a bike gang under the influence of a Satanic spell, where between “mysterious deaths, diabolic rites, and climactic transformations of some characters into werewolves, the gang does what they all do in bike dramas”: “Ride on desert highways toward wide-angle lens, preferably with mid-day heat waves in attendance; camp it up by the fire with chicks; find temporary refuge in auto graveyards near spectacular sand dunes; and hassle all gas station operators . . . If one can imagine Macbeth, The Wolfman, The Addams Family and Easy Rider in one stew, this is it.”44 As formulaic as it undoubtedly was, the film could nevertheless boast of a novel soundtrack. Don Gere’s guitar-drone theme tune was wedded to an insistent Velvet Underground–like beat to underscore the roar of the bikes tooling down desert roads. Nothing else in the cycle sounds anything like it.45 The film was produced by Paul Lewis and directed by Michel Levesque, whom Variety identified as belonging to “that group of Hollywood

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new wave filmmakers, many of whom are not underground anymore.”46 Levesque had worked with Corman on The Trip (uncredited), Naked Angels (as art director), and Bloody Mama (as visual consultant). Lewis had a long history of collaborations with Dennis Hopper, including in Easy Rider (uncredited assistant director) and The Last Movie, and as production manager, he had worked with Richard Rush, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, and Jack Starrett, including in Born Losers and Hells Angels on Wheels. “It was bound to happen,” wrote Thomas, “that someone would come along and make an occult biker in the light of the great revival of interest in astrology and all matters supernatural.” He found the whole concoction rather effective: “What’s more, the conjunction of outlaw motorcycle gangs and Satanists—plus drugs—brings to mind the Manson Family background with a chilling effect.”47 Whether this was the intention of the filmmakers is unknown. Certainly in the director and screenwriter’s audio commentary on a DVD release, no mention is made of Manson; rather, they highlight such texts as the Tibetan Book of the Dead as inspiration.48 The film riffs on Easy Rider, producing an inversion during the opening by having two rednecks in a pickup give the bird to the bikers while running one of them off the road. In return for the infraction, they get a righteous beating at a gas station. Werewolves practices the same kind of film school self-awareness that is there in Naked Angels. When a character called “Movie” goes missing, the cast searches for him, shouting, “Movie, where are you?” This is no doubt part of the “metaphysical” aspect Variety thought a little too pretentious to gain the interest of a drive-in audience. Completed at a cost in the region of $265,000, like Naked Angels, this is a dirty film. Dust and grease cake the players. Locations include the Hollywood Hills and the Southern Californian desert town of Brawley and the nearby Glamis dunes. To keep the overhead down, only half a dozen professional actors went under contract; other parts were taken by the crew, hired locally, or employed by the stunt coordinator, Tex Hall, who provided the thirteen bikes used in the production. Hall worked in outlaw biker movies right from the start of the cycle, including Easy Rider. His youthful visage with a prankster’s grin is found in the cycle’s rogues’ gallery, right alongside Gary Littlejohn, William Bonner, and Robert Tessier. The film’s compact of biker picture and horror is more akin to the Alice Cooper group, then currently road showing their Killer album, than to AIP or horror fare from Hammer studios. The band’s confection of pop

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The grandeur of the American desert is turned into an automobile junkyard in Werewolves on Wheels, a context in which the bikers are at ease.

culture influences, drawn from comic books, movies, and TV, and its embrace of grand guignol, all fueled on Detroit greaser rock ’n’ roll, make a smart match with the film. The business with the werewolves is left to the final reel, with the film holding back, until the death, from monster movie shtick. Less circumspect in their marriage of the biker and monster movies were The Hellcats collaborators Anthony Cardoza and Robert Slatzer, who put the two elements together in Big Foot (1970). The film featured John Carradine and gave serial western star Ken Maynard his last screen appearance. Roger Ebert reviewed the film for laughs: “Why, you are asking, did I decide to see Big Foot? . . . The cast alone convinced me. Let me put it as simply as I can: If you have ever wanted to see a movie starring John Carradine, Joi Lansing, Lindsay Crosby, Chris Mitchum, and Ken Maynard, then Big Foot is almost certainly going to be your only chance. Not since Joan Crawford starred in Trog! has there been such an opportunity.” When the sheriff (Maynard) refuses to help search for Big Foot, a motorcycle club comes to the rescue, but as Ebert wrote, “This is no ordinary motorcycle gang”: “All of its members ride identical brand-new medium-sized Yamahas, which are

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Donna Anders’s naked snake shake provides a variation on the trope of the campfire dance in this publicity still for Werewolves on Wheels.

credited in the titles to a Hollywood Yamaha agency. The gang members also wear bright-colored nylon Windbreakers with pull-strings at the bottom, and they wear new knit shirts and dress loafers. The girls wear bikinis. The gang’s hairstyle is set by Lindsay Crosby’s receding ducktail.”49 The combination of a topical theme with a horror motif had been an exploitation ready-made, as seen with I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), The Ghost of Drag Strip Hollow (1959), and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (both 1966). But the real monster show in Big Foot, Ebert implies, is its gallery of aging Hollywood stars and their callow and talentless offspring. The Peace Killers (1971) stayed away from the supernatural, though it overloaded itself on the sacred and the profane in mortal combat. A hippy commune, led by a bearded fellow in white robes with a Jesus complex, is under siege by the Death Row motorcycle club, which has Manson Family inflections. At least it does according to the entry for the film in the AFI catalog, which offers the idea that the character of Cowboy was “made to resemble Charles Manson.”50 Quite where they have drawn this assumption

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Lobby card for The Peace Killers. The hippie cult that espouses nudity (especially for the women) is riffing on Charles Manson’s notoriety.

from is unclear, because if the film had wanted to exploit the growing notoriety of Manson, it would surely have done so through the leader of Death Row, who is utterly psychotic and depraved. The character of Cowboy is a cross-eyed doofus. The picture revisits the clash of cultures—peace-loving hippies and hate-spouting bikers—first seen in Angels from Hell and later given a western spin in The Savage Seven and Angel Unchained. The Magnificent Seven theme is replayed once more in The Peace Killers, with a rival motorcycle gang, the Branded Banshees, helping the hippies prepare for an attack from Death Row. The promise of novelty comes in the form of the Banshees, a predominantly black club led by a lesbian, Black Widow, played by Lavelle Roby. New World Pictures’ Angels Hard as They Come, with a screenplay by Jonathan Demme and Joe Viola, produced by the former and directed by the latter, similarly returns to the culture clash between hippies and bikers. Two outlaw clubs, the Angels and the Dragons, pitch up at the Lost Cause, a western ghost town, which is inhabited by a small band

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of hippies. The leader of the Angels, Long John (Scott Glenn), is immediately attracted to Astrid, one of the commune’s young women. She is played by Gilda Texter, best known for her appearance as the nude motorcycle rider in The Vanishing Point (1971). Despite their obvious differences, sweet flower child and greasy biker, they find a commonality: “You ride a bike and you’re guilty. I wear beads and I’m guilty.” She asks him about violence and Altamont, and he smarts at the suggestion that he is in part responsible for the violence at the festival. He tells her he’s never been to the speedway, that it had nothing to do with him, and further retorts by asking her if she was one of those hippy chicks “that chopped up all those Hollywood dudes in L.A.” Other than in marketing materials, this is the first time Charles Manson or the Rolling Stones’ concert had been directly referred to within a biker film. Keeping with the moment in the cycle’s inclusion of African Americans, the Angels are a mixed-race club, and Demme and Viola use the character of Monk ( James Iglehart) to raise the specter of racism. When lost among desert sand dunes and without transport or water, Monk encounters a young white couple in a dune buggy that refuses to aid him and racially insults and belittles him. Monk stands tall; he lives to ride back to Lost Cause and rescue Long John. This is one of those scenarios where Corman and his protégés offer a liberal view on social issues, though it barely pauses the flow of the exploitation elements, and the cause is surely not helped by the comely young woman disrobing in front of Monk (and the camera). She and her obnoxious boyfriend intend to find out if there’s any truth to the myth of the black stud. Monk turns around and walks away. Demme has claimed the film was loosely based on Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which, like the “metaphysical” in Werewolves on Wheels, gives the film a potential art house dimension. When Astrid is stabbed to death, the identity of her killer is kept hidden. The weight of evidence appears to point toward the Angels, but perhaps the Dragons are the guilty party? Maybe the hippies, led by Henry (Gary Busey)? Did he take a role in the murder? If this is the sum total of Kurosawa’s influence, then his impact is no more than superficial. Little, if any, screen time is given to establishing alternative and contradictory points of view on the murder. Who killed Astrid is a mystery—no more than that. Just as with the Naked Angels’ basis in Mutiny on the Bounty, you would have to dig deep to find the root inspiration for Demme’s film, if you could find it at all.

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Art direction was by Jack Fisk, starting a career that would include many of Terrence Malick’s productions. He made good use of the standing western sets at Paramount Ranch in the Santa Monica mountains. The setting was also used in Black Angels, and it appears suitably forlorn and abandoned to the elements and probably needed little in the way of dressing by Fisk. The Paramount Ranch was slightly bigger than the Spahn Ranch, located north of Los Angeles, which was also in disrepair and therefore also well suited for biker films, such as the few pickup shots of the location featured in Satan’s Sadists. Around the time of the Tate-LaBianca murders, the Manson Family made a home of sorts at the Spahn Ranch, and the producers of Satan’s Sadists would milk that association for all it was worth. Released in southern and midwestern regions in June 1969, Satan’s Sadists was directed by Al Adamson, son of western bit-part actor Denver Dixon. With President Samuel Sherman and board chairman Dan Kennis, Adamson was a key player in Independent-International Pictures. Their features were budgeted at under $200,000, and the company expected a return of at least $300,000 per title. Independent-International’s pictures were geared to the horror-action crowd and, as Variety reported, gave “continuing employment for such Hollywood vets as J. Carrol Naish, Broderick Crawford, Russ Tamblyn, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Keith Andes, Jim Davis and Lon Chaney.”51 These stalwarts are used partly for any lingering marquee value attached to their names and because Sherman, one-time editor of Screen Thrills Illustrated and Westerns Magazine, was a movie buff. Key to the company’s ethos was to keep campaigns for their releases flexible and responsive to local and regional differences and open to the possibility of exploiting emerging fads and news stories. “Sherman,” wrote Variety, “is especially disdainful of the major companies’ policy of setting a single national campaign on a film which remains pretty much unchanged throughout national release. Key to this is the majors’ position of being able to write off an unsuccessful picture or even shelve one without release, making them insensitive to the showmanship angles and revamped campaigns that often can salvage a questionable property.”52 According to the Independent Film Journal, Satan’s Sadists, the company’s first film, was made for under $125,000 and double-billed in some regions with another of their titles directed by Adamson, Hell’s Bloody Devils—a film about a contemporary Nazi cult made from acquired footage with outlaw motorcyclists added for extra selling power. Both films

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made use of the same stock footage of a car pushed over a cliff. Unlike the industry standard of striking two hundred prints, IndependentInternational made fewer than seventy-five and then played them off regionally. The journal’s reporter noted, “The formula which has provided paydirt for Sherman is ‘more action, less talk’ . . . In booking his films, Sherman is not essentially interested in the New York City and Los Angeles audiences. The money for his type of movie fare is in the ‘grass roots,’ an area where he correctly figured that horror, motorcycles and stalking monsters would rope in the customers. ‘Violent entertainments make money,’ he said . . . Sherman’s product plays the drive-ins and those situations catering to teens to 30s.”53 In March 1971, Boxoffice reported that the film had made more than $1,200,000.54 Discussing “exhib[itor] resistance in Manhattan” to exploitation fare, Variety noted how Independent-International had, with Satan’s Sadists, an edge over their rivals (“and an edge is important when dealing with subdistribs and exhibs”). The picture “was another motorcycle yarn coming at the end of the cycle when the Sharon Tate murders occurred. Pic had been shot on the Spahn ranch and had used Charles Manson and his ‘family’ during production. Literally overnight the campaign was changed to tie-up with the national publicity surrounding the murder of the actress and pic took off . . . It’s the kind of exploitation that generally gives this nether end of the distribution business a sullied name, but Sherman’s position is that they’re in business to sell a product to the public and so be it.”55 “Sick! Savage! Sensual!” ran the tagline in the original advertisements for the film that were run in Boxoffice in August 1969, with marketing shifting in late 1969 to early 1970 to incorporate the Tate murder and stories of the Manson Family. The new exploitation angle was announced in late December 1969: “The company pointed out the many similarities between the film and the Tate murder case, with the hippie gang leader of the film named Satan, one of the names employed by Charles Manson, accused in the Tate case. Star Russ Tamblyn looks like Manson, and his screen girlfriend, Regina Carroll, reportedly a double for Miss Tate. Coincidently, the film was shot on Spahn Movie Ranch where Manson’s ‘satan’s slaves’ lived, and Manson himself was thrown off the set when he disturbed the filming, all of which occurred before the Tate slayings.”56 Posters were redesigned and featured the taglines “See: Wild Hippies on a Mad Murder Spree! (It’s as Frightening as the Sharon Tate Killing)” and “Now: See on the Screen the SHOCKING STORIES You Are reading about in the

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newspapers TODAY!,” which were spread over a montage of newspaper headlines about Tate and Manson and images of the film’s stars.57 In its section on “Exploitips,” Boxoffice advised exhibitors to “advertise through handbills and buttons provided by the distributor. Aim promotion toward ‘rock’ stations. Get original Tate murder clippings and compare with information provided by Independent-International.” Suggested catch lines included, “Human Garbage in Sickest Love Parties! . . . They Start where All the Motorcycle Gangs Leave Off ! . . . Smashing and Slashing, Wild, Warped and Wanton!”58 In the same issue of Boxoffice, the film is reviewed and its potential for exploiting the “Tate-murder hippie cult” is discussed: “Unfortunately, the guts and blood, sex and thrills aspect of the film, emerge more strongly through the graphic ad displays than what appears on the screen.”59 The film was relaunched with screenings in Philadelphia, which gave occasion for Variety to finally provide a review, calling it a “sickie quickie and its vulgarities are many.”60 Satan’s Sadists opened in Los Angeles in May 1970. Its New York release followed eight months later in January 1971 and was hit by more poor reviews.61 The critic for New York’s Daily Mirror wrote, “Advanced publicity says [it is filmed in] the area where the Sharon Tate murders took place . . . I kept getting this gruesome thought that someone might come in to the theatre who actually—dug—this stuff. And this cat might sit in my vicinity . . . I’m not a nervous-type dame. I have covered murders, riots and small wars. But this I will tell you: never alone to another Adamson movie will I go. I’ll bring along my cousin, the cop, [and] while I review the picture he can review the audience.” She called the film a “hunk of hideous junk.”62 The Hollywood Reporter was in on the trend to critically dismiss the film: “Inane Freaky Feature  .  .  . When a couple tosses the speaker out the window of their car at a drive-in theatre and speeds away before the clattering of the box on asphalt has ended, one can assume there’s something wrong on screen. When others follow and there’s no one left except a few die-hards and a reviewer, one can be positive.”63 Satan’s Sadists opens with a rape and double murder before the credits and then moves on to another rape and three more murders, concluding with a further three rapes and murders. All the barbarism is carried out offscreen, though the misogyny behind these acts is manifest in the way Anchor (Tamblyn) treats his woman, Gina (Regina Carrol), in a callous, cruel, and physically abusive manner. This is compounded by making her appear complicit in all this: “I’d do anything he wants me to do. I’d even

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sleep with who he wants me to. Doesn’t he know I dig him?” With her gaudy makeup, a haystack of bleached blonde hair, and a “69” patch that covers the back of her sleeveless jacket, Gina appears suitably abject. “For once,” wrote the Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas, “the gang leader’s girl doesn’t look like a lacquered Hollywood starlet.”64 Gina is relentlessly punished for her love, fixation, loyalty, or call it what you will, for Anchor; eventually she takes a suicide ride over a cliff edge and dies with his name on her lips. The outlaws slay the characters played by Hollywood veterans Scott Brady and Kent Taylor, suggesting, like Mickey Rooney in Baby Face Nelson, that Tamblyn was using his role in Satan’s Sadists to shake off his juvenile good-guy reputation forged in Seven Brides and West Side Story. The reviewer in Variety wrote that his “performance is interesting in that his freaky pothead portrayal is the antithesis of his Metro lollypop image.”65 The film critic for Boxoffice, however, thought he looked more like a “tired, paunchy teddy bear than a vicious killer on a motorcycle.”66 And John Cardos, who plays the Indian outlaw Firewater, wears a badly fitting flesh colored cap on top of which is stuck tufts of hair, making him look more like a rubber chicken than a Mohawk. Whatever fault or value can be found in any of the film’s performances, critical opinion about the movie as a whole was uniformly negative. The poor production values and execution mitigate, it is argued, the abhorrent approach to its subject matter, and the bad filmmaking undermines any verisimilitude. As the Independent Film Journal reviewer summarized, Satan’s Sadists is “handicapped by a weak story that is badly directed.”67 When Variety called out Sherman on his bad taste in tying Satan’s Sadists to the Tate murders, Sherman said that he was in the “business to sell a product to the public and so be it.” As to the question of marketing sadism and brutality, Sherman pointed out that “most of his films are rated GP by the MPAA” (Sadists was rated R) and that the company hired a child psychologist to review their films, and he found their horror pictures “provide harmless aggression outlets for young people.” Moreover, Independent-International steadfastly, he said, avoided the “sexploitation market” not for any “lofty moral reason” but because Sherman “just doesn’t understand how to market sex commercially without getting mired in legal costs and local harassment. Blood is far less disputatious than sex.”68 Sherman explained this last observation to a journalist writing for the Independent Film Journal: “Moviegoers in the so-called ‘Bible Belt’ and Midwest

This Belgian poster for Satan’s Sadists fully exploits the Manson connection: “Sharon Tate is dead . . . is still alive.”

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areas are ‘offended’ by sex scenes in their movies, but not by violence. The thinking here is that violence is something they’re overly familiar with; they accept it quicker than they do sex in films. These audiences ‘cut chickens down on the farm but also go to church on Sunday.’”69 This says something about the low regard and patronizing attitude Sherman held for his target audience. Satan’s Sadists was not the only film to use the Tate murders in its marketing. C.C. and Company was retitled La Familia Manson on its release in Spain. This is somewhat more amusing than disturbing, as the film is the only outing in the cycle produced by a major company, and it stars football legend Joe Namath and a female lead with proven marquee appeal, AnnMargaret. It is also a parody of the biker film. “It probably isn’t essential to the enjoyment of C.C. and Company to be familiar with all the bike pictures that have followed in the wake of The Wild Angels. But it sure helps in recognizing this raunchy, hilarious movie for what it is,” wrote Thomas, “a lovingly precise send-up of the entire motorcycle genre.”70 C.C. and Company is not an exploitation film, even if it is certain what its attractions are: “Much touted is the nude scene with Ann-Margaret and Namath that promises to establish him as a superlover as well as superbowl star. For AnnMargaret’s role in high fashion, an elaborate wardrobe that includes mini’s and maxi’s was designed by Jon Shannon.”71 “Most of the cycle melodramas have S&M on their minds,” wrote a critic, “but C.C. and Company . . . is more concerned with the A&P [anterior and posterior].”72 When Gemini American Productions, the producers of The Hellcats and Big Foot, were hit by financial problems leading to the charge of nonpayment of unemployment and disability coverage, Anthony Cardoza broke away and formed his own company, Hawthorne Productions. Cardoza’s first project was Outlaw Riders, which was shot before Christmas 1970.73 The premiere was held in August the following year in St. Louis, though there doesn’t appear to have been any press screenings.74 The film was still doing the rounds as late as January 1973, with openings at thirty Chicago theaters.75 For the production, Cordoza reunited with The Hellcats scriptwriter Tony Houston, who moved into the director’s chair. Sonny West, a buddy of Elvis, who had a featured part in The Hellcats, took the lead alongside outlaw cycle regulars Bob Tessier and William Bonner. Bing Crosby’s son Lindsay, who’d earlier appeared in The Glory Stompers, was also featured.

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The budget for Outlaw Riders could not have been much beyond $100,000. As with his earlier features, Cardoza used nonunion labor.76 The five outlaws are quickly reduced to two riders and their chicks; screen time is dragged out by playing the four commissioned rock songs to their full extent and through lengthy dialogue scenes. After two poorly organized robberies, what’s left of the gang rides down to Mexico, and in a nod to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), they make plans to go even farther south, to Guatemala. Their money, along with their girls, is snatched from them by Mexican bandits. After an arduous pursuit, the film climaxes on a mountaintop. No one gets out alive, and the money, in yet another of the cycle’s allusions to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, is lost to the wind. As is the case with Satan’s Sadists, Werewolves on Wheels, The Peace Killers, and Angels Hard as They Come, the gang in Outlaw Riders is without a base. They don’t have a hangout space or clubhouse; they are nomads, motorcycle tramps, drifters on backroads that run through unpopulated desert and mountain locations. Independent-International, led by Sam Sherman and Al Adamson, produced their final stab at the cycle with Angels’ Wild Women, which was not given a press preview and has left barely a trace in the trades. With its title, the marketing image of four women brandishing whips, knives, ropes, and rifles, and a hollering tagline—“Hot, Hard and Mean . . . Too Tough For Any Man”—the film gestures back to the short run of femme-centered movies from earlier in the cycle (Mini-Skirt Mob, The Hellcats, Hell’s Belles) and connects to the contemporary vogue for action women in Blaxploitation and prison pictures. The movie opens with a black woman being chased and raped by two white men, cuts to a couple on a bike, and then cuts to a film set (where a low-budget World War II movie is being shot) before returning to the rapists pulling on their boots and shirts. From out of nowhere, four women appear who proceed to beat up the two men. The rest of the film revolves around scenes set on Spahn Ranch, where a Manson-like cult leader, played by biker stalwart William Bonner, holds court. Scenes feature sacrificial killings, naked female torsos, bikers drinking beer (and pissing into the mouth of an unconscious comrade), tousles with the police, a chase sequence or two, a big rumble, and a romantic reverie by a lake and a stable. These scenes are characterized by inordinate amounts of dead time, where nothing happens except the expenditure of film through the projector’s gate. There’s little in the way of motivation, explanation, or justification for

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any of these barely connected sequences, which are, at best, gestures made toward the promises other films have made. Looking back, Adamson and Sherman justified this mismatched assortment of moments as an attempt to stay with contemporary vogues in exploitation movies.77 Having produced a biker film only to realize late in the day that that cycle was out of favor with audiences now salivating over women-in-prison pix, they therefore made up new scenes and yanked the various parts together. Whatever the truth in all of this, Angels’ Wild Women was first released in the New Orleans and Memphis territories in July 1971 under its original title, Screaming Angels. The first of the women-in-prison films, The Big Doll House, was only then in the early stages of a regional release schedule and would not premier in LA until September. With its new title, Angels’ Wild Women, Adamson’s film was on regional release in November. This timeline may have allowed for shooting new scenes and re-editing old ones, no doubt those featuring Maggie Bembry, who plays Cool Chick, the molested woman in the film’s opening, but the idea that the reset was undertaken to better cling to New World Pictures’ shirttails seems dubious.78 An Independent-International trade press advert for its 1972 lineup was pitching it with an illustration of two bikers molesting a white woman, so it was not quite The Big Doll House Pt. II.79 More than likely, they just had a dud on their hands, which they tried to save. Whatever the filmmakers’ intentions, no doubt they were looking to capitalize on links to Manson, making more of the kind of marketing that supported the release of Satan’s Sadists, which after its initial release and during Manson’s trial refashioned its publicity and claimed the film had direct links to his cult and the murder of Sharon Tate. This exploitation angle was still there in a subsequent Independent-International picture called The Female Bunch, which one critic wrote “seems to have been pieced together by putting a little bit of every kind of highly exploitable film into one package. There’s a touch of motorcycle movie, skin flick, western, and even an ounce of contemporary influence thrown in with a bit of Charles Manson style cultism.”80 Crown rode out the cycle in 1971 with two pickups: Plateau Productions’ Pink Angels, a “provocative comedy satire,” and Tudor Productions’ Wild Riders, a “taut emotional action film . . . expected to start a new trend when it goes into release in April.” The latter, Crown hyped in a press release, was setting a company record by being booked for 573 playdates.81 The

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film takes the outlaw biker back to LA. Two psychotic cyclists are ousted from their gang and end up in a rich man’s house in the Hollywood Hills, where they abuse the two women who live there. Quite what new trend was being started here is uncertain—perhaps the home invasion trope used in numerous horror movies. Whatever the case, the figure of the biker as he appears here is no more than a cipher for the criminally demented. In Pink Angels, six queens, with plans to attend a ladies’ cotillion in LA, head south riding three BMWs with sidehacks. Along the way, they stop off for a food fight outside a diner, stock up on groceries at a gas station, get molested by dancing prostitutes in a bar, drink champagne with other bikers at a riverside picnic stop, and get hassled by “the man.” As satire, its target is opaque; as parody, it is underplayed; as burlesque, it has its moments. Despite Crown’s claim for numerous playdates, both films left barely a trace in the trades.82 Florida’s low-budget filmmakers produced their final offerings to the cycle: Brad F. Grinter chipped in with Devil Rider, and Hells Chosen Few director David L. Hewitt refashioned biker elements alongside a moonshine story in The Girls from Thunder Strip. Following Hells Chosen Few, Hewitt relocated to California, with the Spahn Ranch used as a key location. The film was shot and released prior to Manson’s notoriety. Gary Kent rejoins Hewitt in the same colors he wore in Hells Chosen Few. Biker movie regulars Jack Starrett, William Bonner, Lindsay Crosby, Jody McCrea, and Casey Kasem all make an appearance. Listed as released in 1966 in the AFI catalog and in 1970 by IMDB, the film first made an appearance in the trade press in August 1969 with an announcement that the picture’s distribution rights had been picked up by McGee Film Merchandising of Denver.83 Press and trade screenings were announced for Atlanta in June 1970.84 The film was not given a rating until January 1971, when it received an X.85 However, in August 1971, the film gained an R rating, which suggests it was resubmitted with cuts.86 Its next appearance in Variety was almost a year later, when its San Francisco grosses at RKO’s Golden Gate II were listed as a “dismal $600.”87 After these few references, the film disappeared from the journals of record. Devil Rider benefited from distribution by Goldstone Film Enterprises, which booked advertising for the film in March 1971 editions of Boxoffice. Taglines pegged it as “The Cycle Jungle of Hot Steel and Raw Flesh!” At the rear and front of the poster, a troupe of bikers sally forth, while center stage, one of their number, chain in hand, towers above a prone girl in a

The illustration on the front of the Pink Angels’ pressbook captures the film’s burlesquing of the biker picture.

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bikini: “Brutal Violence Turned On By Cool Chicks and Burning Rubber!” Avant-Garde picked the film up for distribution in Canada in May 1971.88 The titling of the film, as with Wild Riders, was an obvious grab at Fonda and Hopper’s coattails, with Goldstone trailing its release with “It picks up where Easy Rider left off.”89 There were no press screenings, and as with The Girls from Thunder Strip, the film quickly fell from view. Today it can be found on YouTube. The story is of a young runaway who hooks up with a bunch of bikers. It features Kung Fu for additional topicality—hence the title change for its video release, Master’s Revenge—and a great local teen band, Heroes of Cranbury Farm, kicking out the jams in a Dade County park. Fanfare’s final motorcycle picture, The Loners, was among eight features announced in December 1971 for release in the new year.90 All their pictures were “aimed at the under-30 market, and two directed to the black audience,” reported Variety. “Six of the features are pickups and the remaining two are Fanfare productions.”91 The Loners was described as a “motorcycle epic.” Marketing taglines penned it this way: “First there was Bonnie & Clyde . . . Then there was Easy Rider . . . And now the wildest breed of them all.” The film was produced by Jerry Katzman, with support from his father, Sam, and with coproduction provided by Cinemobile, which was “anteing up the below-the-line costs.” With other pictures, the company generally acted as a “subproducer,” which means for features costing under $700,000, they guaranteed “about 50% of the total budget.” With such deals, Cinemobile took on a “great measure of the production decisions, hiring the entire crew, including production manager and director of photography, or at least concurring with the producer’s choice.”92 Variety labeled the film as a “fast-paced meller” about three young people “waging a losing battle with society, being chased through the southwest by the police.”93 Dean Stockwell plays the Navajo Scots-Irish motocross rider Stein, who travels around New Mexico with his half-wit sidekick, Allan (Todd Susman). Stein is the double victim of generational conflict, first falling out with his father and being forced to leave the Sandia Pueblo reservation and then involuntarily instigating two road accidents. The first incident happens when a hypocritical older man tries to run him off the road for kicks but comes off worse. The second takes place when the police officers try to book him for the accident and end up crashing their car into a quarry pit. The driver of the car is killed, and the passenger (Scott Brady, appearing in his third bike picture) survives. His pursuit of Stein

The poster for The Loners links the picture to Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider.

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is now personal. On the road, Stein and Allan link up with Julio (Patricia Susman), another runaway. She had fallen out with her mother, played by Gloria Grahame, who joins Jane Russell (Born Losers) and Jan Sterling (The Angry Breed) in the biker pic gallery of maternal harridans. Variety points out the potential for “bally” accruing from a “femme lead appearing in the raw,” which was now something of a prerequisite in films pitched at the “under-30s.”94 Along the way, the film evokes The Graduate (1967) and, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bonnie and Clyde, ends in a hail of bullets. There’s no malice in the trio, who share little, apart from custom motorcycles, with the Angels and Devils of earlier pix in the cycle. The trio is good-natured but hapless, and they unwittingly end up playing a part in the death of eight citizens. The figure of the gay biker (Pink Angels), the horror movie hybrid (Werewolves on Wheels), the influx of Blaxploitation elements (Peace Killers et al.), the impact of Easy Rider and other youth-oriented mainstream movies (The Loners), and topical references to Altamont and Manson are suggestive of a cycle in terminal decline scrabbling around for new ideas. Yet this would be to read parody, hybridity, or other forms of intertextuality as symptoms of decay. The analyst identifies the end of the cycle and then reveals the signs of its decline, like a pathologist dissecting a fresh corpse. Film critics practiced something similar in their predictions of the biker movie’s demise, which began almost as soon as the cycle took shape, and then they continued in error with their prophecies until the actual fact of the matter six years later. The assumption made by both film theorists and critics is that form and content determine the span of a cycle. They don’t. However limited, the biker film was never rarefied or exclusive; it was always open to modulations and curious combinations, to influences and outside forces. Looking across the cycle as a whole, incremental changes are readily identifiable, though by no means uniform, such as shifts in location from LA to desert regions, or in the casting and dressing of the female lead from beach babe to tattooed mama, while other elements—the misogyny, violence, and vulgarity—become ever more fixed and maximized in their expression. The final chapter contends more fully with these aspects of the cycle’s form and content; the study then concludes with an analysis of the external forces that brought an end to the cycle.

4

Nazi Satanists, Vietnam Vets, and Motorcycle Mamas (and Other Such Pulp Delights) My folks were always putting him down They said he came from the wrong side of town They told me he was bad but I knew he was sad That’s why I fell for the leader of the pack —Shangri-Las, “The Leader of the Pack” I like them and what they do to me, ’cause they’re everything my parents hate. —Lu Ann in Born Losers

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There’s a War Going On In 1970, Fanfare, Solomon, Starrett, and Smith returned to the biker movie with The Losers. Still wearing their Devil’s Advocates colors, previously worn in Run, Angel, Run!, William Smith and Eugene Cornelius are reunited and join forces with Adam Roarke, star of Hells Angels on Wheels, The Savage Seven, and Hell’s Belles, alongside Houston Savage and Paul Koslo. These hoodlum riders have been sent to Vietnam to undertake a raid to rescue an American advisor held captive in neutral Cambodia. Kitting themselves out with heavily armored Japanese-made dirt bikes, they cross the border, but from there on in, things go badly. Three of the five survive to be locked up with the advisor, Chet Davis (played by the film’s director, Jack Starrett). He calls their raid stupid and unnecessary, explaining that their story will feature in the world’s press, not because of their heroics, but because their actions are so implausible: “Three doped up, freaked out, American motorcycle tramps tried to take on the entire Chinese Army . . . Now, don’t you think that is a little bit ridiculous?” The film was shot in the Philippines, where the producers made good use of cheap labor, facilities, and authentic-looking locations for their drama. Corman’s New World Pictures production of Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971), the first of many such films the company would make in the Philippines, is often cited as the trendsetter in this regard. Fanfare’s The Losers, however, was made nearly a year earlier than Hill’s film. Despite its self-evident absurdity, underscored by Chet Davis’s selfreflective rant, the film’s story was inspired by an actual offer to fight in Vietnam made by the Oakland Hells Angels. During a press conference held on November  19, 1965, Sonny Barger read a telegram he had sent to the White House: “I volunteer a group of loyal Americans for behind the line duty in Vietnam. We feel that a crack group of trained guerillas could demoralize the Viet Cong and advance the cause of freedom. We are available for duty and training immediately.”1 Regardless of Barger’s showboating, the film in fact owes more to the extraordinary stories and illustrations featured in men’s adventure magazines than it does to his fantasy. These “sweat” magazines were the last in the print line of pulp publications aimed at proletarian male readers, which between their lurid cover illustrations offered the promise of unbridled thrills and sensations of a

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peculiarly prurient persuasion. The key titles were Cavalier, Saga, Stag, Male, Real, True, and any number of variants on these—Man’s True Danger, Real Adventure, True Adventures, Man’s Adventure, Man’s True Adventure, True Men, Real Men, Man to Man.2 The emphasis on “true” and “real” in the titles was not there to suggest the magazines were peddling verifiable facts or authentic experiences. These journals traded in fantasies located in a recognizable but implausible world where truth is always relative. The publishers were not exploiting the gullible (if you say it’s “true,” then the reader will believe it is so) as much as catering to the pleasures involved in a reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief. That reader exchanged his money for the promise of experiencing a humdrum world transformed into a theater of sensation. Editor of men’s adventure magazines Mel Shestack told it this way: “We had these wonderful women in the Aleutians, and there’d be Japs in heavy furs with icicles coming out of their nose. But she’d be wearing a new mini-skirt with high heels, carrying a submachine gun, her parka open with no brassiere, popping out. And yet it seemed real, you believed that it happened.”3 The review of The Losers by New York Times critic Howard Thompson echoed Shestack’s description of the sweats: “For a full hour—and we timed it—the recruits slam around an outpost town in typical cyclistmovie style, brawling, drinking and anchoring to the local brothel . . . Two sideline romances extend right to the front, with the secret-mission truck also carrying two girlfriends, and we’re not kidding . . . The film falls all over itself along the way in dawdling admiration of the bone-crushing quintet as symbols of rebellion . . . But the scenario . . . and direction . . . seem mainly concerned with one thing. War or no war, you can’t push these guys around.”4 The critic at the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “[The film is] one of the most offensive movies of the year thus far . . . More troubling than the nudity, gory violence, and obscene language which permeate the film are the patently racist overtones that crop up in nearly every sequence.” Where twenty years earlier Samuel Fuller succeeded in dealing with “the dehumanizing horrors of war” in The Steel Helmet, he argued, The Losers’ characters are simply “bestial.”5 On and between the covers, the racism of the sweats was on open display, with white women depicted in various states of dishabille, gagged, blindfolded, bound, strapped, caged, chained, whipped, tortured, and threatened from all quarters by cannibals, head-shrinking tribesmen, South Pacific Islanders, African natives, savage Indians, jungle beasts, swamp

The adventure magazine MEN (September 1967) features biker girls in various stages of undress and the promise of “their shock-charged tape-recorded revelations.”

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snakes, weasels, Japanese army officers, jack-booted Nazis, and swastikaadorned outlaw motorcyclists.6 A curator of men’s adventure magazines, Adam Parfrey writes: Damsels have been distressed since the turn of the century in pulps, but nearly always the illustrations suggested that a hero was nearby, and his rescue pending . . . Publishers discovered that readers no longer felt that saving women from torture was on any level heroic. The new, unspoken heroes were not saviors, but the hardest and most degenerate torturers who wear Satanic hoods and are assisted by hunchbacked horror film outcasts. Even the longdespised swastika is seen as symbolizing a suppressed manhood that rids itself of women who humiliate and degrade by virtue of the superiority of their looks.7

The biker cycle emulated the sweats in its acutely limited repetitiveness in titling and in its narratives of degradation, in its depiction of objectified and sexualized women and sexual relationships without commitment or responsibility, and in its antiheroism and antiauthoritarianism. Critics uniformly considered The Losers to be influenced by The Wild Bunch and The Dirty Dozen, but the film is more tellingly aligned to the extraordinarily popular novels of Sven Hassel, which feature a motley crew of World War II German troops recruited from criminals, court-martialed soldiers, and other miscreants and undesirables. They are loyal only to themselves. They fight to survive and because they enjoy it and are good at it. They show no respect for authority, but they never entirely rebel. They are insubordinate but rarely mutinous. The novels are highly episodic, showing little if any regard for story building and character development. All this is echoed in the sweats, where, according to Shestack, “There’s always a ragtag band of guerrillas in the fiction, and there was always a sergeant or a mechanic who ran things, never an officer.”8 Hassel’s novels revel in the bawdy, coarse nature of his protagonists, who endure because they are more violent and think less about things than those who succumb. Like bikers, they are born to lose, and they don’t care. The fantasy that is being sold and bought is that you will give these soldiers and outlaws your fear and respect even as you dismiss them as the scum of the earth. With Chrome and Hot Leather, William Smith got top billing. In a short piece for Variety, AIP president Nicholson and chairman Arkoff

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explained “How to Attract Audiences.” “Promises are the key,” they wrote. “Every picture released must have the promise of something special for audiences. It must be different and the potential audience must know it.” Beginning with “an idea,” the filmmakers must decide if there will “be a market for that kind of film at the time we expect to have it ready.” Simply repeating a trusted story type ignores the possibility of finding “more promising subjects for future exhibition.” Films based on topical subjects have built-in obsolescence, they suggest, such as “a drug film or a gentle comedy about parental relations or a campus revolt drama.” On the other hand, films based on unproven topics pose a risk of being ignored by audiences. But when a known property is combined with a novel spin, such as a “motorcycle drama like Chrome and Hot Leather,” it is possible to forecast returns. “We do our best to figure that ultimate gross and then we determine if we can make the picture which will attract that gross—at a production cost that leaves us a profit.” With confidence in the “promise” of a project, the selling of the promise can begin, from preproduction until after the film’s national release: “We can practically visualize the ads on our films before we start shooting them. In fact if we can’t visualize the ads we shouldn’t start shooting! It is definitely not enough to just make a good picture, or even an outstanding one. Fortunes have been lost on just such accomplishments. Know precisely what and how and whom you are going to sell before you manufacture your merchandise.” “If American International can excite the public with the promise of something different about a subject that is currently in vogue,” they concluded, “then promise it to the public.”9 The reviewer for Variety wrote of Chrome and Hot Leather, “American International has come up with a novel twist on motorcycle pix . . . featuring black singer Marvin Gaye in his first dramatic role . . . It is a unique story and Lee Frost handles it with a comic sense, at times spoofing the whole genre of cycle pics . . . It all smacks of kids playing army on a Saturday afternoon and it is great fun to watch.”10 The film was given a familyfriendly GP rating. Publicist James Raker provided the taglines: “The Cong couldn’t kill him . . . but now his jungle combat skills were matched by bike freak savagery in a cycle gang war where winner takes all . . . Combat Vets vs Cycle Freaks in the Gut Fight of the Century . . . Don’t muck around with a Green Beret’s Mamma . . . He’ll take his chopper and ram it down your throat!” The exhibitor at Valley Drive-In in Velva, North Dakota, recommended Chrome and Hot Leather: “Another good action picture from AIP.

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They rarely miss on this type. We sold as many tickets for this one as for Love Story.”11 At least in North Dakota, Nicholson and Arkoff ’s promise appears to have been fulfilled. The film’s putative novelty was to use the war in Vietnam as a background for the drama (the heroes are combat veterans) and (uniquely) to give a lead role to Motown’s Marvin Gaye. Chrome and Hot Leather tells the story of four Green Beret instructors who tangle with an outlaw motorcycle gang. The outlaws kill the fiancée of one of the soldiers, who then form their own gang and set off for vengeance and glory. “In a most bizarre (and somewhat perverse) finale,” wrote the critic for the Independent Film Journal, “they surround the gang in a canyon and borrowing equipment from the army, barrage its members with mortars, shells, grenades, gas bombs and any other little item they can get their hands on. If one doesn’t think about any of the moral implications, this can be a very enjoyable film to watch.”12 The review in the Independent Film Journal began by noting that the cycle “has taken an offbeat twist of late. The last few have been involving the biker gangs with returning Vietnam veterans.”13 In fact, the cycle had been involved with the war in one way or another from the outset. In The Wild Angels, a radio report about the fighting in Da Nang is heard. Billy Jack in Born Losers is a Green Beret, a rancher, and a horse handler, and “some say [he] may have Indian blood.” In Angels from Hell, Tom Stern’s character is a Vietnam vet, as are key characters in The Angry Breed and Hells Chosen Few. These direct connections to the conflict are not figured as problematic, a critique of America’s foreign policy; they are rather apolitical, more a biographical fact, an authenticating appellation, shorthand for the character’s experience with violence, martial skills, and survival instincts. The pressbook synopsis for Angels from Hell defines Stern’s character as a motorcycle outlaw and veteran and “somewhat of a war hero and with the wild fever of front line battle still racing through his veins.”14 Mirroring the movie, no other mention is made of the war—that is, until the final sentence of the synopsis, when the pressbook provides an explanation for his motivation that is unstated in the film: “He dies in frustrated disillusionment in a rebellious fight against the very establishment for which he so bravely fought in Viet Nam.” Beyond such banalities, the biker film has next to nothing to say about the conflicted figure of the veteran. With the exception of Billy Jack, these veterans are not heroes, or necessarily even good guys, but they are representative. The biker film played to a

Poster for Chrome and Hot Leather. The film built on the trope of the militarization of the biker gang.

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demographic that would volunteer or be drafted; its audience did not have the option of a student’s deferment. Martin Rubin writes, “As the biker film cycle unfolded, the Vietnam War escalated, becoming an ever more central focus for . . . generational and cultural conflicts . . . In keeping with their contradiction-saturated film image, outlaw motorcyclists can function as implicit analogues for both sides of the war: either as US troops in their worst light, raping and razing their way through surrogate My Lai’s along American highways, or as Viet Cong on motorcycles, against whom the returning Vietnam veteran finds himself fighting the war all over again.” Rubin cites The Savage Seven and Angel Unchained as having especially strong associations with the war, both featuring “a ‘peasant’ community destroyed in the cross fire between opposing forces.”15 There is next to nothing in contemporary accounts to support the idea of the films as analogs for the war; rather, critical sources generally take such scenes of pillage to be repurposed tropes from westerns. The cycle’s engagement with the war was explicit, however banally it was expressed. The complexities involved in providing any kind of convincing platform for allegorical readings were beyond its reach. Chrome and Hot Leather opens with a combat sequence in what appears to be Vietnam, but the setting is a Green Beret training camp in California. Having introduced the four army buddies, the film cuts to a frozen image of William Smith, pausing long enough to establish his iconic presence before resuming to show him at the head of his pack of outlaw riders, the Wizards. The casting of Gaye draws interest in the film, but he was not the first black actor to appear in the cycle. Black outlaw motorcyclists made fleeting appearances as early as Angels from Hell, which featured the sharply dressed Soul 7 motorcycle club. Mixed-race gangs also appear in Run, Angel, Run!, but with Merrick International Pictures’ (MIP’s) the Black Angels (1970), race is brought to the fore in the cycle for the first time. The intricacies of contemporary race relations in America, however, are no more of a concern than was the articulation of pro- or antiwar sentiments. Putting Blaxploitation into the biker film was just part of MIP’s promise to do something different. MIP was a fly-by-night company launched in 1970 by Lawrence Merrick with just two titles, Black Angels and Whatever Happened to Count Dracula? Merrick told the Independent Film Journal that the next decade would “witness the absolute elimination of the major studios and the growth of the Hyphanate—the producer-director-writer-actor.”16 Whatever the

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future would bring—and for Merrick, it brought only one more film, a 1973 documentary on Charles Manson, and his death in 1977 at the hands of a deranged stalker—he was simply hyping his own low-budget setup. Black Angels makes the most of its limited resources, reworking the same shots of two riders tearing around LA suburbs, speeding up the footage, freezing frames, and jumping backward and forward in time, which gives some justification for showing the same scene several times. Screen direction and continuity are all over the place, and the ambient sound used to fill the dead spots between inane dialogue is often arbitrary—audio of locomotives with no train or track in sight, for example. The Black Angels are the law, the Satans Serpents are white, and the Choppers are a black club. The two gangs are in a long-standing feud, which is not racially motivated—if you believe Chainer, the leader of the Serpents: “A white man can’t have a decent fight with a black man without someone saying it’s racist.” But then it turns out the one out-and-out racist, Johnny Reb, a recent Serpent recruit, is passing as a white Texan; he is in fact a brother . . . which is to say that race in this film isn’t even skin deep. It is just a topical referent, a promise of difference—a novel raiment in which to dress up (once again) the biker film. Four years later, with The Black Six (1974), the production company Cinemation Industries would return to the novelties promised by Chrome and Hot Leather and Black Angels by recruiting six black NFL stars and casting them as Vietnam War veterans who get themselves some new cycles and set off to seek vengeance on an outlaw motorcycle club responsible for the killing of a brother. Critic for New York Daily News Ann Guarino called The Black Six “another insignificant black adventure . . . What makes this film a little different from what has passed as black fare is that it presents a group of well-known athletes who I am sure are more dynamic on the sports field than they are on screen.”17 The pulp engine that runs on the fuel of regular novelties purred on and on. One of the last biker films produced by AIP, The Hard Ride, was directed by exploitation regular Burt Topper and starred Robert Fuller, from TV’s Wagon Train and Laramie. The picture again yokes together race issues and the war. It tells the story of a returning Vietnam vet, a white marine, who promises his dying buddy, a black biker, that when he gets back home, he will ride his chopper, find his ol’ lady, and get together with his club. The film’s marketing features one of the longest taglines in the cycle: “They gave him a medal and sent him home for the long hard ride ahead . . . with

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a friend’s promise to keep, a friend’s enemy to kill, and a friend’s woman to take. Then he could start living for himself—if he was still alive.” Fuller’s marine finds himself caught between two bike gangs, both of whom want his buddy’s chopper. The film works hard on the interracial friendship (and love—the dead marine’s girlfriend is white). Forsaking the by now familiar overloaded electric guitar soundtrack, the theme tune is Righteous Brother Bill Medley’s soul version of the spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” The film is social commentary by the numbers; both the racial aspect and the returning vet are just factored-in topical elements, all of which get easily swept aside for the idyllic romantic interludes, mountain waterfalls and pools, and the drive toward the big showdown. Kevin Thomas thought otherwise. (He would.) He wrote that the film “more than merely reflects current feelings about Vietnam and an awareness of minorities, Topper shows how segments of our society overlap. In short, The Hard Ride, in which message and action are one, is not just another Hell’s Angels-versusthe Establishment replay.”18 The critic for the Independent Film Journal did not agree; he thought the film was “contrived and rather ludicrous” even as it tried to “find a new way to set up the traditional black leather slaughters.”19

Antiauthoritarian Nazis (and Other Such Oxymorons) The contradiction in the use of fascist emblems as antiauthoritarian symbols by bikers was noted in the review of The Wild Angels by the film critic for the London Times: “Curious, by the way, that here as in other manifestations the popular hallmark of reaction against police and state should be the emblem of the most pitiless police-state in history—the swastika.”20 Writing in Arts Magazine, the British critic Lawrence Alloway covered the release of The Wild Angels and its abundant displays of Nazi insignia and German steel helmets: The point is made early in [Corman’s] movie that a Nazi emblem is “garbage” to somebody old enough to have killed its original wearers in World War II. Now, however, the once-loaded symbol has been separated from its caste functions via the intervening comics and movies about “good” Germans. The deadly symbol becomes optional ornament. Its World War II significance is almost a lost language as it is incorporated into a style of personal

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adornment . . . The Swastika and the non-Christian Maltese cross are general again, like the “S” on Superman’s chest, like two-image Batman rings.21

In his Saturday Evening Post article on the Hells Angels, William Murray made a similar point: “The Nazi uniforms are worn only because they have become identified, through comic strips and men’s adventure magazines, with the license to band together, to push people around, to be somebody.”22 The Los Angeles Times also provided a semiotic analysis of the Hells Angels patches, noting in particular that the swastikas and inverted sheriff badges reflected their wearers’ negative attitude toward the law.23 The fascination with the Angels’ iconography was carried across several news items in the paper: “The Iron Crosses, the Nazi insignia, the German helmets—that’s to shock people,” said Barger. “To let ’em know we’re individualists. To let ’em know we’re Angels.” “Hell, we buy that junk in dime stores,” said another Angel. Discussing the “1%er” and “13” badges with another club member, the journalist has him concede “that the 13 indicated the wearer smoked marijuana. When questioned further about it and the ‘1%,’ his eyes became hostile and he said: ‘Now you’re asking about secrets, man.’”24 In another Times article on the Angels, it was reported that “some of the members also affect swastika emblems. ‘Not because they’re Nazis,’ [a biker] explained. ‘It’s nothing like that. We got nothing in common with the Nazis, or the Communists, except we’re outside of society, like they are.’ ‘Then why the swastikas?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s like a gag. They wear it to look mean. Scares people.’”25 The inchoate and contradictory explanations given by bikers for their flaunting of Nazi regalia is echoed in the pressbook for the Devil’s Angels: “The swastika and its militaristic brethren of insignia have taken on a new significance. They have become the proud symbols of the outlaw motorcycle rider. They still denote violence, hate, contempt for morality as they did a generation ago, but today they have become the protest of one segment against a society, not of society itself.”26 The motif of fascist imagery and symbols runs throughout the cycle. It is there right at the start of things in The Wild Angels’ credit sequence, which graphically conjoins a swastika with the first letter in the film’s title. It is then repeated throughout the picture, visible on jackets and headgear and in the abundant dressing of sets with oversized flags. In the church used for Loser’s funeral, a monumental swastika banner is draped before the pulpit and profanely aligned with a crucifix. In the bedroom where Loser is placed, after his abduction

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from the hospital, a Luftwaffe flag covers the wall behind the bedstead, and another swastika-bedecked flag is used as a bedspread. Meanwhile, at the bed’s foot, a baby sleeps in a cot. Some films were rather more cautious in the display of swastikas—The Savage Seven going so far as to black out the symbol sewn onto the biker’s jackets—but even the coyest films in this regard made full use of alternative Nazi iconography. Naked Angels decked out its clubhouse with huge Maltese crosses and a portrait of Hitler, but no swastikas. Opting instead for Confederate stars and bars, Rebel Rousers avoids the use of German military insignia. This was a self-conscious move on the part of the filmmakers, which is underscored in the satiric figure of Hebrew, a Jewish outlaw biker who wears a skullcap and a yellow Star of David armband. Given to practicing the art of meditation, Hebrew is the most violent of the cyclists. In the main, the films in the cycle are not shy about displaying swastikas, with many, like Hell’s Angels ’69, mimicking The Wild Angels’ decorative use of Nazi flags. In a report for the Village Voice about a chance viewing during a visit to Berlin of Hells Angels on Wheels, Andrew Sarris wrote about the dissociation of the signifier from the signified: Infinitely more interesting than the movie, however, was the predominantly youthful German audience that was audibly enjoying the roaring noise and crunching violence. Many of the kids were wearing Hell’s Angels leather jackets and stomp boots, and one or two actually sported the kind of German helmets and iron crosses so fashionable in the film . . . There were no swastikas

The title of The Wild Angels displays a swastika conjoined to the title.

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as there had been in Roger Corman’s Wild Angels. Corman, after all, is made of sterner stuff. But the German helmets were eerie enough in a German setting not because they symbolized a resurgence of Nazism but because they were less German helmets off the battlefields of German history, than German helmets from off the fashionable heads of the Hell’s Angels in San Francisco. By wearing a German Helmet, a German youth does not embrace his nation’s history. He dissociates himself from the suppressed shame of his elders. Some years ago Germans carried signs proclaiming their refusal to submit to another “Munich” over Berlin and only this year German students have enthusiastically endorsed American self-criticism on Vietnam as an atrocity comparable to the worst exterminatory excesses of the Nazis. The principle of dissociation is consistent in all cases. German youth is determined to get out from under the mountain of Nazi guilt even if final absolution demands the dismemberment of the German State.27

The separation of the signifier from the signified also played out in the rock scene: by the Yardbirds during the band’s final American tour in 1968, with Jimmy Page wearing a Confederate cap and, on his jacket, a German World War II military insignia; with the Iron Cross worn around the neck of the Stooges’ guitarist Ron Ashton at gigs and on the cover of their 1969 debut album; in Brian Jones, Keith Moon, Vivian Stanshall, and the Sweet’s Steve Priest dressing in full SS uniforms for a prank or to make some obscure political point; and in the swastika armband worn by New York Doll Johnny Thunders and emulated by punk rockers Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious. Motorhead’s Lemmy took this to another level with his collection of Nazi daggers and the like and his fondness for dressing as a Panzer tank commander. Guy Peellaert’s illustration of the Rolling Stones in Rock Dreams as cross-dressing pedophiles in SS uniforms is the reductio ad absurdum of pop music’s fetishistic play with fascistic symbols.28 The critic and theorist Simon Reynolds writes about pop and fashion as an industry machine that is remorseless in “detaching signifiers from historical signifieds . . . Images and styles that really represented something are emptied of meaning.”29 Except, one might add, the swastika’s ability to shock and provoke, or at least signify those responses. The accommodation of Nazi imagery spurred Susan Sontag to write “Fascinating Fascism” for the New York Review of Books, which was lauded on its publication in 1975. Discussing the contemporary rehabilitation of

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the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and her recently published book of photographs of Sudanese tribesmen, Sontag wrote, Fascist aesthetics . . . flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of things and grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, “virile” posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.30

The other text Sontag reviewed in her essay was a cheap paperback, Nazi Regalia, a checklist for collectors (or a handy manual for identifying outlaw motorcyclists’ insignia). She rightly calls this most quotidian of books “pornography,” a catalog of fetishes. Discussing the contemporary penchant for conflating the SS and sexual adventurism in Robert Morris’s pop art, Mishima’s novels, and in the films of Visconti (The Damned), Cavani (The Night Porter), and Anger (Scorpio Rising), she defined the erotic lure of fascism as a theater of sadomasochism, where gratification is “both violent and direct . . . in which sex becomes detached from personality, severed from relationships, from love . . . The aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.”31 The sadomasochistic fantasies of the biker film translate directly into Sontag’s conception in which the experience “carries with it the thrill of transgression, blasphemy, entry into the kind of defiling experience that ‘nice’ and ‘civilized’ people can never have.”32

Madcap Femmes and Hellcats As much as “S&M” played its part, “T&A” was always a fixed attribute of the cycle. T&A suggests that the cycle—as much as the bikes, the hell raising, the violence, and the antiauthoritarian stance—was clearly, and unambivalently, geared to male viewers. This gendered appeal is undeniable, yet the cycle did make consistent attempts to engage women in the audience. The terms of this appeal are not without contradiction and can rarely be

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seen as progressive, but that doesn’t invalidate the often bold attempt to create female interest. In Hells Angels on Wheels, Jack Nicholson, as he is defined by Variety’s critic, played the “non-conforming non-conformist.” The journal considered his contribution to the film to be “made up mostly of variations on a grin.”33 Without any real intent, Nicholson’s loner motorcyclist hangs out with the Hells Angels, who call him Poet. He is drawn toward Shill (Sabrina Scharf ), the girlfriend of the gang’s leader, Buddy (Adam Roarke). She looks good in her burgundy-colored leather pantsuit or leopard-skinprint two-piece. Shill returns Poet’s attentions, but it is not clear if she is doing this to make Buddy jealous and to get him to turn his eye away from another woman or because she, like Buddy, has rejected monogamy as “square” and just digs Poet. Whatever the dynamic, Poet finds it hard to make love to Shill with her roommate present. He is coy, and she mocks his “nice middle-class morals.” Later she teases him about being scared of her, of what she can do to him, and for thinking last night’s lovemaking was anything more than what it was. She is, in her own words, “a put-down artist” mocking and belittling Poet. In return, he challenges her over why she stays in an abusive relationship with Buddy: “Maybe you’re just a broad who likes to be pushed around.” Cryptically, she tells him they are all running, scared of taking responsibility. Poet has revealed to her his sensitive side, which she scorns: “I don’t think I like you when you go getting gentle with me.” Toward the film’s end, she tells Poet that she is pregnant with Buddy’s child. Knowing Buddy will unequivocally reject fatherhood and responsibility, Poet tells Shill he will look after her and the baby. The denouement hangs on whether or not she will accept his offer and walk away from Buddy. When the two men fight each other—perhaps over Shill, perhaps for honor, but most likely because they have to—it is not certain who she has chosen, but as the brawl reaches toward a climax, she sides with Buddy, and Poet walks away. Writing about girls and women in rock culture, Norma Coates refers to Stallybrass and White’s theory of transgression to explain how teenyboppers and groupies are used to uphold normative ideas of masculinity. This is achieved through “displaced abjection,” whereby a “low social group turns its power and distain against a group that is even lower.” In rock culture, Coates argues, this is exemplified in the contradictory need for and abhorrence of women: “It was not enough to designate women as low Others . . . They had to be actively distained and kept in their place. At

An Italian poster for Hells Angels on Wheels, which features Sabrina Scharf as the film’s main attraction.

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the same time, women were very necessary for the maintenance and coherence of rock masculinity, as sexual objects as well as adoring subjects.”34 Within biker movies, women conform to this paradigm. The homosocial spaces and activities are an equivalent to the rock scene. Male bonding between the bikers is just as pronounced as it is in rock culture, perhaps even more so, because it is dramatized in a compressed form that aims for immediacy of effect, seen most aggressively through horseplay in clubhouse scenes. With the men shown wrestling, grabbing, hugging, and even kissing one another, the presence of women is vital in displacing the specter of homosexuality, though more than a few film critics called it out. Inasmuch as they were sold as an attraction to both male and female viewers, the leading female characters in Wild Rebels, Devil’s Angels, and Hells Angels on Wheels suggest the need for a more complex understanding of the role of the motorcycle mama. Putting aside the image of the abject woman, Coates argues that groupies flaunt and use an “aggressive sexuality.” In doing so, they articulate “a transgressive act for women even in the mid-1960s . . . They were playing out their own fantasies, using rock stars as sex objects and little more.”35 Ambivalence is stitched throughout the figure of Shill, whose tough public persona hides her vulnerabilities. Her feminizing of Poet, the teasing of him for his romantic inclinations, her rejection of courtship rituals and of sexual loyalty, can all be remedied and she can be redeemed if she will accept his offer to take care of her and her baby. Instead, she rejects Poet and all notions of conformity and propriety and takes her pleasures where she finds them. The nihilism evoked in The Wild Angels, Devil’s Angels, and Hells Angels on Wheels was not universally present within the cycle. The Glory Stompers, for example, delivered a traditional conservative resolution by reforming the couple who had been violently pulled apart at the story’s start. The romantic lead, played by Jody McCrea (son of Joel and veteran of the Funicello and Avalon beach movies), at the film’s end embraces not only the girl, pretty in pink-and-blue pastel shirt and pants, but also the idea that “being a citizen isn’t all that bad.” Born Losers finishes with the formation of the couple, the much beaten and abused Vicky professing her love for the battered and shot Billy Jack. This does not forsake the possibility of perceiving in the figure of the woman complexity, ambivalence, and contradiction even as she is reduced to the kind of cipher that informed the view of postwar genre directors Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. In essence, Boetticher saw the

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woman’s role in the western to have no significance other than to give men something to fight over. “In and of herself,” he said, “the woman has not the slightest importance.” Mann similarly argued that “a woman is always added to the story because without a woman the Western wouldn’t work.” The woman then is both significant and of no significance. Film scholar Pam Cook suggests the “dual, contradictory role of women” in the western is precisely the point.36 In their objectification, with the threat and actuality of sexual abuse omnipresent, in their marginalization—in the story, in society, and in the gang—and with the air thick and turbulent with a virulent misogyny, the women in the biker film not only share a set of gendered conventions with women in the western but might well be considered to represent the absolute reduction of such a mode. Yet a careful consideration of characters like Shill, Lynn, and Linda, who are by no means unique within the cycle, suggests they are not simply passive agents and foils for the men but have agency, however limited and circumscribed by convention. If the woman in the biker film has no other purpose than to shore up a gang member’s heterosexuality by giving him an alibi against accusations of homosexuality, to pose as a mannequin, to provide an audience for male antics, or to act as an object to be fought over, to be possessed and used, how can the attraction the films held for women be accounted for—if, indeed, they had any such appeal whatsoever? In Angels from Hell (1968), the “Madcap Femmes,” the film’s motorcycle mamas, are used as spectators for their men’s “sport”—fighting, drinking, riding, and general horseplay—most emblematically when they are grouped together in a window frame while outside the gang members are being bullied by the police. Arlene Martel plays Ginger, the owner of the go-go club where the gang hang out. Clean cut in a miniskirt and mod clothes, she makes it clear that the gang is tolerated because they amuse her and that she is no man’s woman. She is independent and unattached; lovemaking is done on her terms. She tells gang leader Mike (Tom Stern), you are “my guest tonight.” Later, his eye wanders toward one of the club’s dancers, whom he then takes to Ginger’s bed. The couple’s sex play is interrupted by a switchblade held across his throat. The audience’s expectation is that Ginger wields the knife, but it turns out to be the dancer’s leatherjacketed lesbian lover. Much to her own amusement, Ginger set up the scene, making the point that she is not his plaything or fool. The construct is reinforced when Ginger is contrasted with empty-headed starlets who congregate around a Hollywood producer’s pool. Even with such moments

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The biker women in Angels from Hell act as an audience for male antics.

of female agency and individuality, the film’s misogyny is hardly, if at all, displaced. In her essay on the 1960s and 1970s sexploitation filmmaker Doris Wishman, feminist scholar Tania Modleski questions the essentialist assumption that “sleazy, gross-out films” exist for male pleasure exclusively: “Is there any ultimate value in finding evidence that women can be every bit as raunchy and sleazy as men? What do women have to gain by entering the realm of the grotesque?”37 In answering these questions, she assumes there may be a “kind of split response on the part of some female viewers who recognise their connection to the woman on the screen but are ready to face the most extreme forms of female victimization without blinking, that is, without letting themselves be victimized (terrorized) by a representation of that victimization.” She continues: “Such a viewer neither repudiates her identity as a woman nor identifies with the (often) psychotic male on the screen (or in front of the screen, for that matter)—she does not merge her identity with that of the torturer, at least not to the point where she disavows any connection with images of female suffering.”38 Can Modleski’s formation help account for the attraction the biker films may have held for female viewers? To add further complexity to the picture, what role might class play in the way the films made an appeal to female interests?

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Discussing the girl group phenomenon of the early 1960s, musician and critic Charlotte Greig considers the shifting terrain of pop music aimed at teenage girls. One fracture in the landscape of romance came in the form of the Shirelles’ 1962 hit “Baby, It’s You,” figured as “innocent sincerity.” With that song, the group, alongside the Ronnettes and the Shangri-Las, in “eyeliner and going out with the wrong type of guy,” perform a version of “generational rebellion.” The Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel,” a hit in 1962, further represented this shift in tone. Greig writes that the song expresses: “a fundamental discontent amongst teenage girls with the future on offer to them: if you fell for the rebel, you were hardly going to end up in a nice house with two nice children, as your parents had planned. For the teenage girl, the rebel hero was undoubtedly a symbol of freedom from the restraints of conventional society, perhaps even from marriage; by identifying herself with him, she was able to proclaim her own rebellious individuality.”39 Greig is not making a claim for an inchoate feminism in “Leader of the Pack,” for example, but she is giving agency to the female listener, performers, and the song’s characters that other critics had hitherto failed to recognize. Most importantly, Greig identifies the limits of the world inherited by working-class girls and how a refusal of those parameters, however fantastical and contradictory, is manifest within their pop culture. Given the number of filmmakers with a background in producing teenpics, this construction of the rebel figure’s appeal in pop music can help configure how the biker film might make a similar plea to female viewers. The representation of a transgressive female figure, in all her complexity, is part of the cycle’s tableaux of unruly attractions. Nondomestic, nonconformist, and unmarried yet clearly sexually active, the biker woman is a refusal of the normative role of the life-affirming heroine. The figure of the maternal, nurturing, and tender woman is the cycle’s structuring absence. Hells Angels on Wheels begins with a panorama of the San Francisco cityscape juxtaposed with a park garden. The tranquil scene is despoiled by a kick-started motorbike, which then tears up the flower beds. Within the following montage, a crucifix, hanging from the neck of a statue of Columbus, is contrasted with an Iron Cross worn by an Angel. The defiling of religious iconography foreshadows the bullying of a pastor into leading a wedding ceremony and the despoiling of his small church; it is a scene that echoes the profanity of the funeral in The Wild Angels. The sacrilegious is

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also at the fore in Born Losers: the patch for the outlaw club features an image of a crucified female nude pierced by an arrow with a flight in the form of a swastika. For all the agency the outlaws appear to possess, their transgressive acts are as limited in scope, if as different in kind, as those of their women. The one vocal performance on the Hells Angels on Wheels soundtrack is called “Study in Motion #1,” sung by the Poor. The song is constructed on the repeated refrain of “moving, but going nowhere.” The recording is an aural commentary on the aimlessness of the Angels played over a sequence of them clowning around on their bikes, turning donuts, and pulling wheelies. The murder of a sailor at an amusement park had been the motivation for the gang to get out of the Bay Area, and the wedding is the excuse for a party, but when that is followed by the death of a car driver forced off the road by the Angels’ recklessness, the film stutters to an end, played out in the suitably emblematic ruins of a roadhouse. Here, Poet rejects the Angels: “Don’t tell me anything, man. I’m not a member of your private army . . . I don’t need you, and I don’t need your rules or your uniform, man.” Echoing this speech, Shill rejects Poet’s offer of security and domesticity. She wholly refuses to conform. Buddy tries to run down Poet but succeeds only in killing himself. The finale is nihilistic; no one walks away with anything of value or meaning. There is no romance, no sentiment, no transcendence. There is nothing. The display of nihilism is at odds with the

Born Losers motorcycle club’s profane colors.

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film’s opening, where a pair of saddled, riderless horses running free along a suburban street are used as an analogue for the cavalcade of cyclists, legion in number, crossing the Bay Bridge; they are warriors seemingly in control of their destiny but only moving, going nowhere. The trade press announcement of the opening of The Hellcats, playing with The Wild Rebels, across twenty-five citywide theaters and driveins in the Los Angeles region, heralded the picture as “the first all-female motorcycle gang film.”40 Whatever its shortcomings in production values, story, and characterization, the film displayed a confidence in putting women center stage, leading the pack of bikers, making the drug runs to Mexico, dealing with the mob, and taking the men they want, when they want them. Given the wanton misogyny of the majority of the films in the cycle, this is no small turnaround. The film does not shun the by now standard formula of having a rape scenario, in this instance done entirely offscreen following a short scene in a park where three bikers interrupt an artist and his seminude model. In contrast to the coarse biker girls, the film promotes the usual fashion-conscious and neatly coiffed girlfriend. She spends most of the film undercover as a slightly less grungy Hellcat who, along with a Vietnam vet, is seeking the killer of her slain fiancé, a narcotics agent. The film’s poster art and taglines are licentious. At the poster’s heart is an illustration of a chain-wielding Hellcat, with a pirate patch over one eye, wearing tight jeans and big biker boots. A platoon of motorcyclists, male and female, takes the rear and fill the image to her left and right, creating the shape of a vulva. If you think that image is fanciful, then compare the poster with others from the cycle, where phallic imagery is the norm, with a woman shown astride a motorcycle or where the bike is thrusting toward her. Running above six photographic inserts of Hellcat members is the line “The Cycle Gang Girls . . . Scratching . . . Clawing any Guy who gets in Their Way.” The more prominent tag is “Leather on the outside . . . all woman on the inside.” Boxoffice reported that the film had broken all records for Crown International, outplaying by 50 percent its previous record holder, Wild Rebels, on prerelease engagements in Tucson, Phoenix, and San Diego.41 Two months later, the journal reported on Crown’s marketing campaign, which included tie-ins with motorcycle companies, a soundtrack album, and a paperback novelization of the screenplay. Staking a claim for

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The Hellcats poster strikes a contrast with the phallocentric nature of most biker imagery, like that seen in the Angels Die Hard poster.

the film having dual appeal to men and women, Boxoffice noted that the men’s magazine Adam featured a layout of some of the girls in the film and New California Magazine ran a three-page “photographic fashion layout.”42 On the back of these good tidings, Gemini Productions set about making a sequel, Hell’s Outcast.43 It never materialized, though producer Anthony Cardoza returned to the cycle in 1971 with Outlaw Riders. Following a run of self-financed blood-and-gore pictures, including Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), Monster a Go-Go (1965), and A Taste of Blood (1966), Herschell Gordon Lewis entered the fray with his biker movie She-Devils on Wheels (1968). Like Savages from Hell, it had a Florida setting and received next to no major reviews in or out of the trade press. The film was initially sold on a states’ rights basis, which meant it was peddled to regional distributors for an upfront fee, but when the film showed a little traction, distribution was taken over by AIP. In the “Exhibitor Has His Say” column in Boxoffice, Bill Sellers, of Mineral City Theater, Mineral City, Ohio (population nine hundred), reported that She-Devils on Wheels was “very good. The best of the cycle pictures. You have to see it to believe it. This is what they want—not one walked out. It could offend, but who can tell. It’s worth a good date. Played Fri., Sat., Sun. Weather: Rain.”44

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Like The Hellcats, the film was sold on the novelty of switching female for male outlaw bikers. The script was by Louise Downe, who had worked with Lewis in a number of capacities as well as producing screenplays for him. She and Lewis conceived of the film as an unruly burlesque. The ManEaters are a motley crew of female cyclists who run regular races to see who will get first pick of their male followers. Their clubhouse, as in the other films, is where the parties and debauchery happen, but it isn’t decorated with swastika emblems. Instead, the walls are covered in floral wallpaper. Lewis spends a good deal of screen time recording his actors in lengthy bouts of frottage. There’s no nudity, but a shower scene offers a leg show of sorts, and bra-and-panty-clad bodies are often on display. There’s an initiation scene for the young novice Honey Pot, who gets to choose her man (or men)—“Come and have a taste of Honey,” she screams joyfully at the boys after being baptized in engine oil. A rumble with a rival gang of men ends with the Man-Eaters as victors. Their victory is celebrated by urinating on the losers (the actual pissing is done off-screen). As this is a Lewis picture, there are scenes of gore and blood and the decapitation of a rider. The film is dull and funny in equal measure and has a great theme song: “We are the hellcats nobody likes, Man-eaters on motorbikes . . . Get off the road.” AIP produced their own “femme cycle gang heller-drama” with the MiniSkirt Mob, which they double-billed with Angels from Hell.45 “Since neither taste nor logic seems to be necessary for the success of film cycle gang slam-bangs, American International quite likely has another moneymaker,” wrote a critic in Variety. “B.O. prospects look particularly good from teenyboppers, tired old men, and others who like sex and violence revved up and explicit . . . [The] camera moves with sensitivity and sureness as it sweeps over timeless Arizona horizons and contemporary California faces.”46 Opening with images of a parade and a rodeo, the filmmakers create a link with past and present, referred to in Variety, by cutting seamlessly from a rider swinging a leg over his horse to a boot kick-starting a motorcycle. Shot on location in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, the film effortlessly evokes the western. The film reviewer for New York Daily News made this point when she noted of the double bill that the “films seem like updated Westerns with gangs riding motorcycles instead of horses. Underneath the modern trappings is the old plot about bad guys tearing around and clashing with the good guys.”47 The New York Times thought the double bill consisted of “two reels of celluloid junk” that recycles and

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“gathers up some stale left-overs from the film company’s other cycle sagas.” Angels from Hell was deemed to be “merely dull”; Mini-Skirt Mob was “sickening.”48 Following his role in The Hellcats, Ross Hagan reappeared as the beefcake lusted after by the Mini-Skirt Mob’s leader, Shayne (Diane McBain). Hagan’s character, Jeff, a rodeo champion, has jilted her for the more feminine figure of Connie (Sherry Jackson). Shayne’s credo is “I saw him, I wanted him, I got him.” Having gotten Jeff, she is not going to let him go: “You need a real woman, Jeff. Not a mouse.” Cajoling her fellow femme cyclists, including her sister, Edie (Patti McCormack), and using her charms on the male bikers, she sets about terrorizing Jeff and his new bride. Fistfights between the men and catfights between Shayne and Connie follow, and amid these shenanigans, gang members dance, drink, and grope one another at a lakeshore party. In sharp contrast to the gnarly looking girl gang in The Hellcats or the thrift-store glam of the Man-Eaters in She Devils on Wheels, the women cyclists are dressed to the nines in their kinky boots, miniskirts, and matching tunics with the gang name on the back. Their hair is beautifully set, blonde, and stacked high. Their eyelashes look like clipped raven feathers. They ride stock Hondas (the men ride Triumphs). Visually much of the film compares with earlier AIP beach movies; director Maury Dexter had a long CV in teenpics, including Surf Party (1964) and Wild on the Beach (1965), and he provided the mandatory images of women in bikinis. The shift in tone from beach to biker movie can be measured in the sex suggestiveness of much of the dialogue and some of the action. “Was she better than me?” Connie asks Jeff. “Sure, I slept with her,” he replies, “but I made no promises.” Edie seduces Spook (Harry Dean Stanton) with a proposition implied by her sliding her manicured fingers up and down the barrel of his rifle. When Shayne’s toying with the affection of Lon, Jeff ’s old sidekick, looks like it’s going too far, she slaps him down and tells him any lovemaking will be on her terms. Nevertheless, he overpowers her, and the threat of rape looms. The film unsettles as it oscillates between the coy, chaste imagery associated with beach movies and a more carnal supplication. The male characters, despite their physical maturity (none look under thirty), have childlike propensities and a teenager’s stuttering sexual proclivities. The film critic for the New York Post found the sex and sadism much harder to

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take in this film than in its companion piece, Angels from Hell, “because the driving force . . . is not a dumb brute but a pretty blond, played with steely viciousness by Diane McBain . . . She’s painfully unfeminine.”49 After the Mini-Skirt Mob, director Maury Dexter returned to the cycle with Hell’s Belles (1969), which he also produced. AIP picked up distribution. Dexter was reunited with Mini-Skirt Mob alumni Jeremy Slate and revisited Coronado National Forest for the film’s setting. Playing the villain to Slate’s hero, Adam Roarke made his third starring appearance in a biker movie. John Gordon White, who had helped write The Hellcats, The Glory Stompers, and Mini-Skirt Mob, worked on the script. In all of its marketing, the film is strongly aligned with the series of distaff outlaw motorcycle movies like Mini-Skirt Mob and The Hellcats. Both the release title and the alternative title, Girl in the Leather Suit, underline the correspondence. The poster invites potential viewers to “meet the debutante in a leather skirt. Too young . . . Too tough . . . Too itching for action to look for it . . . She’ll make it where she is!” The trailer also foregrounds the distaff attraction. The voiceover puts all the emphasis on the female characters: “Watch her—she knows every trick in the book. She’s one of the babes that rides with the boys that light Hell’s fires. Hip chicks with an itch for the kind of action it takes a lot of man to scratch. A supercharged triangle  .  .  . two chicks—two guys and one out-of-sight cycle  .  .  . When they fight, anything goes. When they love, everything goes.” The selected clips back the narration, emphasizing those moments where the women figure most strongly in the action and in romantic entanglements. Even the company’s story synopsis provided in publicity materials puts the emphasis on the female angle: “Discarded for Tampa for imagined infidelity, she was a pack girl, available to any of the riders who wanted her; that’s why she was traded off for Dan’s nice, new bike.”50 Despite the marketing ploys used to sell the film, it has little in common with the gender burlesque of She-Devils on Wheels, Mini-Skirt Mob, or The Hellcats. Like The Savage Seven, the film reuses an old western plot—in this case, Winchester 73. Instead of the totemic rifle that is won in a competition and then lost, which starts a pursuit to reclaim it, Hell’s Belles’s object of desire is a Triumph dirt bike. The motorcycle had been won in a motocross race by Cowboy (Slate) but is soon stolen from him. In turn, the Triumph is taken from the thief by Tampa (Roarke) and his gang of dirt bikers. Among ruined adobe buildings, Tampa gives his time and affection to the bike rather than to his woman, Cherry (Angelique Pettyjohn). She

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has ousted her living rival for his affections, Cathy, by telling Tampa about her infidelity. Played by Jocelyn Lane, the main visual attraction in the film poster, Cathy is “turned out.” When Cowboy catches up with Tampa and demands the return of his property, he is offered Cathy as payment for the bike. It is not a trade Cowboy wants to make, but for better or worse, he is left with her, and she with him. In his attempts to reclaim the bike, an uncertain trust builds between Cathy and Cowboy. He wants the bike back because he can sell it for $2,000, which he needs for the upkeep of his ranch. Land ownership comes with a sense of responsibility to himself and others. He has given up running with motorcycle gangs; his crops are growing up, and he aims to do the same. Cowboy would seem to be an attractive proposition for Cathy, who Tampa has treated like dirt, discarded, and abused. “Why stick with him?” Cowboy asks. Why is she constantly bucking to return to the pack? She retorts that she has feelings for Tampa, which she says is something Cowboy has never held for anyone. Tampa’s psychosis, fueled by his refusal to give up the bike, becomes manic, and he is deserted by the gang. All alone, he challenges Cowboy to a duel of sorts. Like in a joust, swinging chains, they ride at each other. Tampa is knocked from the bike. Immobile from his injuries, he tells Cathy how much he loves and needs her. He pleads with her to help him when only moments before he had rejected her. Cathy seems unmoved by his pathetic appeals and rides off with Cowboy, but having gone fewer than one hundred yards down the dirt track, she gets him to stop. As if enacting the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel,” she dismounts and, without a word between the two, walks back to Tampa. Momentarily looking over his shoulder, Cowboy, with a shrug, rides off into the sunset. The character most like Cathy in Winchester 73, Lola (Shelley Winters), learns something about good men and bad men in the course of the story, and she is changed for the better by knowing the hero, played by James Stewart. They may not have formed a couple, but the world is no longer the same for either of them at the film’s conclusion. However, Cathy appears to have learned nothing and doesn’t want things to change. The bad girl returns to the bad boy, but it is her choice. She decides her own fate, romantic notions be damned. In this she echoes the female protagonists from earlier films in the cycle, such as Hells Angels on Wheels. The men seem simply to be acting out their impulses; in contradistinction, Cathy has agency. She can make a choice, even if it is not one a mainstream character, like Lola in Winchester 73, would pick. Among the bike riding and

The Italian art for Hell’s Belles, which imitates the American posters, keeps the sexualized image of the female biker at the center of the cycle’s attractions.

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stunts, male bonding and competition, and a relentless misogyny, these are slim pickings for any female viewers, even as the motif of the unreformed bad girl is replayed consistently across the cycle. The film’s reviewers were not immune to the attempt to appeal to men and women, even when they were generally dismissive of its attractions. Once again, Kevin Thomas found a reason to write a positive critique of a biker movie, along the way noting that the “title has little relation to the story” and that “for all her glamour, Miss Pettyjohn displays plenty of spunk along with her curves.”51 Variety reported that this “surprisingly literate, generally well-acted bike-o-rama jumps to life . . . contains a moral . . . Rest of film, in tradition of the oater, (and Bicycle Thief?—Ed.) is search by the hero for the villain . . . Arizona presents a necessarily dry and drab background.”52 In Women’s Wear Daily, which was surely not a regular reviewer of biker movies, the critic wrote, the film “is the kind of cheap exploitation movie that used to be about sheepmen and cattlemen and then about the Nazis and Americans and then about beach blankets and is now about motorcycles.”53 Continuing, she described Jocelyn Lane’s character, Cathy, as a “sleazy chick who looks like a cross between Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margaret. None of the characters bear the least resemblance in appearance or life-style to a real motorcycle gang.”54 New York Daily News thought the film displayed the “mood of an old western.”55 Among the trends in production listed by Boxoffice for 1971 was a cache of “film[s] for racing enthusiasts . . . whether of the motorcycle or automobile genre.” New World Pictures had entries with Angels Die Hard, Do Unto Angels (released as Angels Hard as They Come), and Bury Me an Angel.56 The latter was helping ease spring doldrums in Dayton, Ohio, according to Variety, reporting good box office returns at three drive-ins, aided by effective television promotions.57 Boston also reported good box office takings of $5,500 for the film at one theater.58 Between the May Dayton run and the August Boston outing, Blue Ribbon Pictures, which served New Orleans and Memphis territories, released the film in March and promoted it as part of its package of pictures that included The Big Doll House, The Student Nurses, and The Love Doctors. The former title was getting the biggest push, and Bury Me an Angel was pitched using a still from Angels Die Hard, with which it was generally double-billed.59 New World Pictures’ Angels Die Hard and Bury Me an Angel shared a remarkable number of creative personnel, with multiple overlaps in cast and crew and many taking on more than one role. The executive producer of

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the former, James Tanenbaum, was also its sound mixer and in charge of special effects; he undertook the same crew roles on the latter. His co-executive producer, Jane Schaffer, had a similar position on Naked Angels. Bury Me an Angel also had male and female executive producers, John Meier and Rita Murray; the latter had a featured acting role in Angels Die Hard. Corman confederate Beach Dickerson produced both films and acted in Angels Die Hard; that film’s director also had bit parts in both films. Postproduction shared the same teams on music and editing, led by Richard Hieronymus and Tony de  Zarrage, respectively. The director of Bury Me an Angel, Barbara Peeters, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, had been script supervisor on Angels Die Hard. She had previously directed a microbudget independent, The Dark Side of Love, about an affair between two married women. The film’s star, Dixie Peabody, had an uncredited role as a biker chick in Angels Die Hard but was otherwise a novice. Under the name of Diane Potter, she had a background in modeling. Angels Die Hard, however, clearly benefitted from a more generous budget. Bury Me an Angel was very much the poor cousin. Bury Me an Angel is clearly linked to the cycle through its production, marketing, and exhibition, as well as in its presumption of audience familiarity with the conventions of the biker movie, but its story and its telling are nevertheless unique. Putting the figure of the female biker front and center, the film suggests a correspondence with Angels’ Wild Women, The Mini-Skirt Mob, or Hell’s Belles, but beyond having a woman on a motorcycle, it shares little with that set of movies. Bury Me an Angel is a tale of revenge, a story of a woman searching for her brother’s killer. Dag (Peabody) witnesses the murder, in which her sibling is shot-gunned in the face by a fellow biker out to reclaim his stolen chopper. With two male companions in tow, she follows the few slender leads she has found and rides into the desert, eventually finding the killer in an out-of-season mountain resort. On the way, the three are hassled by the law, get stoned together around a campfire, take part in a bar brawl, get caught in a sandstorm, go skinny dipping, and take guidance from a hip preacher and a white witch. Dag also has sex with an art teacher, but that romance ends badly. Dag is haunted by memories of her brother, of him and her as children, and of his death. The journey lets loose a series of nightmares wherein the repressed returns to haunt her. At the trail’s end, in a cabin, she makes the cornered killer cower. Begging for mercy, he claims the shooting was an accident; he only wanted to scare her brother. Expecting to be shot, he

Dixie Peabody’s character in Bury Me an Angel appropriates the phallus in this poster for the film even as she is objectified.

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calls her and her brother “sick.” He knows, he says, what they did together. “Say it!” she screams. “Incest!” he shouts back. She fires; the blast takes out a window and is followed by another shot. Outside the cabin, further shots are heard. Has she killed him? Intentionally, the result is left uncertain. Dag stumbles outside and falls to her knees. Using the gun-stock, she starts to dig at the hard, unforgiving ground: “I’ve got to bury him,” she says. But who does she have to bury? Her brother? His killer? Much of the acting in Bury Me an Angel is amateurish, continuity is wayward, dialogue is clunky, scenes are often poorly choreographed and arranged, too many activities simply drag on for no particular reason other than to fill screen time, and the film suffers from limited production values, yet director Peeters is still able to present a complex female character, giving her viewpoint in an adroit and accomplished rendering. Dag shows a range of emotions and uncertain responses to events. Peabody’s performance gives dimension to a character riven with grief and driven by anger. She makes Dag’s motive for revenge believable. Peabody looks like a blonde Grace Slick with a vast stack of back-combed hair, and at around six feet tall, she is a striking physical presence. Riding her chopper, Dag shows confidence, poise, and grace. In the sequences where she is mobile, she appears louche and without care; she drops one hand into her lap or down by her side and at times rides with her feet between the handlebars. When on her cycle, she seems in control, as if she has purpose; when stationary she performs the very opposite. Angels Die Hard and Bury Me an Angel were reviewed together in Cue: The leather-‘n’-levis set may get unchained by these motorcycling monstrosities, but the rest of mankind, who need more than peer identification with sadistic heroes, will find them more boring than offensive. Both use revenge as a motive, and the open road as backdrop for the violence . . . One sees familiar faces like William Smith—with and without the earrings—remembered from previous cycling epics . . . In Bury Me An Angel, written and directed by a Miss Barbara Peeters, a girl mounts her bike to locate the murderer of her brother. More violence, more whirring noises, and a bit of madness follow. Dixie Peabody, as the avenger, is a statuesque beauty.60

In the Christian Science Monitor, David Sterritt essentially agreed with his colleague at Cue but made more of the fact that the film was written and directed by a woman, headlining his review “A Feminine Bikie”:

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The latest foul example of the sex-and-violence-motorcycle genre is called Bury Me An Angel . . . it is unusual in a couple of ways: First it is directed by a woman named Barbara Peters [sic]. And, second, amid all the simulated gore and sexy episodes there is a distinct feminine sensibility at work—the main character, for example, is a woman, and there is a fondness for showing objects of all sorts with a kind of prettified care not usually exercised in the he-man bikie-flick field. Unfortunately, however, Miss Pe[e]ters’s occasional delicacies are swamped by the usual sordid plot and all the usual sordid appurtenances . . . Before it is over the fashionable themes of incest and violent psychosis have been touched on.61

To reduce Peeters’s contribution to no more than providing a “feminine sensibility” with “occasional delicacies” or only being a novelty among the “sordid” attractions still firmly to the fore ignored the film’s singularity. Co-produced by a woman, with a woman directing her own script about a woman’s experience, the film lays bare the cycle’s misogyny, its celebration of the phallocentric and homosocial, and its virtual exclusion of women as anything other than abject. In the context of the biker film cycle, that is no small achievement. After their father ran out on them and their stepfather died, Dag’s mother brought up her kids as a single parent. She now passes her time watching TV game shows that proclaim everyone in America a winner. She blames herself for her children’s estrangement, which led to her son joining a gang and to his murder. Dag can barely speak to her. But as beaten and passive as she might be, Dag’s mother is not a figure of pity or scorn like those who previously represented the maternal in the cycle. There are no father-figure substitutes in Dag’s world; men are either comic law officers (one played by a midget) who make impotent threats, a nervous effeminate school principal, adolescents with crushes on her (the two sidekicks), barroom morons, or sensitive types, like the preacher or the artist who makes love to her. But only her brother will define her, if she lets him. Revealed through flashbacks to their childhood, her sibling is shown to be a devious, manipulative bully. The truth she is looking for, the preacher tells her, cannot be found in the answers she wants to hear. And vengeance will not relieve her anger, says the witch, who, while feeding cannabis stew to Dag and her sidekicks, claims an affinity to Native American mystics. The “real cancer” that is eating away at her, she tells Dag, is her own guilt.

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“What kind of crap is that?” Dag spits back. “Just merely observation,” says the witch. “A girl on a bike, the gun . . . It’s terribly phallic the way you clutch the gun.” The witch tells her she must quit her death trip, leave her brother and her guilt behind, and live life for herself. At journey’s end, Dag does face her past and find the truth. She has arrived at a place never sought and never found in other biker pictures. Peeters would become part of a small group of West Coast female filmmakers whose work in the exploitation field would lead to a widespread recognition of the lack of diversity within American film production and a justifiable celebration by feminist film critics and theorists of those few women who did work in the industry. In a 1978 article for the Los Angeles Times, Linda Gross examined the state of play for women in Hollywood at the time. She began by asking what—besides provocative advertising, sexual subject matter, and teasing titles—The Pom Pom Girls, Point of Terror, Las Vegas Lady, The Van, Malibu Beach, The Model Hunters, Orgy in the Ozarks, Summer School Teachers, Bury Me an Angel, Starhops, The Student Nurses, The Working Girls, Group Marriage, and Terminal Island had in common. The answer was that they were all exploitation films made by women. In the piece, titled “A Woman’s Place Is in . . . Exploitation Films?” Gross conducted interviews with, and considered the work of, Marilyn Tenser, an executive producer at Crown; Joan DeAnda and Marci Siler, partners in Cineworld, producers and distributors of soft-core sexploitation; and Corman alumni Stephanie Rothman and Barbara Peeters. While admitting the value exploitation has as a place to gain experience and build name recognition for women filmmakers, Gross conceded that “sex, nudity, rape and violence . . . are the stuff of exploitation movies and women have to deal with such prerequisites.” For Tenser, the problem of subject matter was mitigated by conceiving, producing, and marketing films with “women in mind . . . Women influence our box office.” She said, “They’re the ones that decide what movie a couple is going to see.” In contrast to the biker picture, Tenser’s films were shot on location in LA’s suburbs, which mirror the living circumstances of Crown Pictures’ audience: “[The] performers in these movies are like the kids the audience go to school with. We aim for a natural look.”62 Siler and DeAnda worked in 16-mm soft-core productions “because it was, in essence, an opportunity to go to film school.” The films were made for men, “but women in our movies were always the aggressors. You’d feature strong women characters because the men who go to see exploitation

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want it that way.” The problem they faced was the competition from hardcore productions, so they were diversifying into 35-mm production: “We aren’t going to try to do major films. You can make very valuable artistic film with an exploitable subject and that’s what we plan to do.”63 When interviewed, Peeters was in postproduction with Starhops. She openly acknowledged the role TV producer Norman Lear and Roger Corman had played in her career: “They are two of the few people who are serious about letting women direct  .  .  . As long as you open big and close big and try to resolve three stories in the end, Roger lets you do what you want. Just be sure you put in either a sex scene or an action sequence every 15 minutes.” Peeters admitted she had ambition beyond the exploitation field.64 Gross introduced Rothman as the “only woman director who makes exploitation movies with a message.” “My films are not always about succeeding,” said Rothman, “but they are always concerned with fighting the good fight.” Like Peeters, she said she had the freedom to do what she wanted as long as the film had “lots of sex, or violence and action . . . sufficiently strong enough to receive an R rating.” Within these limitations, Rothman created “female characters who fight for the right of selfdetermination.” She too had the ambition to work in the mainstream.65 Gross’s subjects were a snapshot of the exploitation field toward the end of the 1970s, with low-budget sexploitation, action and adventure (with plentiful female nudity), and teenage comedies at its core. Within this field, the brutish biker film was now long forgotten. Slated for production in fall 1971 by New World Pictures was Outlaw Mama, with a script by Rothman.66 It was never made. Even with women at the helm and at the center of the narrative, the biker film was finished by this point in time.

Conclusion Buried in the Sand Forever Sixty-nine America in terminal stasis The air’s so thick it’s like drowning in molasses I’m sick and tired of paying these dues And I’m finally getting hip to the American ruse —MC5, “American Ruse” (1970) Back in his office, I ask Solomon to grow philosophical for a moment. To take the long view, and talk about where his life is leading. “Well,” he said, “the first thing, I’m always looking for a new angle on a motorcycle picture. I hope to do one a year for ten years. But the old style is dead, it’s gone, buried. The days of a picture about Hell’s Angels driving down a road and drinking beer have gone by. We probably read ten cycle scripts a month around here, looking for that new angle.”1

Joe Solomon’s ambition to continue to make motorcycle pictures well into the next decade had probably waned even before his interview with Roger Ebert was published. His last credit in the cycle was as executive producer on Werewolves on Wheels. By the end of 1972, the biker film cycle was 164

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finished. A snapshot of 1970–1971 releases are pulled together in Boxoffice’s “Looking Ahead” section. Films are listed by company, large and small, from September to December 1970, as well as those ready, or in production, for distribution in the new year. Of the bigger independents, AIP had twenty-five titles in play, New World eleven, and Crown six. Each title is given a generic descriptor (e.g., “drama,” “melodrama,” “horror,” “comedy,” “mystery”), but these are often qualified by combining those terms (e.g., “horror comedy,” “suspense drama,” “sex drama,” and so forth). Biker movies are sometimes directly identified as such; Bury Me an Angel is labeled a “motorcycle drama,” but more often than not, they are called either “drama” (The Hard Ride) or “action drama” (Angels Die Hard). Seventeen of the forty-two titles released by the three companies are listed as “drama” pictures of some sort or other, not including those also labeled “horror,” which account for a further thirteen pictures. Five movies were listed as “comedy”; the remaining included two science fiction pix, four documentaries, and a war film. Two years later in “Looking Ahead,” the three companies have thirtysix pictures planned or in release: AIP twenty-one, New World ten, and Crown five. These three exploitation companies were joined by newcomer Dimension Pictures, formed by Larry Woolner, ex-director of New World Pictures, alongside the husband-and-wife team of Stephanie Rothman and Charles Swartz, who had seven titles in distribution. The mix of generic descriptors across the forty-three titles is little changed, suggesting the trend in production in terms of overall number and types of films has stayed relatively stable. But a closer look at the titles reveals that the motorcycle picture is down from five to a single title, Dirt Gang from AIP. Following the success of Student Nurses for New World, sex comedies and dramas boomed: five alone for Corman’s company, two apiece from Crown and Dimension, and one from AIP. Four women-in-prison movies are in release, one of which, Black Mama, White Mama, is also part of AIP’s conspicuous swing toward attracting a black audience with Black Caesar, Coffy, Scream Blacula, Scream, and Slaughter’s Big Rip Off. Within all this activity, the production of biker movies has not just dribbled to a halt but has come to a juddering stop. In his overview of the biker movie, Bill Osgerby provides a number of credible explanations for the cycle’s decline.2 Among the reasons considered are audience fatigue, a surfeit of productions, and shifts in the public’s perception of hoodlum bikers, including cultural appropriations of the

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figure that domesticated the transgressive. He also cites growing competition from alternative forms of entertainment, especially nightclubs and discotheques, which were then exacerbated by new venues for film consumption in multiplexes. There are varying degrees of merit in any one of these explanations, and in combination with each other, they appear to provide a persuasive set of reasons for the cycle’s demise. More significant, however, than any of the explanations he gives is the underlying process of serial production that informs planning decisions within individual companies and across the exploitation sector. Understanding this process is crucial if a satisfactory elucidation of a cycle’s span is to be provided. In Life’s article on beach movies, Samuel Arkoff said AIP’s fare differed from that of their competitors and imitators because “we try everything . . . we never depend on one fad.” This is both within individual films and across their portfolio of pictures: “What we’re really doing at American International,” Arkoff concluded, reaching what for him are the heights of metaphysical expression, “is stuffing bananas with bananas.”’3 For want of an explanation for his fruity image, AIP’s films are a regulated product packaged as a novelty. The “we try everything” ethos practiced by AIP was unique in the exploitation sector. Among its competitors were smaller companies, such as Fanfare or Independent-International, that annually produced only a handful of films. Planning ahead, independents were conservative and opportunistic. To move to a new type of film—say, women-inprison dramas—meant having to discontinue a previous line or, at least as Independent-International did with Angels’ Wild Women, attempt to combine film types. Finance allows for only so many productions per year. In 1972, New World entirely dropped biker pictures and, alongside the evergreen horror genre, focused on sex comedies and dramas (Stacey, Student Teachers, Young Nurses, and Fly Me!) and women-in-prison movies such as The Big Bird Cage or combined the two types as in The Hot Box. On this type of production rationalization in film cycles, Zoe Wallin writes, Cycles could exist within a stable production trend without affecting the total quantity of the trend. If more than one particular film type is produced within this total, however, there is necessarily a reduction of other film types. For example, in one season a studio might produce a total of ten musicals: five backstage, three vaudeville, and two biographical musicals. The following season the studio might also produce the same total of ten musicals, but increase

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the number of vaudeville musicals to seven and reduce backstage pictures to only one, indicating the potential rise of one cycle and decline of another. This reinforces the idea of cycles as reactive, being produced and measured in relation to other films.4

A typical explanation given for shifts in film types is that audience interest has waned (or shows signs of waning) or that the market is oversaturated with a similar type of product. In the case of the biker film, there is no evidence that between 1971 and 1972, when there was, respectively, a high of eleven and then a low of three films in the cycle, that the fall in audiences for this film fare was dramatic enough to foster change or that the number of films was too many and so a glut was experienced. Production of biker films may have as good as ceased between these seasons, but the films themselves were still in heavy rotation, often programmed together in double and even triple bills. If audiences were sated with biker movies, then they would not still be in distribution. The domestication, or mainstreaming, of the outlaw figure that Osgerby cites as one factor in the cycle’s demise is, like parody and self-reflexivity, something that is apparent from its beginning. The first film to follow The Wild Angels, Devil’s Angels was universally received by critics as a tame version, suggesting that the hoodlum biker, here and elsewhere, was in danger of becoming as threatening as a Dead End Kid. The same denunciation was only a little later leveled at Sonny Barger and his confederates in Hell’s Angels ’69. Similarly, the figure of the motorcycle mama in these pictures was consistently accused of lacking authenticity. Zoe Wallin and Richard Nowell’s individual studies demonstrate that film cycles are formed not just in response to the public sphere or necessarily during their production but can be determined in the marketing and distribution stages. Cycles are generally measured by the volume of films that are identified as sharing a good number of characteristics so that a distinctive mode of the film becomes definable and noted by industry commentators. The inclusion of individual titles within a cycle is not always dependent on the intent of the filmmakers, who anyway lose control over a film once it is in distribution. Wallin writes, “Cycles are calculated not just as an increase in number but also by type,” which is “discursively identified.”5 Defining film types is not only the province of filmmakers but an activity carried out by industry professionals engaged in marketing, publicity, distribution, and exhibition; by reviewers and trade press commentators; and by audiences. She writes, “The distributors, and industry figures

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Press advertisement from January 1972 for a triple bill of Corman biker pictures playing in Los Angeles–area drive-ins.

followed a fluid approach in developing, distributing, and speaking about the cycle that enabled them to match the shifts in wider audience interest and changing political and social climates. The plans that were set forth in the planning and production process could develop in different directions as the pictures were circulated and consumed, with the potential to transfer between categories and wider associations in the promotion, trade, legal, and political discourse surrounding the films. This fluidity underscores the significance of considering cycles as process.”6 Regardless of audience preference or the number of similar products circulating within the market, production decisions for 1972 were in good part determined by the increased use of the Philippines as a filmmaking base, particularly for New World, but also for Dimension. The change in location did not support motorcycle pictures, which, with the exception of The Losers, were invariably set in southwestern desert locations, not in jungles. Variety’s report on Corman’s plans for a “Manila Studio” suggested his motivation for relocating was driven by the tax benefits and the logistical support provided by

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the Filipino government. New World’s first Filipino production had been The Big Doll House in 1970; at the start of 1972, they were working on their sixth film shot in that country and planned to have half of all their films produced there by year’s end.7 Competitiveness between the exploitation companies is another factor in maintaining or ceasing production of a certain film type. Production plans are made highly public through press releases and coverage in the trades. Knowledge of the current state of play in the market, with regard to production, distribution, and box office takings, is shared. Autobiographies, such as that by actor and stuntman Gary Kent, who appeared in numerous biker films, amply attest to just how small and insular the low-budget filmmaking community was in Hollywood.8 Information on what was in production was widespread among industry insiders and no doubt helped feed the kind of herd-like mentality shown by Independent-International. As argued in The Cool and the Crazy, American film producers, distributors, and exhibitors used a concept of film cycles drawn from business theory in order to understand, predict, and manage change.9 Each cycle is unique but has considerable commonalities with previous iterations. Despite the particularities of any given cycle, the shared elements between them are sufficient to govern decision making based on a reasonable assumption of how long expansion of a product line can be continued before it contracts. This prediction-based planning is especially important for companies with limited budgets that did not wish to get caught with a film that would no longer appeal. Film cycles therefore have built-in production highs and a predictable moment of obsolescence. The demise of a particular line might be decided on the basis of box office returns or exhibitor reports, a change in production circumstances (moving location to the Philippines, for example), or a fading topical relevance to its key audience (the beach movie), but it might also be down to a collective fear of overextending the life of the cycle, so when other profitable lines reveal themselves, such as women-in-prison or Blaxploitation pictures, the instinct is to follow the money and go with the pack. Or the end of a cycle might be a combination of any of these explanations. Making more of one type of film meant that the production of other types must correspondingly be reduced. Only AIP, of the independents, had the capacity to work on multiple film types. In 1972, it provided films readily identifiable as belonging to one or more of the types offered by its competitors, but it also distributed the only new biker,

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which it didn’t repeat in 1973. Between the end of the 1971 season and the start of 1974, there was something of a hiatus in films about mobile protagonists aimed at the drive-ins and youths in cars, but it was a void soon filled by the car crash picture, which geared up and quickly gained traction as it made tracks toward the height of its own cycle in the midto late 1970s. In the Times article on women working in exploitation, Marilyn Tenser made the point that Crown’s films were shot on locations that accurately reflected a world recognizable to its audience, at least to the extent that the suburban locations would be familiar, and a protagonist could be someone the audience shared a classroom with.10 When Joan Didion went to see nine biker films in seven days, she did so primarily in Tarzana and Bakersfield drive-ins, areas around which a good number of the films were shot. This correspondence was no more based on chance than it was for Crown. Post-Altamont, the Hells Angels as a folk devil had little currency. The public’s and the media’s attention had moved elsewhere. Didion made no mention whatsoever of the real-life outlaws her nine films were emulating. Shown in various states of disintegration, the films had value to her only inasmuch as they were a symptom of a wider social malaise, wherein she saw a direct correspondence between the hoodlums on screen and those in the audience. What was less certain was how the film audience for exploitation movies was to be conceived. Tenser’s conception of her audience as female runs counter to the long-held prevailing idea, known as the Peter Pan Syndrome, that exploitation movies should be aimed at males: 1 2 3 4 5

A younger child will watch anything an older one will watch. An older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch. A girl will watch anything a boy will watch. A boy will not watch anything a girl will watch. In order to catch your greatest audience, you zero in on a ten-yearold male.11

Tenser’s concept of appealing in the first place to Wendy rather than to Peter suggests a return to the beach movie era of exploitation filmmaking and away from the male-focused biker movie. Crown’s success with The Pom Pom Girls, The Van, and Malibu Beach supported and confirmed such a recalibration. But at the same time, New World Pictures’ cycle of sex

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dramas featuring comely young professional women, or women-in-prison pictures, supported the counteridea that the Peter Pan Syndrome continued to be relevant. Whatever the case, both paradigms are used to maximize the audience; they do not necessarily invalidate each other in their opposing positions. Rather, they might best be seen as marketing tools that complement, enabling the promotion, however indirect, of a dual appeal across the range of exploitation fare in distribution at any one time. Pitching primarily to Wendy or to Peter was dependent on the history of a company’s productions and where they considered the appeal of their films to lie. Led by Corman, New World was steadfast, in the first instance, in its address to adolescent males. Led by Tenser, Crown, in direct competition with New World, switched emphasis. Neither company had the resources to spread their bets, as did AIP.12 Both companies were, as Nowell has argued for Crown, constructing a brand.13 And that meant prioritizing an appeal to either male or female audiences. Discussing a film’s appeal to primarily a male or female viewer, AIP’s Arkoff said it didn’t mean that the other sex didn’t attend: “You don’t make a picture for everybody and then hope that out of that group, two or four or six million people will come. Maybe you don’t reason it out—maybe you fly by the seat of your pants—but you aim the picture to a specific audience.”14 To a middle-class viewer with a university education, biker movies appear to be exclusively focused on attracting an audience of underachieving young males. But the cycle made allowances for a dual appeal, even if that entreaty is problematic in its representational strategies for those for whom these films were never intended (Didion and myself included). Beyond gender, Arkoff further breaks down his audience: “When you talk about young males, are you talking about city or country? The motorcycle pictures never did too well in the big cities. They did the best, really, in the drive-ins. In, let’s say, the Middle West, the South, smaller towns.” When distributing sex dramas, age also needed to be considered, he said.15 In his auteurist appreciation of Corman’s counterculture trilogy, The Wild Angels, The Trip, and Gass-s-s-s, scholar Nick Heffernan makes the point that Corman shifted his conception of the audience his films would attract between the first and the second titles. Quoting from Richard Staehling’s 1969 Rolling Stone article on teenpics, Heffernan writes that the “biker pictures played pretty much exclusively to the lumpen mass of has-been delinquents and ‘aspiring young bandidos’ that frequented provincial drive-ins, whereas the countercultural kids were ‘most likely down

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at the Bijou stoned out of their minds watching Weekend or 2001.’” The schism between students and those who didn’t continue to college represented a split within a generation as pronounced as that between generations: “The Wild Angels touched a nerve with increasingly disaffected non-college youth, while slyly objectifying and ‘othering’ its biker protagonists, themselves representatives of this group.”16 In film terms, that rupture in the generation is symbolized by Easy Rider’s uncertain correspondence with the biker film. With New World Pictures, Corman returned to his original audience of malcontents and hoodlums. As a seminal work in the lexicon of New Hollywood cinema and as an iconic symbol of the 1960s counterculture, Easy Rider continues to be remembered and replayed. Of the other motorcycle films, only Corman’s The Wild Angels is generally recalled, and this owes as much to Heavenly Blues’s speech having been sampled on Primal Scream’s “Loaded” (1991) as to any intrinsic reason. Maybe fans of Jack Nicholson or Dennis Hopper find time for Hells Angels on Wheels or The Glory Stompers, or Al Adamson cultists take pleasure in rerunning Satan’s Sadists, but on the whole, the films are forgotten, which is wholly apposite. They were designed to be played and then disregarded. Double- or triple-billed, the films toured the circuit until they fell apart. New reels would not be struck; that expense was better saved for creating a bank of prints for the latest production. Neglect, and an audience’s ineffectual recall of the films they’d watched, ensured that each new biker film could be consumed without the senses being overwhelmed by feelings of déjà vu, ennui, or just plain boredom. Regular attendance by an audience that was less than attentive ensured the heightened use of convention was valued by producers and consumers. In this context, familiarity does not breed contempt. A film’s redundancy and an audience’s poor recollection facilitated the habitual participation in moviegoing. A repeatable experience is what’s being manufactured, promoted, sold, and consumed. The process from start to finish is defined as serial; the pleasure is in repetition augmented by the promise of novelty. Describing what he was looking for in a motorcycle picture, Fanfare’s Solomon made just this point in his interview with Ebert: “The thing so many of these writers don’t understand is that you have to have the new twist, but it has to stay inside the formula. The formula is simplicity itself: You’ve got to have this anti-establishment theme perfectly identified with a loser, but a loser that kids can identify with. He’s running free and high and wild.”17

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The motorcycle picture was just that: a new twist inside a formula. If the pleasures appear constrained and limited, bear in mind Solomon’s idea of his audience. Continuing with the theme of the outlaw biker as a loser, he provides as bleak a view as has ever been made on the contract between a filmmaker and the audience for his movies. He told Ebert, “Life is that way. Kids know life is tragic, they’re going to be buried in the sand forever.”

Acknowledgments It’s a crash course for the ravers. —David Bowie, “Drive-in Saturday” (1973)

Richard Maltby read and commented on the initial draft of this book, and his wise words and guidance helped me pull it into shape. Will Straw gave an equally valuable critique, as did Antonio Lázaro-Reboll. Frank Krutnik worked on his own projects alongside me at the New York Public Library and Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences archives and provided his usual razor-sharp comments on an essay that formed my first public airing on the topic of outlaw motorcycle pictures. Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker published that piece in their estimable collection Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (2016). Leslie Mitchner agreed to publish Hoodlum Movies, which with Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson (2011) and The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (2015) completes an informal pulp film trilogy with Rutgers. All of the aforementioned have my lasting gratitude and respect. Along the way, scholars of seriality Phyll Smith, Tim Snelson, Kathleen Looke, Ruth Mayer, and Guy Barefoot became unknowing coconspirators in all of this. There work is an inspiration. Match me Sidney x

175

Notes Introduction Hoodlum Gestures 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Davis’s quotation is from Brett Callwood, MC5: Sonically Speaking—a Tale of Revolution and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Church Stretton: Independent Music Press, 2007), 18–19. Joan Didion, “Nine Bike Movies in Seven Vroom! Days,” Life 68, no. 17 (May 8, 1970): 4. For production figures, see Edward Buscombe, ed., The BFI Companion to the Western (London: Andre Deutsch, 1988), 426–427. Didion, “Nine Bike Movies.” Ibid. There is little, if any, coverage of films from the cycle in Jeffrey Sconce, ed., Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). “Hell’s Angels Called Threat on Wheels,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1965, A1, A2. As defined by the British sociologist Stanley Cohen, who writes about the contemporaneous subcultures of mods and rockers, folk devils were “visible reminders of what we should not be.” Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Paladin, 1973), 10. Leo E. Litwak, “On the Wild Side,” New York Times, January 29, 1967, 248. Ibid. Lawrence E. Davis, “Cyclists Ordered Out,” New York Times, September 8, 1964, 21. “California Takes Steps to Curb Terrorism of Ruffian Cyclists,” New York Times, March 16, 1965, 15. “Hell’s Angels Called Threat on Wheels,” A1, A2. William Murray, “Hell’s Angels: Outlaw Motorcycle Club in California,” Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1965, 37–40. Hunter S. Thompson, “The Motorcycle Gangs: A Portrait of an Outsider Underground,” The Nation, May 17, 1965, 521–526. Ibid. 177

178 • Notes to Pages 9–16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Murray, “Hell’s Angels,” 37–40. Ibid. “Resort Set for Holiday Hell’s Angels Invasion,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1965, 14; Jerry Cohen, “Police Clamp Halos on Hell’s Angels at Resort,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1965, 3, 15; Jerry Cohen, “Hell’s Angels Pull Out after Quiet Weekend,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1965, 3. Jerry Cohen, “Hell’s Angels: How They Live and Think,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1965, A1, A3. Ibid. Gordon Grant, “Hell’s Angels Fade in Valley,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1965, SF-A1, SF-A6. Daryl E. Lembke, “Hells Angels Attack Peace March at UC,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1965, 1, 26. Subsequently, an American government class teacher invited Sonny Barger to speak on the issue to students at Redwood High School. He said the Angels will “counter-demonstrate at all future anti-war demonstrations in the area.” “Hell’s Angels Will Picket Viet Marchers,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1965, A9. “Both groups excuse their misdeeds as a revolt against what they consider the ‘phoniness’ of society, or ‘system, or ‘machine’ to use the strained phraseology of the Berkeley group.” John F. Haggerty, “Much Alike,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1965, A4. Thompson, “Motorcycle Gangs,” 249. Contemporary confusion over where outlaw bikers fit into the counterculture is at the heart of Martin Rubin’s excellent essay “Make Love Make War: Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle,” Film History 6, no. 3 (1994): 355–381. Eliot Fremont-Smith, “Motorcycle Misfits—Fiction and Fact,” New York Times, February 23, 1967, 33. Thompson, “Motorcycle Gangs,” 64. Ibid., 111–112. “The Wilder Ones,” Time 85, no. 13 (March 26, 1965). Thompson, “Motorcycle Gangs,” 521–526. Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 109. Ibid., 41, 252. Murray, “Hell’s Angels,” 32–39. The Mogdigliani section is on page 38 and in Thompson, Hell’s Angels, on page 41. Paul Coates, “Hell’s Angels Rule of the Road,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1965, A6. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 41. Paul Schrader, “Naked Angels,” Los Angeles Free Press, July 18, 1969, 24, 28–29. Didion, “Nine Bike Movies,” 4. Sol Stern, “Altamont: Pearl Harbor to the Woodstock Nation,” in Ramparts, Conversations with the New Reality (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1971), 50–51. Donna Gaines, “The Ascension of Led Zeppelin,” in Rolling Stone: The Seventies, ed. A. Kahn, H. George-Warren, and S. Dahl (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 14–17. Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods: Led Zeppelin Unauthorized (London: Pan, 2005), 125. Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 181.

Notes to Pages 16–27 • 179 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Ibid., 159. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 67. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 246. Film TV Daily, May 7, 1970, cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Charles Champlin, “Glory Stompers and Teen Screen,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1968, C7. Review, “Cycle Savages,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 1970, cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. “A Roaring Tribute for ‘Mother’ Miles,” Life, January 28, 1966, 30. For example, see Murray, “Hell’s Angels,” 37–40; Hunter S. Thompson, “Motorcycle Gangs,” 521–526; “Hell’s Angels Called Threat on Wheels,” A1–A2; “California Takes Steps,” 15. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), 84, 90. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), 217, 219, 255, 253, 254. Champlin, “Glory Stompers and Teen Screen,” C7. Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 11. Rudmer Canjels, Distributing Silent Film Serials: Local Practices, Changing Forms, Cultural Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 7. Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu, 12. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 82–83. Ibid., 329. David Bordwell, The Rhapsodies: How 1940s Critics Changed American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 30. The press release is held in the Then Came Bronson clipping file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division. Zoe Wallin and Karina Aveyard, “The Ranown Cycle: Budd Boetticher’s ‘New Look’ Western Programmers in 1950s Hollywood,” in The Films of Budd Boetticher, ed. Gary Rhodes and Robert Singer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 122. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 131. Peter Stanfield, “Intent to Speed: Hot-Rod Movies,” in The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 112–134. Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 42–95. Donald J. Mayerson, review, “Satan’s Sadists and Hell’s Bloody Devils,” Cue, January 23, 1970, cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu, 7.

180 • Notes to Pages 29–35

Chapter One 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

Strange Excitements

Bob Thomas, “Tide Running Out for Beach Films, In for Protest Movies,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1966, B7. “AIP: Action, Youth, Older O’seas Fans; Let TV Gravy Bubble Up by Itself,” Variety, June 22, 1966, 24. The Wild Angels pressbook confused Corman’s film with Clarence Brown’s 1949 adaptation of a Faulkner story, Intruder in the Dust. Review, “Wild Angels,” Variety Weekly, July 20, 1966, 6. Wild Angels pressbook. Ibid. Hollis Alpert, “SR Goes to the Movies: A Director Strikes Back,” The Saturday Review, September 10, 1966, 53. Robert F. Hawkins, “Venice, Controversy,” The Saturday Review, October 8, 1966, 93, 108. Review, “Wild Angels,” Variety Weekly, July 20, 1966, 6. “Feature Reviews,” Boxoffice, July 11, 1966, a12. Review, “Wild Angels,” Motion Picture Herald, July 6, 1966. Review, “Wild Angels,” The Hollywood Reporter, July 6, 1966; see also review, “Wild Angels,” Film Daily, July 5, 1966. Review, “Wild Angels,” Variety Weekly, July 20, 1966, 6. “Wild Angels Predicted as AIP’s Top Grosser,” Boxoffice, August 15, 1966, 14. Ruth Pologue, AIP press release, August 25, 1966. “Wild Angels Predicted,” 14. “Wild Angels Combo 145 at 8 KC Houses,” Boxoffice, August 22, 1966, C-5; “Wild Angels Gains 135 Points in Loop,” Boxoffice, September 5, 1966, C-1. “Wild Angels Opens in 42 Eastern Airers, Hardtops,” Boxoffice, September 19, 1966, E-2LA; Citizen News, September 16, 1966, Wild Angels cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Vincent Canby, “Series of Movies on Cyclists Near: Small Company Finds Gold in Hoodlums’ Behavior,” New York Times, November 22, 1966, 32. “Venice to Show The Wild Angels; Festival’s U.S. Entry Deals with Motorcycle Gang,” New York Times, August 20, 1966. Sarris, in his commentary on the film, also notes the cuts. Louise Sweeney, “Screen’s Wild Angels,” Christian Science Monitor, August 26, 1966. Kevin Thomas, “Wild Angels Strong Story of the Motorcycle Mystique,” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 1966. D19. Review, “Wild Angels,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, September 30, 1966. Review, “Wild Angels,” Citizen News, September 1, 1966. Bosley Crowther, New York Times, December 22, 1966, Wild Angels clipping file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division. The “grind house” note is drawn from Morning Telegraph (New York), December 23, 1966. Hollis Alpert, “SR Goes to the Movies,” The Saturday Review, August 27, 1966, 53. Ibid., 40. Vincent Canby, “Roger Corman: A Good Man Gone to ‘Pot,’” New York Times, September 18, 1966, 127. Cited in Litwak’s review of Thomson’s book Hell’s Angels.

Notes to Pages 35–42 • 181 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53

Thomas, “Wild Angels Strong Story,” D19. Note the cartoon illustration that accompanies the review. Kevin Thomas, “Style: A Film’s Secret,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1966, M12. The French journal Positif: Revue de Cinéma had given Corman extensive coverage in issue 59 (March 1964) under the heading “Les Soixante Travaux de Roger Corman.” The dossier filled twenty-eight pages of text and twelve pages of photographs. In 1970, the Edinburgh International Film Festival mounted a major retrospective of his films. Canby, “Roger Corman.” Ernest Callenbach, “The Wild Angels,” Film Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Winter 1966/67): 63. Pauline Kael, “Trends,” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (New York: Little Brown, 1968), 21. Andrew Sarris, “Films,” Village Voice, September 15, 1966. Elenore Lester, “From the Underground: Kenneth Anger Rising,” New York Times, February 19, 1967. For example, Sweeney, “Screen’s Wild Angels.” Scorpio Rising’s first New York screening was at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, October 29, 1963. Gregory Markopoulos reviewed the film in Film Culture 31 (Winter 1963–1964): 5. Archer Winsten, review, “Wild Angels,” New York Post, August 29, 1966. Alpert, “SR Goes to the Movies,” The Saturday Review, August 27, 1966, 40. Kael, “Trends,” 19. John Simon, Private Screenings: Views of Cinema of the Sixties (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 263. Canby, “Series of Movies.” Joe Gelmis, “Scorpio Rising at 3 Theaters,” Newsday, June 15, 1967; Archer Winsten, “Scorpio Rising,” New York Post, April 20, 1966; Ann Guarino, New York Daily News, April 20, 1966, clipping file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division. Undated clipping. Arthur Knight, “The Creative Artist and the Cops,” The Saturday Review, April 11, 1964. The incidents at Hollister had taken place over the 1947 July 4 holiday weekend, and Life published its short one-page report “Cyclist’s Holiday” with a picture of a boozed-up biker. Life 23, no. 3 ( July 21, 1947): 31. See Frank Rooney, “The Cyclist’s Raid,” Harper’s, January 1951, 34–44. History of Cinema, Series 1: Hollywood and the Production Code, selected files from the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code Administration collection, from the holdings of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Woodbridge, Conn.: Primary Source Microfilm/ Thomson Gale, 2006). Ibid. Lawrence Alloway, “Son of Public Enemy,” Arts Magazine, November 1966, 25–26. Thomas, “Tide Running Out.” Alan Levy, “Peekaboo Sex, or How to Fill a Drive-in,” Life, July 16, 1965, 81–88. For the history of the teen pic before the beach movie, see Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (London: Unwyn, 1988). For overviews of the beach movie cycle, see Alan Betrock, I Was a Teenage Juvenile Delinquent Rock n Roll Horror Beach Party Movie Book: A Complete Guide to the Teen Exploitation Film—1954–1969 (London: Plexus, 1986); and

182 • Notes to Pages 42–50

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Brian Chidester and Domenic Priore, Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film, and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom (Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press, 2008). Levy, “Peekaboo Sex,” 81–88. Ibid. Ibid. Jim Dawson, The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Ibid. “Wild Producer Roger Corman Called in Senate Juve Delinquency Probe,” Daily Variety 135, no. 16 (March 27, 1967): 1, 4. “From Sand in Bikini to Sand in Machinery: AIP on ‘Protest’ Kick,” Variety 243, no. 3 ( June 8, 1966): 4. Thomas, “Tide Running Out,” B7. Howard R. Cohen papers, Margaret Herrick Library. “Swastika-Symbols Help?,” Variety 246, no. 1 (February 22, 1967): 29. “Quick Marketing of AIP’s Devil’s Angels,” Variety 246, no. 6 (March 29, 1967): 21. Canby, “Series of Movies.” Alpert, “SR Goes to the Movies,” Wild Angels cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Kevin Thomas, “Motorcycles Return in Devil’s Angels,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1967, F17. The biker costume would also feature in the era’s fashion journalism; see Bernadine Morris, “Should Hell’s Angels Have a Monopoly on Leather?,” New York Times, November 4, 1966, 43. Ibid. Post-1967 biker movies tended to feature leaden rock and blues, though Run, Angel, Run! has an immaculate contribution from Tammy Wynette. Country music, bikes, and leather never sounded and looked so right. John Mahoney, “Born Losers,” The Hollywood Reporter, July 6, 1967. “AIP,” 24. Review, “Devil’s Angels,” Morning Telegraph (New York), October 5, 1967. For an account of western costume and authenticity, see Peter Stanfield, The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 162–187. The Glory Stompers, undated script, pp. 1–2, Margaret Herrick Library special collection. Ibid., 6. Review, “Hell’s Angels on Wheels,” Daily Variety 136, no. 1 ( June 6, 1967): 3. Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). C. R. Stecyk, Kustom Kulture (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1994). William Murray, “Hell’s Angels: Outlaw Motorcycle Club in California,” Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1965, 37–40. Mark Masker, “Renaissance Man Gary Littlejohn,” Street Chopper, accessed November 21, 2017, http://www.streetchopperweb.com/bikes/renaissance-man -gary-littlejohn. He is also given a short biographical plug in the Angels Die Hard pressbook: “He is the man who takes those big Harley Davidson machines and rebuilds them into super-powerful ‘choppers’ with luminous paint jobs, each one built differently to suit its owner.”

Notes to Pages 51–62 • 183 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95

John Arthur Maynard, Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 1. Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (Mansfield Center: Martino Publishing, 2009). James Raker papers, AMPAS, Margaret Herrick Library special collection. “Sell Angle for ‘Losers’ Lost on Delores Taylor,” Variety, July 5, 1967, 22. “‘Waves,’ ‘Born Losers,’ ‘Dirty Dozen’ All Draw Frowns from Catholics,” Variety, July 5, 1967, 20. William Wolf, Review, “Born Losers,” Cue, August 19, 1967. Hollis Alpert echoed Wolf in his review of the film for the Saturday Review, July 22, 1967. Nadine M. Edwards, review, “Born Losers,” Citizen News, September 8, 1967. Review, “Born Losers,” Motion Picture Herald, July 5, 1967. Further negative reviews for the film can be found in Boxoffice, July 10, 1967; Time, September 8, 1967; Film Daily, August 1, 1967; and from Penelope Gilliatt in the New Yorker, September 9, 1967. Gilliatt is the only reviewer to mention the film’s overworked Christian imagery. No details available. Review, “Born Losers,” Variety, July 12, 1967, 22. “Big Rental Films of 1967,” Variety, January 3, 1968, 25. “Wild Rebels,” Variety, September 27, 1967, 26. “Born Losers,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1967. Charles Champlin, “Random Notes for a Smoggy Day,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1967, D24.

Chapter Two Getting Out of Town 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

Will Straw, “Urban Confidential: The Lurid City of the 1950s,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clark (London: Routledge, 1997), 113–130; Robert J. Read, “‘The Smashing, Crashing, Pileup of the Century’: The Carsploitation Film,” in Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond, ed. Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 93–106. Straw, “Urban Confidential,” 115. Ibid., 121. Read, “Smashing, Crashing, Pileup,” 94. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 98. Richard Nowell, “Cars and Girls (and Burgers and Weed): Branding, Mainstreaming, and Crown International Pictures’ SoCal Drive-in Movies,” in Fisher and Walker (2016), 107–128. See the chapter “Intent to Speed; Hot Rod Movies,” in Peter Stanfield, The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 112–134. David Church, Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Ibid., 34–35. Ibid., 38. Read, “Smashing, Crashing, Pileup,” 94. Ibid., 95.

184 • Notes to Pages 63–76

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Review, “Devil’s Angels,” Variety, May 3, 1967, 6. The film’s pressbook identifies the location as Hamilton Aviation Co., near Tucson Airport. Howard Thompson, “The Born Losers,” New York Times, August 19, 1967; and Ann Guarino, “Born Losers Just Gets Lost,” Daily News (New York), August 19, 1967. Zoe Wallin, “Film Cycles and the Hollywood Studio System” (PhD diss., Flinders University, 2017), 61. Charles Champlin, “Glory Stompers and Teen Screen,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1968, C7. “Hell’s Angels on Wheels,” Daily Variety 136, no. 1 ( June 6, 1967): 3. Review, “Hells Angels on Wheels,” Variety, April 28, 1967. Frances Herridge, “Motorcycle Gangs Return in Two Neighborhood Films,” New York Post, October 24, 1968, 55. Bryan Thomas, “The Girls from Thunder Strip,” Nightflight, posted September 19, 2016, accessed February 7, 2017, http://nightflight.com/the-girls-from-thunder -strip -dynamite-action-souped-up -cars-illegal-whiskey-wild-women-souped-up -thrills/. Ibid. Review, “Angry Breed,” Variety, December 25, 1968, 18. “About 20 Films Ready, or Soon,” Variety, February 19, 1969, 5. “David Common’s Suit,” Variety, January 28, 1970, 5. “Full Ownership to CU on The Angry Breed,” Variety, March 18, 1970, 7. “Commonwealth United Reports $22.7 Million Loss,” Independent Film Journal 65, no. 2 (December 23, 1969): 21; “AIP to Take over U.S. Distribution of Commonwealth United Films,” Boxoffice, April 13, 1970, 8. Kevin Thomas, “Hellcats Arrives in Multiples,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1968, D16. “Hellcats,” Variety, June 18, 1969, 6. Kevin Thomas, “Savages in Citywide Run,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1970, 123. Peter Boatwright, Suman Basuroy, and Wagner Kamakura, “Reviewing the Reviewers: The Impact of Individual Film Critics on Box Office Performance,” Quantitative Marketing and Economics 5 (2007): 401–425. Bruce Dern, Things I’ve Said, but Probably Shouldn’t Have: An Unrepentant Memoir (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 61–65. Born Losers pressbook. Frances Herridge, “Savages and Belles at Showcase Theaters,” New York Post, April 30 1970, 47. A. H. Weiler, “2 on Mobile Mobsters,” New York Times, August 16, 1969, 46. Herridge, “Savages and Belles,” 47. Kevin Thomas, “The Savage Seven Opens in Multiples,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1968, E8. “The Savage Seven,” Variety, May 15, 1968, 28. Richard F. Shepard, “Just Plain Brutal,” New York Times, August 22, 1968, 47. Kathleen Carroll, “Motorcycle Gang Fights Indians,” Daily News (New York), August 22, 1968, 71. “The Savage Seven and Wild in the Streets,” Time, May 24, 1968.

Notes to Pages 77–89 • 185 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72

Kevin Thomas, “Angels from Hell,” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1968, 19. “Angels from Hell,” Variety, July 17, 1968. “Angels from Hell,” Citizen News, September 3, 1968. John Mahoney, “Angels from Hell,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 13, 1968. John Mahoney, “Glory Stompers,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 30, 1967. Ernest Callenbach, review, “The Wild Angels,” Film Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Winter, 1966–1967): 63. Review, “Hell’s Angels on Wheels,” Daily Variety 136, no. 1 ( June 6, 1967): 3. Thomas, “Savage Seven.” John Mahoney, “Naked Angels,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 4, 1969. He is quoting freely from Nat Freedland’s column “Waiting,” Los Angeles Free Press, April 4, 1969, 13, 21. Gan was a recruit from Actors Studio West, Hollywood’s branch of Lee Strasberg’s acting workshop established in 1967. Nat Freedland, “Waiting,” Los Angeles Free Press, April 4, 1969, 13, 21. Ibid. Kevin Thomas, “Cyclists Head Cast of Naked Angels,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1969, D14. “Naked Angels,” Variety, May 21, 1969, 34. Martin Rubin, “Make Love Make War: Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle,” Film History 6, no. 3 (1994): 355–381. Joan Didion, “Nine Bike Movies in Seven Vroom! Days,” Life 68, no. 17 (May 8, 1970): 4. The bikes were supplied by Dean’s Custom Services; see “Dean Lanza ‘the Dean’ of Custom Bike Painters,” Classic American Iron, April 2, 2010, accessed November 21, 2017, http://www.caimag.com/wordpress/2010/04/02/dean-lanza-the-dean-of -custom-bike-painters/. Mahoney, “Naked Angels.” Ibid. Naked Angels and Pit Stop advertisements, Boxoffice, May 26, 1969, W-7. Producer Dawdy discusses soundtrack financing with John Wasserman in “The Rock on the Soundtracks, 1970,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 25, 1970, accessed November 21, 2017, http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/The-rock -on-the-soundtracks-1970-5080292.php. Paul Schrader, “Naked Angels,” Los Angeles Free Press, July 18, 1969, 24, 28–29. Ibid. Ibid. Naked Angels and Pit Stop advertisements, Boxoffice, May 26, 1969, W-7. Crown International billed and distributed Naked Angels with The Hellcats and The Wild Rebels for a citywide run starting December 2, 1970. “Triple Cycle Bill,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1970, F13. Box office data are taken from AIP marketing materials for Hell’s Angels ’69, cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. The Hells Angels had previously received screen credit in The Wild Angels and Hell’s Angels on Wheels, and Sonny Barger had a credit on Angels from Hell. Stern’s deal with AIP is outlined in Variety, January 17, 1971, 3, 27. Review, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Cue, September 20, 1969; Hell’s Angels ’69 cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library.

186 • Notes to Pages 90–98

73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Review, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Motion Picture Herald, August 13, 1969, Hell’s Angels ’69 cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Review, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Boxoffice, August 18, 1969, 42–43. Michael Ross, review, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, August 15, 1969, Hell’s Angels ’69 cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Review, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Hollywood Citizen News, August 15, 1969, cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Review, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Daily Variety 144, no. 37 ( July 29, 1969): 3. Kevin Thomas, “Hell’s Angels ’69 in Run on Pantages Screen,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1969, D16. Other reviews that highlight the Angels’ participation include Variety, July 30, 1969; and Wanda Hale, “Angels ’69 Noisy, Phony,” Daily News (New York), September 11, 1969, 84. Joe Rosen, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Morning Telegraph (New York), September 11, 1969, 3. Roger Greenspun, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” New York Times, September 11, 1969, 52. Ibid. Lawrence Alloway, “More Skin, More Everything in Movies,” Vogue, February 1, 1968, 213. Ibid. “Picture Grosses,” Variety, September 9, 1970, 9. “Picture Grosses,” Variety, September 16, 1970, 10. “Picture Grosses,” Variety, August 26, 1970, 14. “Picture Grosses,” Variety, September 2, 1970, 28. “Picture Grosses,” Variety, December 23, 1970, 10. “Angel Unchained Stars Hard-Hitting Newcomers,” Entertainment Today, September 2, 1970, 7. “A Cast That Includes Three Second Generation Performers . . . Unchained Due Citywide Today,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1970, H14. Angel Unchained materials, Margaret Herrick Library special collection. Born Losers pressbook, Margaret Herrick Library special collection. Review, “Angel Unchained,” Motion Picture Examiner, August 27, 1969, Angel Unchained cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Angel Unchained materials, Margaret Herrick Library special collection. James Raker papers, AMPAS, Margaret Herrick Library special collection. Bridget Byrne, review, “Angel Unchained,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, September 4, 1970, cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Review, “Angel Unchained,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 1970, cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Review, “Angel Unchained,” Variety, August 19, 1970, 16. Kevin M. Saviola, “Angel Unchained,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 17, 1970, 12.

Chapter Three After Easy Rider Robert B. Frederick, “Action Credo of Frazer, Kennis: Eye on Youth,” Variety, September 17, 1969, 3, 20. 2 Joe Rosen, “Hell’s Angels ’69,” Morning Telegraph (New York), September 11, 1969, 3. 3 Charles Champlin, “Low-Cost, High-Importance Bike Film,” Los Angeles Times, August 10, 1969, P1. 4 Ibid. 1

Notes to Pages 98–107 • 187 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid. Andrew Sarris, “Films,” Village Voice, July 3, 1969, gives heavy praise to Nicholson’s characterization, lists just about every group and solo artist that features, and is dismissive of Fonda and Hopper’s “affecting figures of alienation” and “man-cool mumble.” Louise Sweeney, “. . . and Hopper’s Rider,” Christian Science Monitor, September 29, 1969. Vincent Canby, “Easy Rider: A Statement on Film,” New York Times, July 15, 1969. Penelope Gilliatt, “Into the Eye of the Storm,” New Yorker, July 19, 1969, 70. Judith Crist, “Easy Rider; Putney Swope,” New York, July 21, 1969. Gilliatt, “Eye of the Storm.” See Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, eds., The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). Archer Winsten, “Fonda’s Easy Rider,” New York Post, July 15, 1969, 26. Poster strapline. Lee Hill, Easy Rider (London: BFI, 1996), 34. Gilliatt, “Eye of the Storm.” Nicholas Godfrey, “Reappraising the Renaissance: The New Hollywood in Industrial and Critical Context” (PhD diss., Flinders University, 2014), 47. Derek Nystrom, Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22, 52–53. Robert Christgau, “Easy Rider’s Soundtrack,” reprinted in The Complete Screenplay, ed. Nancy Hardin and Marilyn Schlossberg (New York: Signet, 1969), 22–25. Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 162. Howard Hampton, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: The Uneasy Ride of Hollywood and Rock,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 249–266. Kevin Thomas, “Run, Angel, Run! in Citywide Engagement,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1969, D18. Ibid. John Mahoney, “Run, Angel, One Best Fanfare BO Prospects,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 23, 1969. Leo Mishkin, “A Motorbike to Toyland,” Morning Telegraph (New York), April 23, 1969, 3. Daphne Kraft, “Motorcycle Gang Film Has Realism,” Newark Evening News, April 27, 1969. “Angels Die Hard,” Variety, June 24, 1970, 22. “New World Pictures Launches Program,” Boxoffice, June 29, 1970, 5. Ibid. Jim Hillier and Aaron Lipstadt, “The Economics of Independence: Roger Corman and New World Pictures 1970–80,” Movie 31/32 (Winter 1986): 43–53. “Looking Ahead: New World Pictures,” Boxoffice, June 7, 1971, d86. “Roger Corman—Director Who Changed the Face of Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1972, V18. Ibid.

188 • Notes to Pages 107–117

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62

See Maitland McDonagh, “The Exploitation Generation. Or: How Marginal Movies Came in from the Cold,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 107–131. “Roger Corman,” V18. John Mahoney, “Naked Angels,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 4, 1969. Angels Die Hard pressbook. The film’s pressbook doesn’t mention the Morrison connection but does highlight his East Coast avant-garde credentials. Kevin Thomas, “Savages in Citywide Run,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1970, 123. “Werewolves on Wheels,” Variety, June 9, 1971, 4. “Fanfare Acquires Werewolves,” Boxoffice, June 7, 1971, 7. Review, “Werewolves on Wheels,” Variety, October 13, 1971, 20. Craig Fisher, review, “Werewolves on Wheels,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 1, 1971. Ibid. A soundtrack album was not released at the time, but in 2002, Finders Keepers records pulled together Gere’s recordings for CD and LP. Fisher, review, “Werewolves on Wheels.” Kevin Thomas, “Devil’s Advocates in Fantasy Biker,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1971, 128. Special feature included with the Dark Sky DVD (2006). Roger Ebert, review, “Big Foot,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 1971, accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/big-foot-1971. American Film Institute, The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Chadwyck-Healey), ProQuest. “Today’s Majors as Instant No-Guts . . . ,” Variety, July 21, 1971, 7, 22. Ibid. “The Story of Independent-International Pictures,” Independent Film Journal, September 30, 1971, 61, 82. John Cocchi, “Sam Sherman Gives Accent to Action in Films Aimed for Youth Market,” Boxoffice, March 1, 1971, 13. “Today’s Majors,” 7, 22. “Compares Hippie-Cult Film with Tate Murder Case,” Boxoffice, December 22, 1969, 13. The advertisement is reproduced in Wyatt James, Sleazy Riders: A Guide to the Sleaziest Biker Flicks Ever Made (Phoenix: Simple Studio, 2011), 106. “Feature Reviews,” Boxoffice, January 12, 1970, b12. “Satan’s Sadists,” Boxoffice, January 12, 1970, b11. “Satan’s Sadists,” Variety, January 14, 1970, 20, 38. See, for example, Archer Winsten, “Two Cyclist Pix for Price of One,” New York Post, January 7, 1971, 49; Howard Thompson, review, “Satan’s Sadists,” New York Times, January, 7 1971, 41; Gunter David, review, “Satan’s Sadists,” Newark Evening News, January 7, 1971, 46; and Kathleen Carroll, review, “Satan’s Sadists,” Daily News (New York), January 7, 1971, 73. Atra Baer, “Movie Review,” Daily Mirror, January 11, 1971, 11.

Notes to Pages 117–127 • 189 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81

82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

John Goff, “Satan’s Sadists,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 1970. Kevin Thomas, “Outlaw Motorcyclists Topic of Satan’s Sadists,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1970, F15. “Satan’s Sadists,” Variety, January 14, 1970, 20, 38. “Feature Reviews,” Boxoffice, January 12, 1970, b12. “Satan’s Sadists,” Independent Film Journal, May 27, 1970, 1276. “Today’s Majors,” 7, 22. “Story of Independent-International,” 61, 82. Kevin Thomas, “Namath in Debut as Cyclist,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1970, E1. Review: “C.C. and Company,” Show, July 9, 1970, clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS. “C.C. and Company,” Independent Film Journal, October 30, 1970, 1379. “Anthony Cardoza to Do Riders on Own,” Variety, August 26, 1970, 6. “New York Sound Track,” Variety, July 28, 1971, 6. “Outlaw Riders to Open,” Boxoffice, January 8, 1973, C1. “Anthony Cardoza,” 6. J. Wooley and M. Price, The Big Book of Biker Flicks (Tulsa: Hawk Publishing, 2005), 148. See “New Orleans,” Boxoffice, July 12, 1971, SE8. In late summer, there were reports of the film being ready for release: “Story of Independent-International Pictures,” 82. Reports of The Big Doll House’s returns during its Texas run are in Boxoffice, May 31, 1971, 10. Trade advertisement, Independent Film Journal, October 8, 1971, 10. “The Female Bunch,” Independent Film Journal, March 16, 1972, 12. “12 New Features on Crown,” Boxoffice, February 8, 1971, 42; “Pink Angels to Crown,” Boxoffice, July 5, 1971, 3; “Crown’s Wild Riders Sets April Booking Record,” Boxoffice, April 12, 1971, 8. Pink Angels was reviewed by Kevin Thomas, “Bikers Dig Each Other in Angels,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1972, E27. He was concerned that action fans would see it as “a joke on homosexuals,” while “sophisticates” would see it as a send up of biker flicks. “McGee Film to Distribute,” Boxoffice, August 25, 1969, W-3. “Atlanta,” Boxoffice, June 22, 1970, SE6. “Storefront Boom,” Independent Film Journal, January 21, 1971, 30. “Naked and Free,” Variety, August 4, 1971, 3. “Picture Grosses,” Variety, July 19, 1972, 11. “Avant-Garde to Distribute,” Boxoffice, May 31, 1971, 5. Advertisement, Boxoffice, February 1, 1971, SW8. The Loners was initially titled Julio and Stein and was listed as such in an advertisement publicizing New Mexico as a location for filmmakers by the state’s film commission. Trade advertisement, Back Stage, March 26, 1971, 18. “Fanfare for Under-30s,” Variety, December 1, 1971, 7. “Cinemobile as Sub-producer,” Variety, December 2, 1970, 3. “The Loners,” Variety, April 26, 1972, 6. Ibid.

190 • Notes to Pages 129–142

Chapter Four Nazi Satanists, Vietnam Vets, and Motorcycle Mamas 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

KRON-TV news footage held in the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, accessed March 1, 2017, https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/225552. Rich Oberg, Men’s Adventure Magazines (London: Taschen, 2008). Adam Parfrey, It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazine, the Postwar Pulps (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), 36. Howard Thompson, “Screen Losers Arrives,” New York Times, August 6, 1970, 28. David Sterritt, “Starrett’s Losers,” Christian Science Monitor, July 6, 1970. Illustrations of bikers and motorcycle gangs from men’s adventure magazines are reproduced in Barbarians on Bikes, ed. Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle (Los Angeles: New Texture Books, 2016). See also Tom Brinkmann, “The 1 Percenters: Outlaw Riders—Sixties Style,” in Bad Mags, vol. 1 (London: Headpress, 2008), 212–249. Parfrey, It’s a Man’s World, 36. Ibid. Nicholson and Arkoff, “How to Attract Audiences,” Variety, January 5, 1972, 38. “Chrome and Hot Leather,” Variety, September 1, 1971, 16. “The Exhibitor Has His Say,” Boxoffice, August 28, 1972, a3. “Chrome and Hot Leather,” Independent Film Journal, September 16, 1971, 9. Ibid. Angels from Hell pressbook. Martin Rubin, “Make Love Make War: Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle,” Film History 6, no. 3 (1994): 355–381. “Merrick Seers End of Major Studios, Enter Hyphanates,” Independent Film Journal, November 12, 1969, 28. Ann Guarino, “Black Six Vets on Bikes,” Daily News (New York), March 14, 1974, ML88. Kevin Thomas, “Biker Film with Message,” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1971, D12. “The Hard Ride,” Independent Film Journal, April 29, 1971, 11. “The Wild Angels,” The Times (London), April 27, 1969. By “two image Batman rings,” he is referring to “flicker” rings, cheap plastic toys with a lenticular cover over images, which change when moved. Lawrence Alloway, “Son of Public Enemy,” Arts Magazine, November 1966, 25–26. William Murray, “Hell’s Angels: Outlaw Motorcycle Club in California,” Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1965, 37–40. “Hell’s Angels Called Threat on Wheels,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1965, A1, A2. Jerry Cohen, “Hell’s Angels: How They Live and Think,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1965, A1, A3. Paul Coates, “Hell’s Angels Rule of the Road,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1965, A6. Devil’s Angels pressbook. Andrew Sarris, “Films: Puffs from the Jet Stream,” Village Voice, July 11, 1968. Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn, Rock Dreams: Under the Boardwalk (London: Pan, 1973). Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), 370. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating -fascism/.

Notes to Pages 142–163 • 191 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Ibid. Ibid. “Hell’s Angels on Wheels,” Variety, June 6, 1967. Norma Coates, “Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and Early 1970s,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 15, no. 1 (2003): 67. Ibid., 86. Pam Cook, “Women and the Western,” in The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998), 293–300. Tania Modleski, “Women’s Cinema as Counterphobic Cinema: Doris Wishman as the Last Auteur,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 64. Ibid., 63. Charlotte Greig, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Girl Groups from the 50s on . . . (London: Virago, 1989), 50–51. “Hellcats Setting Record,” Boxoffice, April 1, 1968, W2. Ibid. “Continuous Bally Builds Up Hellcats,” Boxoffice, June 3, 1968, 86. “Hell’s Outcast for Gemini,” Boxoffice, May 20, 1968, 10. “Exhibitor Has His Say,” Boxoffice, February 3, 1969, 20. “Mini-Skirt Mob,” Variety, May 29, 1968. Ibid. Ann Guarino, “Motorcycles Sub for Horse in Mini-Skirt,” Daily News (New York), October 26, 1968, 80. Howard Thompson, “Cyclist Double Bill,” New York Times, October 24, 1968, 55. Frances Herridge, “Motorcycle Gangs Return in Two Neighborhood Films,” New York Post, October 24, 1968, 55. Synopsis and cast/production credits included in the cutting file, Margaret Herrick Library. Kevin Thomas, “Hell’s Belles Playing at Theaters, Drive-ins,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1969, G11. “Hell’s Belles,” Variety, April 9, 1969. Gail Rock, “Hell’s Belles,” Women’s Wear Daily, April 30, 1970, 12. Ibid. “Cycle Bums Strike Again,” Daily News (New York), April 30 1970, 84. “Uptrend in Feature Schedules,” Boxoffice, June 7, 1971, d8, d10, d12, d14. “Spring Doldrums . . . ,” Variety, May 12, 1971, 8, 16. “Eyes Boff . . . Angel 5 ½ G,” Variety, August 25, 1971, 8, 14. Blue Ribbon Pictures advertisement, Boxoffice, February 22, 1971, SE3. Donald J. Mayerson, “Angels Die Hard and Bury Me An Angel,” Cue, May 8, 1971, 72. David Sterritt, “A Feminine Bikie,” Christian Science Monitor, September 3, 1971, 4. Linda Gross, “A Woman’s Place Is in . . . Exploitation Films?,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1978, P34, P35. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “New World Schedules,” Boxoffice, April 12, 1971, 10.

192 • Notes to Pages 165–172

Conclusion 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17

Buried in the Sand Forever

Roger Ebert, “Joe Solomon: The Last of the Schlockmeisters,” Esquire, November 1971, republished in Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), 135–146. Bill Osgerby, “Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, ‘Otherness,’ and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 31, no. 3 (2003): 98–108. Alan Levy, “Peekaboo Sex, or How to Fill a Drive-in,” Life, July 16, 1965, 81–88. Zoe Wallin, “Film Cycles and the Hollywood Studio System” (PhD diss., Flinders University, 2017), 142–143. Ibid. Ibid., 203. “Corman’s New World Plans Manila Studio,” Variety, January 12, 1972, 16. Gary Kent, Shadows and Light: Journeys with Outlaws in Revolutionary Hollywood (Austin: Dalton, 2009). Peter Stanfield, The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 4–20. Linda Gross, “A Woman’s Place Is in . . . Exploitation Films?,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1978, P34, P35. Levy, “Peekaboo Sex,” 81–88. AIP was happy to suggest both adherence to the Peter Pan Syndrome in Levy’s article and a year later the precise opposite: “We keep our eye on the female buyer,” said an AIP executive, “because the female is the principal buyer of records and it’s the girl who decides which film she and her boyfriend or husband are going to see.” “AIP: Action, Youth, Older O’seas Fans; Let TV Gravy Bubble Up by Itself,” Variety, June 22, 1966, 24. Richard Nowell, “Cars and Girls (and Burgers and Weed): Branding, Mainstreaming, and Crown International Pictures’ SoCal Drive-in Movies,” in Fisher and Walker (2016), 107–128. Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), 261. Ibid. Nick Heffernan, “No Parents, No Church, No Authorities in Our Films: Exploitation Movies, the Youth Audience, and Roger Corman’s Counterculture Trilogy,” Journal of Film and Video 67, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 3–18. Ebert, “Joe Soloman.”

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Adam, 151 Adams, Beverly, 46, 47, 48 Adamson, Al, 115 African Americans, 113–114 Africa Texas Style, 58 AIP. See American International Pictures Alaimo, Steve, 56 Allan, Davie, 70 Alloway, Lawrence, 38, 91, 138–139 Alpert, Hollis, 35, 37 Altamont Speedway, 15 American General Pictures, 69 American International Pictures, 4, 12, 33, 92–93, 166, 169; and beach movies, 39, 41–42; and Blaxploitation, 165; break with Corman, 88–89, 106; finances, 33, 45, 89; marketing, 29, 132–133; and ratings, 94 Anders, Donna, 112 Anders, Richard, 75, 77 Angels Die Hard, 107–109, 108, 151, 157–158 Angels from Hell, 67–69, 77–78, 134, 146–147 Angels Hard as They Come, 113–115 Angels’ Wild Women, 121–122 Angel Unchained, 89, 91–92, 95–96, 95; production, 92–93; promotion, 94–95; reception, 95, 96

Anger, Kenneth, 36–38 Angry Breed, The, 70–71 Ann-Margaret, 105, 120 Arkoff, Samuel Z., 37, 41–42, 106, 132–133, 166, 171 artists, 51, 74 Arts Magazine, 138–139 Asher, William, 39 Askew, Luke, 93 audience, 162–163, 167, 170–173; demographics, 5, 15–18, 27, 38, 118, 120, 152; expectations, 15–16; female, 4–5, 46–48, 142, 147, 192n11; identification, 15 auteurism, 36 Avalon, Frankie, 39, 44 Avco, 105 Aveyard, Karina, 24–25 Baker, Tom, 108–109 ballad form, 99 Barger, Sonny, 9, 10, 67, 129, 139, 178n23 Barris, George, 50 Bass Lake, California, 9, 11, 14 beach movies, 29, 39, 41–44, 45, 61, 153, 166; biker movie links, 48, 57–58 Beatles, 44 Bembry, Maggie, 122 193

194 • Index

Berger, Mel, 76 Berkeley, California, 10 Big Doll House, The, 122 Big Enough n’ Old Enough. See Savages from Hell Big Foot, 111 Bikers in Outer Space, 44–45 Bikini Beach, 43 Bishop, Larry, 77, 93, 95 Black Angels, 136–137 Black Six, The, 137 Blaxploitation, 121, 136, 165 Blue Ribbon Pictures, 157 Boetticher, Budd, 145–146 Bohrer, Jack, 75 Bonner, William, 120, 121 Bordwell, David, 22 Borealis Enterprises, 69 Born Losers, 13, 54, 66, 134, 145, 149, 149; promotion, 53, 93; reception, 55 Boxoffice, 105, 151, 165; on biker movie cycle, 90; on The Hellcats, 150–151; on Satan’s Sadists, 116–117; on Werewolves on Wheels, 109; on The Wild Angels, 33 box office, 33–34, 45, 55, 69, 89, 92, 123 Brady, Scott, 118 Brando, Marlon, 38–39 Bruno, Richard, 65 budgets, 87, 89, 105, 106, 115, 169 Bury Me an Angel, 157–161, 159 Busey, Gary, 114 Byers, Bobbie, 56–57 California, 50 Canby, Vincent, 36, 99 Canjels, Rudmer, 21 Capitol Records, 90 car crash movies, 170 car culture, 50, 79 Cardos, John, 118 Cardoza, Anthony, 71, 111, 120 Carradine, John, 111 Carroll, Regina, 116 carsploitation movies, 59, 60, 62 Cassavetes, John, 47, 63, 65 casting, 72, 111–112, 137; continuity, 48, 67, 98; Hollywood lineage, 4, 31, 77, 93, 145; of women, 46

Catching, Bill, 103 Cavell, Marc, 31 C.C. and Company, 105, 120 Champlin, Charles, 58, 66, 98 Christgau, Robert, 101 Christian Science Monitor, 34, 98–99, 130, 160–161 Chrome and Hot Leather, 132, 133–134, 135, 136 Church, David, 61–62 Cinemation Industries, 137 cinematography, 78, 84–85, 103 Cinemobile, 125 Citizen News, 34, 55 city exposé movies, 59, 60 Clark, Bruce, 79, 87–88 Clark, Dick, 75 class, 5, 15–16, 61, 100–101 Clemens, George M., 7 Coates, Norma, 143, 145 Coates, Paul, 13 Cohen, Howard R., 44 Cohen, Jerry, 9–10 Cohen, Martin B., 72 Commons, David, 71 Commonwealth United Corporation, 71 competition, 169 Confederate symbolism, 140 continuity, 67, 74, 77 conventions, 20–21 Cook, Pam, 146 Corman, Gene, 105 Corman, Roger, 12, 87–88, 105–107; as auteur, 36, 171, 181n32; filmography, 30; on The Wild Angels, 34, 35 “Corman Method,” 87–88 Cornelius, Eugene, 129 costumes, 65–66, 112; female, 49, 53, 81, 118, 146, 153; male, 49. See also fashion counterculture, 10–12 Cream, 78 Creedence Clearwater Revival, 101 Crist, Judith, 99 Crosby, Lindsay, 120 Crown International Pictures, 60–61, 71, 122–123 Crowther, Bosley, 34–35 Crystals, 148 Cue, 55, 160

Index • 195

Cummings, Robert, 42 Curb, Mike, 64, 73, 75, 78 customization: cars, 50; motorcycles, 23–24, 50–51, 182n81 cycles, 63, 66, 166–168, 169 Cycle Savages, The, 73–75, 75; reception, 17–18 “Cyclist’s Raid, The,” 38 Daily Mirror, 117 Daily News, 66 Daly, Tyne, 93, 96 dance, 43, 51, 57–58 Dawdy, David R., 79 decentralization, 60 decline, 60; of cycles, 25, 105, 127, 165–166; of film industry, 18 Demme, Jonathan, 106, 113 depersonalization, 15 Dern, Bruce, 31, 72–74, 75 Devil Rider, 123–124 Devil’s Angels, 47, 48, 57–58, 63–67, 65, 167; Nazi symbolism, 139; promotion, 46–47, 52; reception, 46, 48 Dexter, Maury, 154 de Zarrage, Tony, 158 Dick Clark Enterprises, 75 Dickerson, Beach, 158 Didion, Joan, 1–2, 5, 15, 18, 84, 170 Dimension Pictures, 165, 168 Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, 60 displaced abjection, 143 dissociation, 140–141 distribution, 21, 24, 26, 27, 106, 116 Downe, Louise, 152 drive-ins, 17–18, 25, 60–62, 88 drugs, 16 dystopia, 83–84 Easy Rider, 94, 97–101, 172, 187n6; allusions to, 110, 125 Ebert, Roger, 111 Eco, Umberto, 20 Edwards, Nadine M., 90 Ekins, Bud, 23, 93 employment, 16 Esquire, 50 exhibition, 24–25

Familia Manson, La. See C.C. and Company Fanfare Film Productions, 67, 125 fashion, 46–47, 48, 120, 141, 151. See also costumes Female Bunch, The, 122 femininity, 154 feminism, 148 Film Quarterly, 36, 78 Film TV Daily, 17 Fireball 500, 44 Fisher, Craig, 109 Fisk, Jack, 115 Fiskin, Jeffrey Alladin, 92, 93 folk devils, 7, 11, 177n8 Fonda, Henry, 29 Fonda, Peter, 31, 36, 98 formula, 20–21, 26, 42 frameworks, 24 Frank, Joanna, 76 Freedland, Nat, 79 Friends of the Hells Angels, 10 frontier, 82–83, 96, 100, 107 Frost, Lee, 133 Fuller, Robert, 137 Funicello, Annette, 39, 44 Furlong, V. A. See Starrett, Valerie Gaines, Donna, 16–17 Gan, Jennifer, 79 Garwood, John, 77 Gaye, Marvin, 133–134, 136 Gayle, Saundra, 67 Gemini-American Productions, 71, 120 Gemini Productions, 151 gender, 5, 49, 56 Genovese, Kitty, 54–55 Gere, Don, 109 Gilliatt, Penelope, 99 Ginsberg, Allen, 11–12 Girl in the Leather Suit. See Hell’s Belles Girls from Thunder Strip, The, 123 Glenn, Scott, 114 Glory Stompers, The, 49, 57, 66, 78, 145; reception, 20–21 Godfrey, Nicholas, 99 gonzo journalism, 11 graffiti, 13, 51 Greene, Michael, 79, 82

196 • Index

Greenspun, Roger, 91 Greig, Charlotte, 148 Griffith, Charles B., 63 Grinter, Brad F., 123 Gross, Linda, 162–163 groupies, 143, 145 Guarino, Ann, 137 Hagan, Ross, 153 Haig, Sid, 105 Hall, Tex, 110 Haller, Daniel, 63 Hampton, Howard, 101 Hard Ride, The, 137 Harley-Davidsons, 23, 182n81 Harper’s, 38 Hassel, Sven, 132 Hawthorne Productions, 120 Hayward, Deke, 29 Heffernan, Nick, 171 Hellcats, The, 71–72, 150–151, 151 Hells Angels, 6–10, 90–91, 129, 139, 170 Hell’s Angels ’69, 89–91, 97, 167 Hells Angels on Wheels, 78, 90, 143, 144, 148–150; reception, 49–50, 67 Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, 10–14, 30, 35 Hell’s Belles, 73, 154–157, 156 Hell’s Bloody Devils, 115–116 Hells Chosen Few, 69–70 Herald Examiner, 34 Herman, Norman, 93 heroes, 98, 132, 134 Herridge, Frances, 67 heterosexuality, 146 Hewitt, David L., 69, 123 Heyward, Louis M. “Deke,” 42, 46 Hieronymus, Richard, 158 hippies, 68, 95–96, 112–114 Hollister, California, 9, 11, 38 Hollywood, 3–4, 12, 27, 77 Hollywood Citizen News, 90 Hollywood Reporter, 47, 62, 103; on Angels from Hell, 77–78; on Naked Angels, 79, 84–86, 107; on Satan’s Sadists, 117; on Werewolves on Wheels, 109; on The Wild Angels, 33

homosexuality, 37, 123, 145 homosociality, 37, 145, 161 Hondas, 41, 43, 53, 54, 153 Hopper, Dennis, 98 horror movies, 52, 109, 110–111, 112, 118; allusions to, 123 hot and cold iterations, 25–26 hot-rod movies, 25, 61 hot-rods, 25, 50 Houston, Tony, 120 How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, 43 Hughes, Mary, 39, 41 hybridity, 14, 109, 127 Independent Film Journal, 60, 115–116, 118, 134, 136, 138 Independent-International Pictures, 115, 121 initiation rites, 7–8, 152 interchange, 21 intertextuality, 20–21, 127 Iron Butterfly, 78–79 Jackson, Sherry, 153 James, Elizabeth, 46, 53, 54 juvenile delinquency, 14, 43, 57 Kael, Pauline, 36, 37 Kasem, Casey, 73 Katzman, Jerry, 125 Katzman, Sam, 125 Keaton, Buster, 43 Kefauver hearings, 60 Kennis, Dan, 115 Kent, Gary, 77, 123 Kesey, Ken, 11–12 Kessler, Bruce, 77–78 Knight, Arthur, 37 Koslo, Paul, 129 Kovacs, Laszlo, 75, 78, 98 Kraft, Daphne, 103 Ladd, Diane, 72 Lane, Jocelyn, 155 Las Vegas, Nevada, 83, 91 Lavelle, 113 Led Zeppelin, 16 Lee, Randee, 73 Lembeck, Harvey, 39, 41

Index • 197

Levesque, Michel, 109–110 Levy, Alan, 42 Lewis, Herschell Gordon, 151–152 Lewis, Paul, 109–110 Life, 2, 9, 18, 38, 42 Lippman, Irving, 93 Littlejohn, Gary, 50–51, 73, 77, 182n81 Litwak, Leo, 7 locations, 51, 77, 78, 82–85, 100, 115 Lollipop Shoppe, 68 Loners, The, 125 Los Angeles Free Press, 79 Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 55, 90 Los Angeles Times, 9–10, 29, 58, 162; on Angels Die Hard, 72; on Angel Unchained, 95; on Born Losers, 57; on Roger Corman, 106; on Devil’s Angels, 46, 63; on Easy Rider, 98; on The Hellcats, 71–72; on Hell’s Angels ’69, 91; on Pink Angels, 189n82; on Satan’s Sadists, 118; on The Wild Angels, 34, 35 Losers, The, 129–130, 132, 168 Lynch, Thomas G., 6–7 Lynch report, 6–8 Madcaps, 67 Madden, Lee, 92–93 Mahoney, John, 103 Man and a Woman, A, 35–36 Mann, Anthony, 145–146 Manson, Charles, 3, 113, 114, 116–117, 122 Manson Family, 110, 112, 115, 116 manufacture, 22 market, 25, 27 Martel, Arlene, 146 masculinity, 100–101, 143, 145 Master’s Revenge. See Devil Rider Mayer, Ruth, 21, 27 Maynard, Ken, 111 McBain, Diane, 153 McCormack, Patti, 153 McCrea, Jody, 39, 145 McKinney, Bill, 95 Medley, Bill, 138 Mehas, Mick, 73 Meier, John, 158 MEN, 131 Merrick, Lawrence, 136

Merrick International Pictures, 136–137 military, 16–17 Mini-Skirt Mob, 152–154 MIP. See Merrick International Pictures Mishkin, Leo, 103 misogyny, 4–5, 117, 146, 161 Mitchell, Cameron, 72 mobility, 59 Modleski, Tania, 147 Monterey, California, 7, 9 Moore, Richard, 65 morality, 46, 134, 143 moral panic, 11, 17, 25 Morning Telegraph, 48, 90, 103 Motion Picture Association of America, 31 Motion Picture Export Company, 31 Motion Picture Herald, 33, 55, 89–90 MPAA. See Motion Picture Association of America Murray, K. Gordon, 69 Murray, Rita, 158 Murray, William, 8–9, 13, 50, 139 music, 29, 70, 71, 109, 125, 152; country, 182n70; girl groups, 148; psychedelic, 68; rock, 78–79, 86–87, 101, 111, 121; soul, 138; surf, 78 Naked Angels, 80, 82, 83–84, 83, 85, 86, 91, 110; distribution, 88; and Nazi symbolism, 140; production, 79, 87, 107; reception, 79, 81–82, 84–86; and women, 81 Namath, Joe, 105, 120 Nation, 8, 11 National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, 34, 55 Native Americans, 76–77 Nazis, 35, 139 Nazi symbols, 8, 13, 56, 70, 138–142. See also swastika Neale, Steve, 20 Newark Evening News, 103 New California Magazine, 151 New Hollywood, 6, 99, 100–101 Newsday, 37 Newsweek, 35 New World Pictures, 4, 88, 105, 157, 166, 168 New York Daily News, 37, 137, 157 New Yorker, 37, 99

198 • Index

New York Post, 37, 67, 99, 153–154 New York Times, 7–8, 11; on biker movie cycle, 45; on Born Losers, 66; on Roger Corman, 36; on Easy Rider, 99; on Hell’s Angels ’69, 91; on The Losers, 130; on The Wild Angels, 34–35 Nicholson, Jack, 72–73, 98, 143 Nicholson, James H., 106, 132–133 nihilism, 2, 86, 149–150 nouvelle vague, 84 novelty, 41, 49–50, 68, 77, 134, 166, 172 Nowell, Richard, 60–61, 167 obsolescence, 61, 133 Osgerby, Bill, 165 Outlaw Riders, 120–121 oversaturation, 167 padding, 25 Pajama Party, 41 Paramount Ranch, 115 parents, 15, 42, 55 Parfrey, Adam, 132 parody, 43, 57–58, 120, 127. See also satire patriotism, 10, 17 Patterson, Melody, 74 Peabody, Dixie, 158, 159 Peace Killers, The, 112–113, 113 Peanut Butter Conspiracy, 68 Peeters, Barbara, 158, 160–161, 163 Peter Pan Syndrome, 170–171 Pettyjohn, Angelique, 154 phallic imagery, 150, 151, 159, 162 Philippines, 106, 129, 168–169 Phillips, Stu, 67, 68 Pink Angels, 122–123, 124, 189n82 Poor, 149 Porterville, California, 7–9 Price, Vincent, 42 primitives, 43 prison movies, 106–107, 121–122, 165 Procopio, Lou, 72 production, 21–22, 24–26, 59–61 promotion, 117, 133 protest movies, 29–30, 33, 44–46, 76 race: and beach movies, 43; and biker movies, 68, 76–77, 114, 136–138. See

also African Americans; Blaxploitation; Native Americans racism, 114, 130, 137 Raker, James, 53, 133 Ranown cycle, 24–25 rape: and Hells Angels, 8–9; offscreen, 94, 117; onscreen, 74; threat of, 49, 53, 77 ratings, 88, 93–94, 118 Ray, Aldo, 93 Read, Robert, 59–60, 62 Rebel Rousers, 72–73, 140 regionalism, 62 repetition, 5–6, 20–21, 41, 46, 95 Republicans for Conservative Action, 10 Riefenstahl, Leni, 142 Riot on Sunset Strip, 67 Roarke, Adam, 75, 76–77, 129, 143, 154 Robbins, Leroy, 75 Robinson, Chris, 74 Robles, Walter, 73 rock culture, 143, 145 Rolling Stone, 171 Rolling Stones, 15 Rooney, Frank, 38 Rooney, Mickey, 43 Rosen, Joe, 90, 97 Ross, Michael, 90 Roth, Ed “Big Daddy,” 50–51 Rothman, Stephanie, 163, 165 Rubin, Martin, 82, 136 Run, Angel, Run!, 102–104, 104 Rush, Richard, 75, 78, 79, 82 Ryan, Tim, 93 sadism, 132, 142 San Francisco Chronicle, 87 Sarris, Andrew, 36, 98, 140, 187n6 Satan’s Sadists, 115, 119 satire, 122–123, 140. See also parody Saturday Evening Post, 8, 13 Saturday Review, 35, 37 Savage, Houston, 129 Savage Seven, The, 75–77, 83, 140 Savages from Hell, 57, 69, 72 Schaefer, Eric, 25–26 Schaffer, Jane, 158 Scharf, Sabrina, 98, 143, 144 Schrader, Paul, 15, 87–88

Index • 199

Scorpio Rising, 36–38 Screaming Angels. See Angels’ Wild Women self-consciousness, 45, 46, 110 self-reference, 41–42 self-reflexivity, 14, 21, 84 Selvaggi, I. See Wild Angels, The seriality, 19–22, 26, 41–42, 158, 166, 172 sex, 143, 145, 146; acceptability, 118, 120; and beach movies, 42–43; and Hells Angels, 8; suggestiveness, 88, 153. See also rape Shangri-Las, 148 She-Devils on Wheels, 151–152 Sherman, Samuel, 115–116 Shestack, Mel, 130 Shirelles, 148 Simmons, Jeff, 86 Simon, John, 37 Sinatra, Nancy, 31, 46, 48 Slate, Jeremy, 90, 154 Slatzer, Robert F., 71, 111 Smith, Jeff, 101 Smith, Maurice, 73 Smith, William, 102, 105, 108–109, 129, 132 Solomon, Joe, 67, 102, 103, 164, 172–173 Sontag, Susan, 141–142 Spahn Ranch, 3, 115, 116, 123 square-ups, 25 Staehling, Richard, 171 Staiger, Janet, 22 Stanton, Harry Dean, 72 Starrett, Jack, 67, 102, 129 Starrett, Valerie, 102, 103–104 star system, 3–4 Stephens, John, 103 Sterling, Jan, 70 Stern, Sol, 15 Stern, Tom, 89, 90 Sterritt, David, 160–161 Straight Records, 87 Straw, Will, 59–60 Stroud, Don, 93, 95 student films, 15 studio system, 22, 60 “Study in Motion #1,” 149 subproducers, 125 Swartz, Charles, 165 swastika, 138–140, 140, 141–142, 149, 149

sweat magazines, 129–130, 131, 132 Sweeney, Louise, 34 Tamblyn, Russ, 116, 118 Tanenbaum, James, 158 Tate, Sharon, 116–117 Taylor, Delores, 54–55 Taylor, Kent, 118 teenagers, 29, 42–44, 60–61, 75, 148 Tenser, Marilyn, 170 Tessier, Robert, 77, 120 Texter, Gilda, 114 Then Came Bronson, 23 Thomas, Kevin, 106–107, 120; on Angels Die Hard, 72, 108–109; on Devil’s Angels, 46, 63; on The Hard Ride, 138; on Hell’s Angels ’69, 91; on Hell’s Belles, 157; on Naked Angels, 81; on Pink Angels, 189n82; on Run, Angel, Run!, 102; on Satan’s Sadists, 118; on The Savage Seven, 76; on Werewolves on Wheels, 110; on The Wild Angels, 35–36 Thompson, Howard, 130 Thompson, Hunter S., 8, 10–14, 17 Thunderbird International Pictures, 69 Time, 12 titles, 20–21, 95, 165; of magazines, 130 topicality, 25, 31, 33, 39, 112, 127, 133 Topper, Burt, 137 Tossi, Mario, 78 transgression, 143 Trans-International Films, 69 Triumphs, 153, 154 UCLA. See University of California, Los Angeles Ullner, Fred, 10 University of California, Los Angeles, 15, 79 Van Dyke, Conny, 91 Variety, 49, 53, 55, 115; on AIP, 44; on Angel Unchained, 95; on The Angry Breed, 70–71; on Chrome and Hot Leather, 133; on Roger Corman, 168; on Devil’s Angels, 63, 67; on The Hellcats, 72; on Hell’s Angels ’69, 89; on Hell’s Belles, 157; on Naked Angels, 82; on Satan’s Sadists, 117, 118; on Werewolves on Wheels, 109;

200 • Index

Variety (continued) on The Wild Angels, 30; on The Wild One, 38; on Wild Rebels, 56 Venice Beach, California, 51–53 Venice Film Festival, 31, 33 Vietnam movies, 129–130, 133–134, 136, 137–138 Vietnam War, 129, 136, 141 Village Voice, 36, 98, 101, 140, 187n6 Viola, Joe, 106, 113 violence, 13, 55, 94; acceptability, 118, 120 Von Dutch, 50–51 voyeurism, 42 Walker, Robert, Jr., 76–77, 98 Wallin, Zoe, 24–25, 66, 166–168 Wasserman, John, 87 Werewolves on Wheels, 109–111, 111, 112 West, Sonny, 120 westerns, 3, 24–25, 76–77, 100; allusions to, 75, 96, 103, 121, 152–153, 154; women in, 48, 146. See also frontier White, John Gordon, 154

Wild Angels, The, 19, 32, 40, 53, 134, 140, 172; Nazi symbolism, 138–139; promotion, 29–30, 31; reception, 33–39, 78; title, 29 Wild One, The, 9, 12, 31, 37–39 Wild Rebels, 56 Wild Riders, 122–123 Winchester 73, 154, 155 Winsten, Archer, 37 Wishman, Doris, 147 Wolf, William, 55 Wolfe, Tom, 50 women: as filmmakers, 162–163; as leads, 121, 145, 150–157, 158– 162; portrayals, 56, 81, 132, 146, 148. See also audience: female; casting: of women; costumes: female; misogyny Women’s Wear Daily, 96, 157 Woodstock, 15 Woolner, Larry, 105, 165 World War II, 11, 17, 138 Yamahas, 111–112

About the Author

is a professor of film at the University of Kent. He has written two monographs on the western (with a third on postwar dirty westerns under development) and a substantial body of research on popular music and film, including Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film (2005). Recent publications for Rutgers include Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson (2011), which takes a long look at our fascination with a pulp aesthetic, and The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (2015), which examines cycles of sensational movies produced to capitalize on current events, moral panics, and popular fads. Hoodlum Movies draws on these two books and further develops ideas on film cycles and pulp cinema. Found in the pocket of a Lewis Leathers jacket he carelessly left behind at the Hope and Anchor pub in 1979 was the scribbled note “Directions for skedaddle: Steal the money, go to the station, and get to Portsmouth. Get boat for America. On arriving there, go to the Black Hills and dig for gold, build huts, and kill buffalo; live there and make a fortune.”

PETER STANFIELD