David Friedman

David Friedman, who died on February 14 aged 87, produced a string of cult B-movies which exploited the cinema-going public’s appetite for a dash of smut and lashings of gore. 

 

His 1963 classic Blood Feast, directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis, featured a murderous Egyptian caterer who decapitates women and serves them up to diners, and was the first in the so-called “splatter film” genre. To promote it, Friedman promised audiences that they would have seen “nothing so appalling in the annals of horror”, and bought tens of thousands of airline sick bags that read “You May Need This When You See 'Blood Feast’” to distribute in front of cinemas.

David Friedman

The film cost just $24,500 to make and the notices were terrible: “Incredibly crude and unprofessional from start to finish, 'Blood Feast’ is an insult even to the most puerile and salacious audiences... It was a fiasco in all departments,” read one. Almost inevitably it became a hit, grossing millions, notably on the drive-in cinema circuit.

Between 1958 and 1984 Friedman produced, and sometimes directed, 58 similarly tasteless, low-budget features: “I am probably guilty of promulgating more of the most disgusting garbage on the American public than anyone has ever done,” he cheerfully admitted.

David Frank Friedman was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on Christmas Eve 1923 and worked as a film projectionist in Buffalo before serving in the US Army during the Second World War. After the war he worked as a roadshow salesman for Kroger Babb, whose best-known film, Mom and Dad, combined sex hygiene education with prurience and caused a sensation in the 1940s. Later he became a press agent at Paramount before leaving in 1958 to try his hand at independent film production.

As well as splatter movies (other titles included Two Thousand Maniacs!, Color Me Blood Red and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS), Friedman made a handful of “nudie cuties” — low-budget romps with such titles as Daughter of the Sun, Nature’s Playmates and Goldilocks and the Three Bares. Later on he moved into soft-core pornography with The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (“the first movie rated Z”, as the promotions proclaimed).

But he skirted the hard-core X-rated films which mushroomed in the 1970s and 1980s. “The secret of my stuff was the old carnival tease,” he explained. “The audience would think: 'Oh, boy, we didn’t see it this week, but next week.’ They never did see it, but they kept coming back.”
In 1990 Friedman published his autobiography, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King. He remained proud of his cinematic oeuvre: “I made some terrible pictures, but I don’t make any apologies for anything I’ve ever done. Nobody ever asked for their money back.”
Friedman’s wife, Carol, died in 2001.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/8329292/David-Friedman.html