Believe it or not, until today, there was no podcast devoted to American International Pictures.

The Pop Culture Entertainment Network is changing that by introducing The American International Podcast, on April 2nd, 2023, which not coincidentally is the 69th anniversary (nice!) of the studio’s founding.

So what is American International Pictures? It’s a studio known for their B-movie fare, aimed mainly at teenagers and young adults, which made pictures fast and on the cheap, nevertheless coming up with many fun and successful movies. If you’re a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, you know all about these masters of schlock and awe.

The studio was formed by Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson in 1954 as the American Releasing Corporation. When the preferred company name American International name finally became available a couple years later, they changed it.

AIP worked with some big names, right from the beginning. Roger Corman was a big part of the studio’s origins, as Arkoff and Nicholson wanted to distribute his film The Fast and the Furious (1954). Other studios expressed an interest, but ARC offered to give Corman the money to make three more films, so they won the bidding war. The Fast and the Furious did well at the box office, and that success propelled the company forward. Corman’s next two films for the company were Five Guns West and The Beast with a Million Eyes.

The studio may have hired a lot of D-listers, but AIP also launched the careers of film legends like Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Pam Grier, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. They gave directors like Martin Scorsese, Brian dePalma, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich their start.

Arkoff’s brother-in-law Lou Rusoff became the studio’s leading scriptwriter, and he wrote the Corman double bill Apache Woman and The Day the World Ended. Other key producers in those early days were Herman Cohen, who produced I Was a Teenage Werewolf (and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein) and Blood of Dracula and the late Bert I. Gordon, who made such classics as The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People and Earth vs the Spider.

In addition to AIP’s self-produced movies, by the late 1950s, they started tapping foreign markets, making deals to distribute films made in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and Japan, to name a few countries, here in America. AIP brought many a kaiju film, sword-and-sandals-epic, bloody giallo and Cold-War era spy thriller to the domestic market.

One of their best and best-known film series was their Edgar Allen Poe cycle. Starring Vincent Price and directed by Corman, the studio made movies like The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligiea.

What was unique about American International Pictures?

An AIP movie starts with a title…literally. AIP chiefs Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson often thought up a title for a movie, ran it past their exhibitors, and if it met with their approval, they would hire a writer to pen the script.

They were the first studio to use focus groups, and to care about what American teenagers wanted to see. Where Walt Disney, for example, divided his audience into children and adults, American International singled out the under-served teenage market as their intended audience. They polled teens and the responses they got determined titles and stories, as well as the casts, of their movies.

After the title was set, AIP would get an artist like Albert Kallis to create an attention-getting poster. With that, they could raise the cash needed to write and cast the film. Then it was time for production, which was fast and cheap. A typical film was shot in a week or two, for around $300,000 (not adjusted for inflation.)

And these movies may have had low budgets, but that doesn’t mean that Arkoff and Nicholson considered these throwaway films – many were box office successes. Unlike the major studios, AIP never had a money-losing year. Between 1954 and 1960, according to the New York Times, AIP never even made a money-losing picture.

Arkoff said the formula for his success was spelled A-R-K-O-F-F.

• Action (exciting, entertaining drama)
• Revolution (novel or controversial themes and ideas)
• Killing (a modicum of violence)
• Oratory (notable dialogue and speeches)
• Fantasy (acted-out fantasies common to the audience)
• Fornication (sex appeal)

The studio targeted teenage boys, figuring that younger kids would watch movies aimed at teens and young adults, but not the other way around. Similarly, girls would watch movies aimed at boys, but the reverse could not be said to be true.

Why do we love these movies?

AIP movies are just plain fun. They don’t take themselves too seriously, with their deliberately overwrought titles, rubber-suited monsters and performances that sometimes verged on camp. These movies make us laugh (even when they aren’t trying to be funny), but more importantly, they aren’t boring (usually.)

AIP pioneered so many exploitation genres: after producing countless monster movies, they moved on to surfer films, then biker films like Corman’s Wild Angels, then hippie rebellion dramas and drug psychodramas like The Trip and finally Blaxploitation movies like Blacula and Foxy Brown.

AIP movies were by, about and for the nerds, the weirdos, the wounded and the less-than-sane. The protagonists of AIP pictures tended to exist on the outside of the respectable world, whether they were the scarred revenge-driven Abominable Doctor Phibes, the street-smart heroes of Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off, or the throw-away kids of Reform School Girl, or the sadly mutated Amazing Colossal Man – these are anti-heroes we could root for. They are like us…maybe they even are us. And we love to watch their stories.

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