BIBLIO WATCHDOG ON THE CHEAP
MY LIFE IN LOW BUDGET FILMMAKING By Greydon Clark
2013,
greydonclark.com, 296 pp., Softcover, $29.95 Reviewed by John Charles
Following acting work in the impoverished oeuvre of Al Adamson and David L. Hewitt, Michigan native Greydon Clark gradually established his own directorial career in the exploitation arena. Although he has given interviews and recorded au- dio commentaries over the years, this autobio- graphic look back at his life and career offers the sort of film-by-film detail that will engage fans of Clark’s pictures and exploitation fare in general. As is often the case with indie filmmakers, Clark’s story is part cautionary tale and part celebration of dogged determination. Not all of his movies are worth watching, but Clark has a good story or two to tell about every one of them.
Constructed in the form of a screenplay (with “es- tablishing” information provided by first person narra- tion as the lead-in to each “scene”), the book relates how Clark decided to make acting his vocation after dropping out of college. Relocating to California, he started to act and did unpaid production work for Adamson, learning the nuts and bolts of exploitation filmmaking on the sets of pictures like THE FAKERS (1967). Clark progressed to screenplays with the
unproduced Adamson Western THE LAST OF THE COMANCHEROS and the infamous SATAN’S SA- DISTS (1969), which he disavowed after Adamson
insisted on depicting a rape scene in a manner that depicted the victim as enjoying the assault. Clark learned every aspect of production by serving as as- sistant to the disorganized Adamson, who rarely gave direction to actors and did not bother to participate in editing SADISTS, the film that made him a viable commodity. In spite of Clark’s hard work and the money the early movies made, Adamson continued to nickel-and-dime Clark, who eventually set out on his own. His first directorial credit, the GRADUATE-
inspired drama MOTHERS, FATHERS AND LOV- ERS (1971), had to undergo an Adamson-style
transformation into the Blaxploitation potboiler NIGGER LOVER (better known nowadays under the
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less inflammatory title THE BAD BUNCH) to get anything more than a cursory release.
When discussing why he chose this path in life, Clark invokes Ben Hecht’s famous quote “If you had no education, no skills and no training, but plenty of ambition... show business was for you.” Clark’s willingness to jump in with few of the nec- essary abilities caused some problems early on, but his main obstacle was the dishonorable practices and unreliable partners so commonplace in the movie business. In contrast to Adamson and Hewitt, there was a time when it seemed like Clark’s hard work
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