William Beaudine

William Beaudine mini-bio: William "One-Shot" Beaudine, the director of nearly 350 known movies (nearly one for every day of the year; some bibliographies of his films put his output at 500 movies and hundreds of TV episodes) and scores of television episodes, enjoyed a directing career that stretched across seven decades from the 'Teens to the Seventies. (Beaudine also was a screenwriter credited on 26 films and one TV series). His movies, which ranged from full-length motion pictures to shorts, included the notorious Mom and Dad (1945) of 1945, the "Gone With the Wind" of the "Hygeine/Sexploitation" genre, for producer Kroger Babb (one of the "Forty Thieves" of the exploitation circuit), as well as his last two films, the grind-house/drive-in horror classics Billy the Kid versus Dracula (1966) and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966) in 1966 (when he made these two cheapies, he was the oldest active director in Hollywood, at 74). "One Shot" was prolific not only because of his propensity for a minimal amount of takes (which gave him his sobriquet), but also because he started in the early film industry when one- and two-reelers were ground out like sausages, and worked primarily after 1937 in churning out programmers at Poverty Row studios. If a producer like Babb needed a well-made potboiler shot in two weeks or less, Beaudine was the man to hire through the mid 1960s. William Washington Beaudine was born on January 15, 1892 in New York City, which was advantageous to a tyro filmmaker after the turn of the last century as the original "Hollywood" of America was located nearby in Ft. Lee, New Jersey. (Thomas Edison, the inventor of the first motion picture production device and, more importantly, holder of several of its most important patents, was headquartered in New Jersey. The patent monopoly that Edison belonged to did not want filmmakers operating too far away so that the monopoly could oversee the industry to ensure it did not use pirated equipment that infringed their patents. California arose as a major production center in the 'Teens as it was so far away from the prying eyes of the Edison trust) Beaudine started in the movie industry as a $10 per week prop boy, factotum and extra in 1909 with American Mutoscope and the Biograph Co., where he first worked with D.W. Griffith, the father of the American film. He began appearing as an actor in Mack Sennett's Biograph films in 1912 and continued to work behind the camera while appearing as an actor in 44 movies through 1915. From 1911 to 1914, he was the assistant director or second unit director on 55 movies. He wed Marguerite Fleischer in October 1914 (they remained married until his death in 1970), the same year he moved to California. Although hired by the Kalem Co. as an actor, he got his first chance to direct while working on the Kalem's "Ham and Bud" comedy series in 1915. He directed at least five films in 1915, and served as an assistant to director D.W. Griffith on the seminal masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915) and its follow-up, the aptly named Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916). By 1916, he was making $100 per week directing. Beaudine directed as many as 150 short comedies before graduating to feature film assignments in 1922. He earned the nickname "One Shot" for his propensity to shoot just one take, regardless of the problems that afflicted filming during that that one take, such as actors blowing their lines, or the actors fumbling the blocked business of the scene, or even technical limitations such as the failure of special effects or equipment. Problems could be taken care of in the editing room, which was much cheaper than costly filming process. Beaudine, like John Ford, was known for "editing in the camera", that is, shooting only those scenes that are necessary, which saved time and raw stock. He did not shooting full coverage of scenes, with master shots and alternate takes (His contemporary William A. Wellman , another master of editing in the camera, did Beaudine one better as "two-shot" - he would film two shots of a scene in case one was ruined in the developing lab Beaudine stubbornly would shoot only what he knew was necessary, and since Beaudine worked almost exclusively on low budget 'quickie' pictures for the last thirty years of his career (he directed over half of the Bowery Boys feature films), he was prized for making films quickly and economically, despite the gaffes, which likely would not be noticed by the audience of these movies anyways (when informed that an East Side Kids quickie he was making for Monogram, which bought the rights to the Bowery Boys and renamed them, was falling behind schedule, he responded, "You mean someone out there is actually waiting to see this shit?"). Beaudine churned out low-budget films in numbers measured by the gross, in a wide variety of genres. Incredibly, before he became a hack, Beaudine was quite respected by the American film industry from the 1920 through the mid-30s, and he was highly paid for his work. His early feature work quickly established his reputation as a craftsman, displaying a light touch. In silents, Beaudine worked as a director for Goldwyn, for Metro, for First National Pictures, and for Warner Brothers.. His reknown for working well with children won him two assignments directing films for superstar Mary Pickford at United Artists: Little Annie Rooney (1925) and Sparrows (1926), the latter a Gothic suspense thriller that is an ur-The Night of the Hunter (1955) that reportedly influenced "Hunter" director Charles Laughton. His finest silent film is considered to be "The Canadian", based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham. By the time the talkies arrived, Beaudine was a top director in Hollywood, his salary increasing from $1,250 a week in 1925 to $2,000- $2,500 a week in 1926. For directing the "Izzy and Mike" (Jewish/Irish comedy) The Cohens and the Kellys in Paris (1928) in 1928, he earned $20,000 (approximately $215,000 in 2006 terms), which was not bad considering the speed in which he made movies. Even after the Depression hit, Beaudine commanded $2,000 week in 1931. Unfortunately, Beaudine was heavily leveraged in the stock market and was virtually wiped out by the Crash of '29. He moved to England in 1935 and directed more than a dozen films there before returning to the U.S. Once home, he couldn't find a job in Hollywood for 2 years. When he was finally offered work he found himself employed at the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder: Gower Gulch at studios like Monogram and PRC. By 1940, Beaumont had more or fallen to the hack plateau expected by his poverty row producers and was earning about $500 per picture, working on such low-budget programmers and bottom-of-the-double-bill-fillers as Desperate Cargo (1941) and the dreadful The Ape Man (1943). The lowest point of his career would be considered, by some (considering the remarkable string of turkeys and stinkers he turned out in almost 60 years of directing), his employment by exploitation titan Kroger Babb, via Babb's contract with Monogram, to direct "Mom and Dad". "Mom and Dad" was a "hygiene" picture featuring real footage of a live birth that Babb "four-walled" in territories across the U.S. (Four-walling meant renting a theater outright in which to show a film, cutting exhibitors out of any share of the profits other than the theater rental). There were separate showings for males and females at separate times, and a "doctor" and two "nurses" were in attendance (played by actors), with the doctor giving a hygiene lecture and selling sex hygiene books at inflated prices (the money collected by the "nurses", who ostensibly where there lest anyone faint from such a frank divulging of "the facts of life"). These tactics also worked to keeps local authorities at bay. Some cinema historians say that "Mom and Dad" may well have been the most profitable film in history, grossing as much as $100 million. Babb later recounted that each one of his investors got back $63,000 for each $1,000 he invested in the film. In the pre-"Kinsey Report" world filled with ignorance about biology and sex, "Mom, and Dad" was created to this void, as well as to turn a handsome profit. (The film played at drive-ins at least until 1977, even after the sexual revolution of the Swinging Sixties, so potent was the "Birth of a Baby" come-on to rubes.) "Mom and Dad" was likely the top-grossing picture of 1947. The film was so heavily promoted, "Time" Magazine once commented that the ad campaign "left only the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life." Until the advent "The Blair Witch Project", many regarded it as the purest and most successful exploitation film in history. By the end of the 1940s, Beaudine had churned out 60 movies. Still, he was respected enough as a man who could make a movie quickly to be paid $3,000 per week for "The Lawton Story" (a 1947 filmed adaptation of a Passion Play staged in Oklahoma, re-released in 1951 by Kroger Babb's Hallmark company). His paced slowly somewhat in the 1950s, when he made only 23 movies, most of them for Allied Artists (formerly Monogram). A quarter century after directing superstar Mary Pickford, Beaudine was "reduced" to directing a washed-up, drug-addicted former Vampire and Martin & Lewis clones in Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo in drek like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), in which Mitchell is turned into, what else? A singing gorilla. Beaudine, who had worked with Lugosi in The Ape Man (1943) and the East Side Kids cheapie Ghosts on the Loose (1943) (which was most memorable for featuring a young Ava Gardner) in 1943, wrapped the film in nine days on a budget of $50,000. The film today serves as a landmark in bad cinema. In fact, during his preparation for playing Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994), the chronicle of another director of bad movies, Martin Landau watched "Brooklyn Gorilla" three times. Landau, who would earn an Oscar for his turn as Lugosi, was stunned by its sheer awfulness, saying that it was so bad "it made the Ed Wood films look like Gone with the Wind (1939)." Two years after giving the world the landmark naughty picture "Mom and Dad", Beaudine was contracted by an evangelical Christian organization, the Protestant Film Commission, in 1947 to make a religious-themed movie (beginninig in the late 1940s, evangelist Billy Graham had done quite well in converting non-believers with movies specially made for the task.) It was successful and the PFC hired him on a regular basis to make more films. By 1955, Beaudine had directed 10 more films for the PFC, all of them crafted to spread the word of God and try to convert non-believers to Christianity. Ironically, Beaudine himself reportedly was an atheist, directing them for the money. His ability to overlook almost anything in order to get exposed film into the can would prove a huge advantage in the medium of television. In the 1950s, he moved into television, directing hundreds of episodes of popular series, including shows for Walt Disney. By the Sixties, Beaudine was one of the principal directors on "Lassie" (1954), eventually passing the baton on to his son, William Beaudine Jr. upon his retirement from the show--- proving the adage that the fruit really doesn't fall far from the tree. At the time of his retirement in 1967, William "One Shot" Beaudine was the oldest active director in Hollywood. He died in Canoga Park, California, on March 18, 1970 setting a record for proliferativeness and profligacy that likely won't ever be matched again. In 2005, the "labor of love" brought into the world by William Beaudine and Kroger Babb, two of Hollywood's most Prodigal Sons, was honored by the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, with the inclusion of "Mom and Dad" to the list of the nation's cinematic treasures. Date of Death: 18 March 1970, Canoga Park, California, USA. (uremic poisoning)

William Beaudine Information: