Introduction

The above statement by the once president and chief executive officer of Poverty Row outfit Monogram Pictures represents an appropriate introduction to a different form of independent filmmaking during the studio years: low-end independent production, which, in Broidy's analogy, is represented by the phrase ‘stale bread’. The analogy seems apt. If one accepts that the films of top-rank independent producers and the studio prestige productions represent American cinema's ‘cake’, and the standard studio film production corresponds to its ‘bread’, then films from studios like Monogram, Republic, Grand National, Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) and a large number of other smaller companies operating in the margins of the industry certainly represent American cinema's ‘stale bread’. In other words, they represent film production of a particularly low quality and cheap look that could never be confused with the top-rank product examined in the previous chapter. For instance, according to film historian Wheeler Dixon, the key features of Monogram films were ‘shoddy sets, dim lighting restricted mostly to simple key spots, non-existent camerawork and extremely poor sound recording’, elements far removed from prestige-level independent production or studio filmmaking. Even the most successful financially and ‘artistically’ Poverty Row studio in the 1930s and 1940s, Republic Pictures, was widely known by industry practitioners as ‘Repulsive Pictures’.

Despite the lack of quality and the absence of production values, however, low-end independent production represents a less controversial form of independent filmmaking. This is because the ties with the major studios that top-rank independents such as Selznick International Pictures enjoyed did not exist for companies like Grand National and Producers Releasing Corporation. Indeed, these companies operated completely ‘independently’ from the majors, producing their films in their own studios (or in hired soundstages), releasing them through self-owned distribution networks (or through the states rights system) and exhibiting them in small independent theatres located mainly in the neighbourhoods of big cities, small towns and rural areas.