Killer B's

We’ve all heard different actors referred to as A-listers or B-movie actors. Years ago, comedienne Kathy Griffin had a show called Life on the D-List. This terminology comes from the days of double features, back when theaters trying to fill seats would play two movies back to back, sometimes with a newsreel or cartoons in between. The first picture featured recognizable, big-name stars; had high quality, often “important” subject material; had a big production budget; and was often in Technicolor and sometimes a big aspect ratio like Cinemascope. That picture, known as the A picture, had all the good stuff, but because those were expensive to make, market, and show, the second movie needed to be cheap. So, the B picture usually featured actors who were lesser known; a much smaller budget; a less ambitious or perhaps more exploitive story; and was usually in black and white. And so the A-list was born (as was the B list and everything else.)

Double features are a thing of the past, of course, but the idea remains. Prior to the home video revolution of the 80s, made for TV movies were the new second-best in cinema. In the 80s and 90s, the equivalent of the B-picture was a movie going straight-to-video. If it wasn’t good enough to appear in theaters first and was released direct to VHS, it probably starred Lorenzo Lamas and was filmed in the producer’s back yard in Malibu.

The 21^st century has brought the advent of streaming video, and initially, a movie going straight to streaming had the same stigma as straight to video. But now Netflix is complicating that by dumping buckets of money on A-listers like Martin Scorcese and others, trying to convince them to release their first-run work either directly to streaming or simultaneously in theaters and online.

A-listers like Will Smith and the horrible Woody Allen have both produced original material for streaming with mixed results at best. Disney is now in the process of establishing its own streaming service. This will have a huge impact on all other platforms considering how many subsidiaries Disney owns and could potentially pull from all other venues. If it proves popular enough, Disney could even choose to release its first run movies on streaming only and cut out the cost of dealing with theater chains altogether. Imagine Frozen 2 or Toy Story 4 or the second half of Avengers: Infinity War only being available for home viewing and then only if you subscribe to Disney’s streaming service.

The idea of what qualifies as A-list or B-list material used to be as easy to identify as figuring out which movie was in color and which was in black and white. But with the advent of more sophisticated moviemaking technology and more prevalent home viewing platforms, those definitions are becoming increasingly complicated.

The financial contraction of Hollywood filmmaking also affects the creation of B-pictures. With budgets for tent pole projects getting bigger and bigger, there’s less money for smaller, less ambitious movies. Because Infinity War cost 316 million dollars to make, there’s less cash to make a small love story or an economical gangster picture. So I worry that B-pictures as we understand them might cease to exist altogether. Instead of small, lesser-known but still interesting pictures coming to the theaters, we may be headed for a future of just getting continually swamped with endless Netflix projects.

And that would be a shame because so much of what we think of when we envision westerns, science fiction movies, gangster pictures, and film noir comes from that low-budget, no-stars tradition. Yes, many of them are low-quality schlock and are just fun to watch because they’re so bad, they’re good. But some are legitimately great movies. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll tell you about two of my favorite B-movies: 1945’s ultra low-budget noir, Detour and 1954’s wildly influential monster movie, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.