Regional Film-Making and Location Shooting

[Another pause to draw some conclusions.]

My recent “Truly Obscure” posts about John Sledge and Ned Hockman nagged at me because of the commonality of their being regional film-makers – Sledge a very early one. It occurred to me that the gradual emergence of micro-regional cinema, akin to micro-brewing of today, was another movement of the 1955-1975 time-frame, and was strongly related to a parallel studio trend of the time – the growing prominence of location shooting. This latter trend had a number of sources, but one of them was clearly the cycle of semi-documentary noir policiers in the late Forties. At first, much of the urban location shooting was done in the Los Angeles area or in New York City. But as producers went farther afield, making the “runaway productions” that AT and I had a brief exchange about, more and more locales got a taste of film-making, and perhaps this helped to spur the notion that films could be conceived and generated locally as well, not just by a distant studio.

Had postwar American cinema been more like postwar European cinema, this regionalization might have taken the form of micro-neo-realism – because who better to make a realist film about the lives of New Mexicans or Michiganders than New Mexico and Michigan regional film-makers? However, despite a certain strain of “little people” realism in mid-Fifties Hollywood films (Marty and Come Back, Little Sheba, say), that concept seems to have had little appeal for the regionals, and was seldom tried (at least not much before the Seventies). Interestingly, what regional film-makers typically chose to make were low/no-budget versions of conventional Hollywood genres and film types. So you get micro-regional expose films such as New Orleans after Dark; noirs such as Stark Fear (Oklahoma City); horror films such as Carnival of Souls (Lawrence, Kansas) and Night of the Living Dead (Pittsburgh); JD films such as The Delinquents (Kansas City). One somewhat more distinctively regional development was the moonshine/race car film pioneered by Thunder Road (North Carolina), which led a healthy generic life for many years to come.

One of the supposed benefits of both locally based film-making and location shooting by bigger outfits is economic stimulus. Ned Hockman pushed that in Oklahoma; it is still routinely pushed today. The level of stimulus can run the gamut from non-existent (such as the Southern location shooting of Roger Corman’s The Intruder, which was pretty much done on a stealth basis) to the transformative warping effect of the year-long Ryan’s Daughter shoot on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula (for an entertaining account of which, read Michael Tanner’s Troubled Epic: On Location with Ryan’s Daughter). (I have a small separate piece on The Intruder which I wrote for another venue a while back; I’ll post it here shortly, as it touches on this issue of location shooting.)

Location shooting has the interesting effect, too, of turning films into “documentaries of their own making,” as someone once described Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (which moves very explicitly in that direction, and in fact is based around the notion of what happens to a film location once the film crew departs).

You can see that what I’m getting at here is approaching noir and other film-making from a different angle, concentrating not so much on the artistic intentions of the makers and the thematics of the films, but on the conditions of production that generated certain sorts of films in certain places at certain times. I never thought I’d turn into an amateur Marxist at this late stage! But it seems to me that this approach, always relevant, is especially so for the last gasps of “classic” noir. A fairly large proportion of the late noir or noir-ish titles are from second and third tier studios and regional film-makers, who latched onto noir as they did onto other familiar formats in order to get small-but-potentially-profitable films made.

There must be hundreds of regional micro-productions to account for, and I get the feeling that little has been done about that outside the horror/science fiction axis, whose independent scholars are interested in micro-productions, but more for their generic qualities than their regional or economic qualities. Undoubtedly there remains a lot to learn about these films.

POSTSCRIPT: AT had defined "runaway productions" for me thus: "Movies made for distribution by Hollywood companies but shot outside of Los Angeles, often nonunion. Usually this refers to overseas productions such as those that were common in the 50s and 60s, when the majors were trying to use money that they'd earned in Europe but couldn't get into the country."

The piece on The Intruder that I promised next was, in fact, the piece on that film I had posted here at PMD.