April 2, 1954; 70 years ago (1954-04-02) (original) October 7, 2020; 4 years ago (2020-10-07) (relaunch; under the American International Pictures label)
American International Pictures LLC[1] (AIP or American International Productions) is an American film production company owned by Amazon MGM Studios. In its original operating period, AIP was an independent film production and distribution company known for producing and releasing films from 1955 until 1980, a year after its acquisition by Filmways in 1979.
It was formed on April 2, 1954, as American Releasing Corporation (ARC) by former Realart Pictures Inc. sales manager James H. Nicholson and entertainment lawyer Samuel Z. Arkoff[2] and their first release was the 1953 UK documentary film Operation Malaya. It was dedicated to releasing low-budget films packaged as double features, primarily of interest to the teenagers of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
The company eventually became a part of Orion Pictures, which in turn, became a division of Amazon MGM Studios. On October 7, 2020, four decades after the original closure, MGM revived AIP as a label for acquired films for digital and theatrical releases, with MGM overseeing across streaming platforms and United Artists Releasing handling theatrical distribution in North America until 2023 when Amazon MGM Studios took over.
When many of ARC/AIP's first releases failed to earn a profit, Arkoff quizzed film exhibitors who told him of the value of the teenage market as adults were watching television.[4][5] AIP stopped making Westerns with Arkoff explaining: "To compete with television westerns you have to have color, big stars and $2,000,000".[6]: 126
AIP was the first company to use focus groups,[7] polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. AIP would question their exhibitors (who often provided 20% of AIP's financing[6]: 35 ) what they thought of the success of a title, then would have a writer create a script for it.[6]: 156 A sequence of tasks in a typical production involved creating a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955 to 1973[8] to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally writing and casting the film.
According to Filmink, "AIP ran on basic principles: keep overheads down (i.e. no permanent studio space), keep all costs down, use fading stars (eg Ray Milland) or its own up-and-coming names (eg John Ashley), use cheap directors, go for genre (horror, sci fi, action, peplum), follow the trends, abandon the trends when audience enthusiasm lessens, give audiences something they can’t get from a regular studio picture, build your own franchises."[9]
The ARKOFF formula
Samuel Z. Arkoff related his tried-and-true "ARKOFF formula" for producing a successful low-budget movie years later, during a 1980s talk show appearance. His ideas for a movie included:
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)
Later, the AIP publicity department devised a strategy called "the Peter Pan Syndrome":
a) a younger child will watch anything an older child will watch;
b) an older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch;
c) a girl will watch anything a boy will watch;
d) a boy will not watch anything a girl will watch;
therefore:
to catch your greatest audience you zero in on the 19-year-old male.[10]
AIP began as the American Releasing Corporation, a new distribution company formed in 1954 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff.
Roger Corman
They were interested in distributing a car chase movie produced by Roger Corman for his Palo Alto Productions, The Fast and the Furious (1955). Corman had received offers from other companies for the film, but ARC offered to advance money to enable Corman to make two other films. Corman agreed, The Fast and the Furious performed well at the box office and the company was launched.[citation needed]
Corman's next two films for the company were a Western, Five Guns West (1955), which Corman directed, and a science fiction film, The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955). The title from the latter had come from Nicholson.
ARC got Corman to direct another Western and science fiction double bill Apache Woman (1955) and Day the World Ended (1955). Both scripts were written by Arkoff's brother-in-law Lou Rusoff, who would become the company's leading writer in its early days. Apache Woman was produced by Alex Gordon, an associate of Arkoff's, Day was produced by Corman. Both were made by Golden State Productions, ARC's production arm.[11][12]
Normally, B movies were made for the second part of a bill and received a flat rate. As television was encroaching on the B movie market, Nicholson and Arkoff felt it would be more profitable to make two low budget films and distribute them together on a double feature. Nicholson came up with a title for a film to support Day the World Ended, The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955), but lacked the money to make both films. They split the costs with Dan and Jack Milner, film editors who wanted to get into production. The resulting double bill was very successful at the box office.[11]
Gordon also produced The Oklahoma Woman (1955), a Western by Corman, made through Sunset Productions. It was put on a double feature with Female Jungle (1955), a film noir.
Other films released under the ARC banner include a British documentary Operation Malaya (1955) and Corman's Gunslinger (1956).
American International in the 1950s
Arkoff and Nicholson had always wanted to name their company "American International Pictures", but the name was unavailable. When the name became available, they changed over.
There were three main production arms at AIP in the late 1950s: Roger Corman, Alex Gordon & Lou Rusoff, and Herman Cohen. Arkoff and Nicholson would buy films from other filmmakers as well, and import films from outside America.
Roger Corman
Corman continued to be an important member of AIP (though he also worked for Allied Artists and his own Filmgroup company during this period). He had a big hit for the company with the science fiction film It Conquered the World (1956) from a script by Rusoff that was rewritten by Charles B. Griffith.
The other key producer for AIP was Alex Gordon who mostly made films though his Golden State Productions outfit, usually written by Lou Rusoff. He made Girls in Prison (1956), with director Edward L. Cahn who would become one of AIP's most prolific directors. AIP released it on a double bill with Hot Rod Girl (1956).
AIP developed a mutual relationship with Britain's Anglo-Amalgamated who would distribute AIP's product in the UK. In return, AIP would distribute their films in the U.S., such as The Tommy Steele Story (1957) and Cat Girl (1957).
AIP became a victim of its own success when other companies started copying its double feature strategy. Costs were rising and were not compensated by increased box office grosses. AIP shut down most of their production arms and focused on distributing films from Italy, while they decided what to do next.
In October 1959 AIP announced it had secured finance from Colonial Bank (who had financed three of their films to date) for ten films over the next 12 months. The remaining 14 to 20 projects planned were paid by Pathe Laboratories. The ten films were Diary of a High School Bride, Drag Race, The Haunted House of Usher, End of the World, World Without Women, Bombs Away, Blood Hill,Take Me To Your Leader, She and Eve and the Dragon. Not all of these would be made.[14]
AIP's 1960s output
The company moved into rented office space at the former Chaplin Studios.
Imports
In the late 1950s, AIP kept their company afloat by importing films from Italy. These included Sheba and the Gladiator (1959), Goliath and the Barbarians (1959) and Black Sunday (1960); the latter film proved to be one of the company's early successes.
The original idea, usually credited[who?] to Corman and Lou Rusoff, was to take Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher", which had both a high name-recognition value and the merit of being in the public domain, and thus royalty-free, and expand it into a feature film. Corman convinced the studio to give him a larger budget than the typical AIP film so he could film the movie in widescreen and color, and use it to create lavish sets as well.[15]
The success of House of Usher led AIP to finance further films based on Poe's stories. The sets and special effects were often reused in subsequent movies (for example, the burning roof of the Usher mansion reappears in most of the other films as stock footage), making the series quite cost-effective. All the films in the series were directed by Roger Corman, and they all starred Price except The Premature Burial, which featured Ray Milland in the lead. It was originally produced for another studio, but AIP acquired the rights to it.[15]
As the series progressed, Corman made attempts to change the formula. Later films added more humor to the stories, especially The Raven, which takes Poe's poem as an inspiration and develops it into an all-out farce starring Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre; Karloff had starred in a 1935 film with the same title. Corman also adapted H. P. Lovecraft's short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in an attempt to get away from Poe, but AIP changed the title to that of an obscure Poe poem, The Haunted Palace, and marketed it as yet another movie in the series. The last two films in the series, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia, were filmed in England with an unusually long schedule for Corman and AIP.
Although Corman and Rusoff are generally credited with coming up with the idea for the Poe series, in an interview on the Anchor Bay DVD of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, Mark Damon claims that he first suggested the idea to Corman. Damon also says that Corman let him direct The Pit and the Pendulum uncredited. Corman's commentary for Pit mentions nothing of this and all existing production stills of the film show Corman directing.
List of Corman-Poe films
During the early 1960s, AIP produced a series of horror films inspired by the Poe cycle. Of eight films, seven feature stories that are actually based on the works of Poe.
Seven of the films, with the exception of The Premature Burial, featured Vincent Price as the star. Occasionally, Corman's 1963 film The Terror (produced immediately after The Raven) is recognized as being part of the Corman-Poe cycle, although the film's story and title are not based on any literary work of Poe.
Some Poe films announced by AIP but not made include The Gold Bug, The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, and The Angel of the Odd.[16]
Before that they were on poverty row. Our better position will enable us to obtain more important writers, perhaps more important producers as well. We're a privately owned company at the moment but perhaps within two or three years we will become a public company.[17]
In the UK, AIP struck up a film making partnership with Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy's Anglo-Amalgamated. Anglo eventually released over 140 AIP-made or owned movies in the UK, mainly on double bills. The arrangement also saw Anglo Amalgamated's British-made films distributed in the US by AIP. AIP's co-productions with Anglo included Cat Girl, Circus of Horrors and The Masque of the Red Death. AIP also had co-production arrangements with Tigon British Film Productions, Hammer Film Productions and Amicus Productions. Amongst the movies made under these arrangements were Witchfinder General, The Vampire Lovers and Scream and Scream Again. AIP maintained a production office in London until 1973 before it was closed down. Nevertheless, the company remained active in making and financing British films, including Hennessy and The People that Time Forgot. They were also, briefly, involved in setting up two Hammer projects- Vampirella and To the Devil a Daughter (AIP distributed the latter on its initial US run.)
On a trip to Italy, Arkoff met Fulvio Lucisano, an Italian screenwriter and producer who eventually headed Italian International Film,[citation needed] which co-produced 25 films in Italy for AIP.[20] Due to importing completed productions from other foreign countries being cheaper and simpler than producing their own in-house studio films in America, AIP had released many giallo, peplum, Eurospy and Macaroni Combatwar films featuring many American stars and Italian stars such as the comedy team of Franco and Ciccio. However, AIP released only two Spaghetti Westerns (Massacre Time retitled The Brute and the Beast and God Forgives... I Don't!), perhaps recalling their failure with Westerns in the 1950s. Many of these films were edited, rewritten with different (dubbed English) dialogue, usually by Arkoff's nephew Ted Rusoff, and sometimes re-scored by Les Baxter.
The studio also released edited and English-dubbed versions of several Eastern Bloc science fiction films that had the dialogue rewritten for the American market and in some cases had additional scenes filmed with American and British actors. These include the Soviet film Planeta Bur (Planet of Storms) which was released by AIP in two different English-dubbed versions, as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women and the highly regarded 1963 Czech science fiction film Ikarie XB-1, which was re-titled Voyage to the End of the Universe.
In 1964, AIP became one of the last film studios to start its own television production company, American International Productions Television (a.k.a. American-International Television or AIP-TV).[22] AIP-TV at first released many of their 1950s films to American television stations, then filmed unsuccessful television pilots for Beach Party and Sergeant Deadhead. The company then made several color sci-fi/horror television films by Larry Buchanan that were remakes of black-and-white AIP films, and sold packages of many English-dubbed European, Japanese and Mexican films (the last type were produced by K. Gordon Murray) and foreign-made live-action and animated TV series (including Prince Planet). The best known animated series AIP-TV distributed was Sinbad Jr. and his Magic Belt.
In order to allay the fears of cinema owners who feared current releases would soon end up being shown on television, AIP issued a statement retroactive to 1963 that the company would not release any of their films to television until five years after cinema release, unless the film had not made back its original negative costs.[23] AIP-TV also filmed specials for promotion of AIP films, such as The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot (1965, ABC) and An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1972, syndication), both with Vincent Price.
In 1978, AIP-TV distributed the pop music series Twiggy's Jukebox. For several years around this time, AIP-TV also distributed several British TV series, including The Avengers, to U.S. stations.
AIP Records
AIP started their own record label, American International Records, in 1959[24] to release music used in their films. There were a number of soundtrack albums as well.[25]
AIP Records was once distributed by MGM Records,[26] the record label owned by AIP's successor-in-interest MGM.
Going Public and Departure of Nicholson
In 1969, AIP went public to raise extra capital, issuing 300,000 shares.[27][28]
In 1970, they entered into an agreement with Commonwealth United Entertainment to issue their films.[29] In 1971 they released 31 films, their greatest number to date, and were seen as one of the most stable companies in Hollywood.[30] Despite their exploitation roots, they did not concentrate on R- or X-rated filmmaking during this period.[31]
In 1972, James H. Nicholson resigned from AIP to set up his own production company working out of 20th Century Fox, called Academy Pictures Corporation; its only two releases were The Legend of Hell House and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.[32][33] AIP bought out over 100,000 of Nicholson's shares.[34] He died shortly thereafter of a cancerous brain tumor.[35]
Around this time Roger Corman stopped making films for AIP, focusing on his company, New World Pictures. According to Filmink "Corman leaving AIP coincided with Nicholson and Arkoff splitting up – they were like two parents who decide to get divorced when their eldest child finally moves out of home."[36]
Arkoff alone
Arkoff continued on at AIP as president until the end of the decade. Heads of production during the 1970s included Larry Gordon (from January 1972 until early 1974)[37] and Jere Henshaw (from 1977 until the demise of the company).
By the early 1970s, AIP felt the horror movie cycle was in decline and so switched to other genres, such as kung fu and gangsters.[38] Notably, they produced some of that decade's blaxploitation films, like Blacula and Foxy Brown. In a throwback to the old "studio days", the company is credited with making Pam Grier a household name, as the majority of her early '70s films were made under contract to American International.
James Nicholson's first wife Sylvia was still a major shareholder of the company. She sued AIP for mismanagement, but this was resolved in 1978 when AIP bought out her shares.[40]
Merger with Filmways
By the late 1970s, filmmaking costs continued to rise, AIP's tactic of moving into bigger budgeted quality pictures was not paying off at the box office, and Arkoff began to think of merging the company. "We've been the Woolworths of the movie business but Woolworths is being out priced", said Arkoff.[41] Talks began with Filmways, Incorporated. Negotiations stalled for a while,[42] but resumed a number of months later.[43] In 1979, AIP was sold to Filmways for $30 million and became a subsidiary production unit thereof, renamed Filmways Pictures in 1980.[44][45]
Arkoff was unhappy with the direction of the company and resigned to set up his own production company, receiving a pay out worth $1.4 million.[46][47]
AIP-TV was absorbed as the wholly owned program syndication arm of Filmways Television. Filmways was later bought by Orion Pictures Company in 1982 and Filmways was later renamed Orion Pictures Corporation, but retained the distribution arm. This allowed Orion to establish its own distribution, after utilizing Warner Bros. for distribution. Warner Bros. still has distribution rights to Orion films which were originally distributed by this company. Today, a majority of the AIP library is owned by Amazon MGM Studios (via Orion Pictures). The American International name is still a registered trademark owned by Amazon MGM Studios's Orion Pictures unit.[48][49]
Relaunch
On October 7, 2020, it was announced that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer relaunched AIP as a label for films that the studio will acquire for digital and limited theatrical releases. An MGM executive, Eric Hohl, was accepted as a president of the studio. MGM will oversee AIP's new films across all streaming platforms and the theatrical releases of them will be handled by its joint distribution venture United Artists Releasing. The first film from the relaunched AIP was Breaking News in Yuba County, directed by Tate Taylor and starring Allison Janney, which was released on February 12, 2021.[50]
On May 17, 2021, technology company Amazon entered negotiations to acquire MGM and even made a bid for about $9 billion. The negotiations are made with Anchorage Capital Kevin Ulrich.[51][52] On May 26, 2021, it was officially announced that MGM will be acquired by Amazon for $8.45 billion, subject to regulatory approvals and other routine closing conditions; with the studio continuing to operate as a label under the new parent company, which includes AIP and its titles.[citation needed] The merger was finalized on March 17, 2022.[53] On March 4, 2023, Amazon shut down UAR's operations and folded them into MGM.[54] In May 2023, Amazon Studios created Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, an international film and television distribution unit for both MGM and Amazon projects, which will include new projects and acquisitions from AIP.[55]
Initially planned for AIP release, but sold off to independent distributor The International Picture Show; rights to the film would eventually come back full circle to MGM
^Scheuer, Philip K. (September 17, 1958). "Shocker Pioneers Tell How to Make Monsters: Want to Make a Monster? Experts Tell How It's Done". Los Angeles Times. p. E1.
^Bean, Robin and Austen, David U.S.A. Confidential p. 215 Films and Filming November 1968 quoted in p. 157 Doherty, Thomas Teenagers and Teenpics Unwin-Hyman 1988
^ abScheuer, Philip K. (September 21, 1958). "Shocker Pioneers Tell How to Make Monsters: Want to Make a Monster? Experts Tell How It's Done". Los Angeles Times. p. E1.
^pp.219-220 Palmer, Randy Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker: A Biography of the B Movie Makeup and Special Effects Artist McFarland, January 1, 1997
^ abScheuer, Philip K. (July 12, 1963). "Grand Guignol Set at Vine St. Cabaret: Huston 'Sells' Kipling Yarn; Sinatra, AIP Think Young". Los Angeles Times. p. D11.
^ abScheuer, Philip K. (January 2, 1964). "AIP Millions for Poe, Beach Parties: 'Flowers' Oscar Hopeful; Burton Buys, May Direct". Los Angeles Times. p. C11.
^"Hollywood To Make A Big Silent Film". The Times. London. March 3, 1965. p. 15 – via The Times Digital Archive.
^Dorothy Kilgallen (June 11, 1964). "Howard Hughes, Aide Part Company". The Washington Post. p. E22.
^"American International Pictures' Profit Steady: Company Says Results for Third Fiscal Quarter Were About the Same as for Year-Ago Period". The Wall Street Journal. October 12, 1971. p. 37.
^"American International Pictures". The Wall Street Journal. May 9, 1973. p. 19.
^Getze, John (February 20, 1974). "Horror or Horrid Films, AIP Quickies Score at Box Office: FILMS". Los Angeles Times. p. d10.(Turn on hit highlighting for speaking browsers)
^"Stockholder Meeting Briefs". The Wall Street Journal. June 26, 1973. p. 35.
^"American International Will Be 'Happy' if Net Matches Fiscal 1975's". The Wall Street Journal. October 27, 1975. p. 18.
^Bry, Barbara (January 5, 1979). "AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL EPIC: CHINESE BOOK U.S. FILM 'FUTUREWORLD'". Los Angeles Times. p. d16.
References
Mark Thomas McGee (1995). Faster and Furiouser: The Story of American International Pictures'. McFarland & Company. ISBN0-7864-0137-0..
Gary A. Smith (2013). American International Pictures: The Golden Years. Bear Manor Media.
Hamilton, John (2022). Witches, B*tches and Banshees: The British Films of American International. Little Shoppe of Horrors. ISBN979-8416552794.
