|
William "One-Shot" Beaudine, the director of nearly 350 known films (nearly one for every day of the year; some listings of his work put his output at 500 movies and hundreds of TV episodes) and scores of television episodes, enjoyed a directing career that stretched across seven decades from the `Teens to the `70s (he also was a screenwriter, credited on 26 films and one TV series). His movies, ranging from full-length features to one- and two-reel shorts, included the notorious Mom and Dad (1945) of 1945--the "Gone With the Wind" of the hygiene/sexploitation genre--for infamous producer Kroger Babb, one of the notorious "Forty Thieves" of the exploitation circuit. His final, as well as very likely best-known films, were the grindhouse/drive-in horror classics Billy the Kid versus Dracula (1966) and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein`s Daughter (1966) (in 1966, when he made these two cheapies, he was the oldest active director in Hollywood, at 74). "One Shot" was prolific not only because of his propensity for shooting the least amount of takes possible (hence his sobriquet), but also because he started in the early days of the film industry, when one- and two-reelers were ground out like sausages, and that`s how he learned to make them. Although he was responsible for some prestigious pictures in the silent era--i.e., Mary Pickford`s Sparrows (1926)--after 1937 he worked primarily churning out programmers at Poverty Row studios. If you were a low-budget producer like Babb and needed an efficiently-made potboiler shot on a two-week (or less) schedule, William Beaudine was the director you went to, and he remained so through the mid-`60s.
|
Comments
Submit a Comment