American International Pictures was created
in 1954 as American Releasing Corporation by James H. Nicholson, sales manager
of the RealArt Production Company, and Hollywood lawyer Samuel Z. Arkoff
with the concept to target the teenage market.
They are credited with creating a new low
budget approach to film making. They hired artist Albert
Kallis to do the artwork for Beast
With 1,000,000 Eyes. Then they marketed the film BEFORE it was completed.
This format of using vivid artwork to presell their films became their trademark
in the early years
In 1956 ARC was renamed American International
Pictures, but its teenage marketing target remained the same.
The 1960s was a training ground for new
actors and directors such as Roger Corman, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter
Bogdanovich .
With The
Wild Angels in 1966, AIP launched the biker-film genre and reflected
a radical new spirit in AIP's youth-oriented fare.
In 1969 Roger Corman made his last films
for AIP: the violent gangster film Bloody Mama and then started
his own distribution and production company, New World Pictures.
James H. Nicholson died in 1971, but AIP
kept going strong throughout the early 1970s and horror still paid the bills.
Count
Yorga, Vampire, The
Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, the Phibes films, Scream,
Blacula, Scream!, and The
Food Of The Gods are just a handful of the dozens of horror films
AIP released in the 1970s.
With greater financial freedom, AIP started
purchasing foreign sci-fi and horror films and financing more mainstream
films.
By the late 1970s, big-budget films had
surprisingly become more important to AIP than the cheap, two-week shoot
pictures of the past. The
Island Of Dr. Moreau, Love
At First Bite and The
Amityville Horror all made money but the overspending led to the
ultimate downfall of AIP.
Massive spending hurt the company, and 1979,
AIP merged with Filmways (which later became Orion Pictures).
In 1980, Sam formed Arkoff International
Pictures.
Here are the films listed in our archive
AIP HAS BEEN REVIVED!!
C. S. Lamb, a movie producer, has bought
up the logos and rights to Monogram, PRC, AIP and several other b-movie
studios and has started reviving them. They plan to re-release some of the
old GEMS as well as produce new b-movies... For more information you can
go their website. We applaud
Mr. Lamb and hope he succeeds.
You must be logged in to see these
articles
Not a member? see
here for more info
1. A.I.P. Production Logs with
all production numbers. A.I.P. production numbers were broken down a little
different than most production logs.. Because of this we have 2 different
logs. These are very important for still identification and anything associated
with production numbers.
A. The
A. I. P. Number Log
B. The
A. I. P. Letter and Oddities Log