Does the “B” in “B movie” stand for “bad”? Not exactly.
Originally conceived to fill out the programming around the major studio’s “A” titles, the term “B movie” referred to movies that were produced with minimal budgets and had runtimes of under 80 minutes. But even from the beginning, the definition was spongy; what was “low cost” to a major studio would have likely doubled the budget of the most expensive film produced by an independent “Poverty Row” studio.
These low budgets were often spent on “fringe genres” such as comic adaptations, science fiction, horror, and crime. As content restrictions eased in the 1960s and ’70s, the Bs used their low profile to embrace exploitation as filmmakers like Russ Meyer, Jack Hill, Melvin Van Peebles, John Waters, and more pushed the bounds of what audiences were willing to accept.
As more B movies like “Easy Rider” and “Night of the Living Dead” found mainstream success, studios embraced the content they once considered unserious. Major releases like “The Exorcist,” “Jaws,” “Superman,” and “Star Wars” showed that audiences craved genre fare, and that there wasn’t a need for B movies any more (in movie theaters, at least.)
But their influence lives on. Most of Quentin Tarantino’s work draws direct inspiration from exploitation-era B movies, and the Coen Brothers have reworked B movie tropes in everything from “Blood Simple” to “No Country for Old Men.”
Ethan Coen continues that tradition with “Drive Away Dolls,” which opens at the Triplex this week. The first in his planned “Lesbian B movie” trilogy with co-writer Tricia Cooke (and his first directorial effort without brother Joel), “Drive Away Dolls” is a classic B movie Coen crime-comedy in the spirit of “Raising Arizona” or “The Big Lebowski,” where a group of loveable losers gets caught up with a group of less loveable criminals.
One of the big reasons that these seemingly “toss away” movies continue to have an impact on filmmakers is because B movies were often a unique opportunity to see your repressed desires represented on screen. These low-budget movies were some of the first to tell unabashedly black, queer, and feminist stories. Without the influence of these seemingly “bad movies,” we wouldn’t have some of the most important and exciting filmmaking of the last 40 years.
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