Sam Z. Arkoff 1918-2001

ARKOFF, RUSOFF

Posted By: SLG (email)
Date: 12/9/2003 at 04:31:18

Sam Arkoff, film producer, was born on June 12, 1918, in Fort Dodge, Iowa. He died in Burbank, California, on September 16, 2001, aged 83.

Producer of low-budget, high-profit films who enthralled teenagers with his sensationally vacuous wares. The film producer Sam Arkoff was once informed: "You have been accused of
being a crass, commercial exploiter of lousy movies."

"That's me, kid," he replied, without missing a beat.

Whatever their artistic merit, the films produced by him and his company, AIP,
stand as grandfathers of the modern teenage horror movie, and the kind of plots
that he encouraged are now used in big-budget mainstream productions.

Arkoff's motto was: "Thou shalt not put too much money into one picture." He described his film-making process thus: "First things first. A title. Then some artwork. Then a publicity campaign. If it passed all those things then we'd get a script and a director and all the rest of the stuff you need to get people into the seats." Only later would he adopt the traditional script-first approach.

It was this commercial imperative that led Arkoff regularly to switch between
genres. Noting the success of Hammer horror films, AIP began a series of Edgar
Allan Poe adaptations; and when the Hell's Angels were making the news, AIP
made films such as The Wild Angels (1966), paying $35 a day for real Hell's
Angels as extras. The AIP col-lection included genres from horror to Blaxploitation, and often combined them, as in Blacula.

Samuel Zachary Arkoff was born in Iowa and was a year away from earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He tried to join the army but failed, because he weighed 230 pounds and
had high blood pressure. He managed to join the Army Air Corps because he had swallowed a huge dose of medication before his physical examination.

He spent the war as a cryptographer in the Azores and on his return he earned
a law degree from Loyola University, Los Angeles. Having always loved films, he drifted into entertainment law. Having spent seven days in a coma in 1952, after a cerebral haemorrhage, he decided that he could not defer his dream of
becoming a film producer.

In 1954 he teamed up with Jim Nicholson, a cinema chain manager, to form American Releasing Corporation, which in 1956 became American In-ternational Pictures (AIP). At a time when cinemas were no longer required to show films
made by just one studio, Arkoff and Nicholson sought to make money by releasing
cheap first-run films for suburban cinemas and drive-ins. The duo had only $3,000 in capital, no scripts, no stars and no experience in making movies.

Their first release was a motor racing film, The Fast and the Furious (1954) made by Roger Corman. Made for $60,000, it grossed more than four times as much, and Cor-man became the company's most prolific film-maker. AIP also tried
out promising young film-makers who afterwards moved elsewhere, such as Francis
Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese.

AIP's first hit came in 1957 with I Was a Teenage Werewolf: it took six days and $100,000 to make, and earned $2 million. The following year Arkoff produced no fewer than 17 films, of which Night of the Blood Beast (1958), which
revolves around the discovery of alien embryos inside a resurrected astronaut's body, was not unrepresentative.

Before 1960 AIP never made a film which lost money. This was not simply because they took only a week or two to shoot. It was largely because the
producers were the first to understand that there was an audience of teenagers who were hungry for films that reflected their world.

Arkoff realised how out of touch Hollywood was when he saw a Joan Crawford movie. "She was close to 45 or 50 and she dressed as a teenager." he said. "I said to Jim and Roger, we have to make pictures for teenagers." And they did:
not long after came the release of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) and
Teenage Caveman (1958).

Arkoff also persuaded drive-in cinema managers to feature AIP releases for the baby-boomer "date-night" crowd, and gradually the big cinema chains came to recognise the value of the youth market. Some critics claimed that Arkoff was
enticing the young immorally, but his beach movies at least, such as Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), were essentially wholesome. Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), however, was a bit racy: in it the eponymous doctor constructs
an army of bikini-clad robots who seduce and then defraud wealthy men.

AIP could not deny, though, that they were pandering to whatever teenagers wanted to see. They tested their films out with their target audience - including Arkoff's children and their friends. "Twice a week, on Friday and
Saturday, I'd have them bring 30, 40, 50 kids round to our house," he said. "We had a 35mm viewing theatre and we'd run pictures and see the reactions. That was the way we did our market research, not jiggery-pokery."

Another reason for AIP's commercial success was that the middle-aged were gradually settling down in big new housing developments and watching
television. But teenagers still wanted to get out of the house and spend their money, and Arkoff made sure that they could do so.

In 1972 Jim Nicholson left AIP; he died from a brain tumour shortly afterwards. Arkoff carried on film-making alone, continuing to develop new
genres, such as the Blaxploitation movement of the early 1970s. He sold the company in 1979, and that year he had two of his biggest financial successes: The Amityville Horror, which grossed $65 million, an enormous figure for an
independent film at the time, and Love At First Bite.

The same year, which was the 25th anniversary of the founding of the company, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented the first major tribute to AIP. Two years later saw the creation of Arkoff International Pictures, but Arkoff
was effectively in retirement.

In 1945 Arkoff married Hilda Rusoff, who died last July. They had a son, Lou, who has produced films such as Confessions of a Sorority Girl (1993) and Inspector Gad-get (1999), and a daughter, Donna, who has produced films such as
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) and Forces of Nature (1999).

Copyright (C) The Times, 2001
Source: The United Kingdom Times, Sep 28, 2001