When people think of the New Hollywood auteurs who cut their teeth in the court of B-movie king Roger Corman, the names that come to mind are Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, and Martin Scorsese.
But Stephanie Rothman, who also worked as a director for Corman, was never afforded the opportunity to graduate from making low-budget exploitation fare to the mainstream studio system. “The cinema I longed to make remains an unhealed wound in my head,” says the 88-year-old. “But we all have wounds we live with, if we want to stay sane.” What the proto-feminist painter Artemisia Gentileschi was to the 17th-century Renaissance, Stephanie Rothman was to the 1970s grind house.
Born in 1936 in New Jersey and raised in Los Angeles, Rothman was the first woman to be awarded a Directors Guild Fellowship after studying filmmaking at the University of Southern California.
At a time when the film business offered few behind-the-camera opportunities for women, the financially restrictive but socially progressive Corman found Rothman impressive enough to offer her a job in 1964. Her early days working as his assistant were filled with everything from casting and editing to script re-writing and second-unit directing, and in 1965 she was given her first solo picture to direct—It’s a Bikini World.
The film was a cash-in on the then popular “beach party” subgenre that featured rebellious teenagers, trendy musical acts, and, naturally, bikini-clad girls. With hardly any connection to the assigned material, Rothman was left depressed by the experience. In 1970, however, Corman hired Rothman to write and direct her second film, for his new distribution company, New World Pictures.
The Student Nurses was Rothman’s first Trojan-horse movie, in which she managed to shoehorn a modern, feminist perspective—exploring issues such as abortion and immigration—into an exploitation film. While Corman mandated that the film had to include scantily clad nurses, he was known to give creative freedom to young directors as long as they could shoot cheaply and quickly and turn a healthy profit, all of which Rothman accomplished.
“We all have wounds we live with, if we want to stay sane.”
Over the next half-decade, on shoestring budgets, Rothman made a horror romp (The Velvet Vampire), a polyamory farce (Group Marriage), a prison thriller (Terminal Island), and a sexploitation comedy (The Working Girls). Despite the genre trappings, all of the films displayed a socially conscious directorial voice and remarkably assured style.
While a certain amount of female nudity was a prerequisite in order for Corman to gain financing, Rothman was “very tired of the whole tradition in western art in which women are always presented nude and men aren’t.” Daringly, she made sure to undress the male actors as much as the female ones in order to emphasize the presence of female desire. This was a rarity. “I didn’t always get to choose the subjects of the film, but I did have control over … the treatment of the subjects,” said Rothman in an interview with The Austin Chronicle in 2010.
The next 10 years saw Rothman trying to get more ambitious, serious projects financed, but to no avail. “The so-called elephant in the room: I was a woman,” Rothman said. “I often learned indirectly that this was the decisive reason why many producers wouldn’t agree to meet me. If that sounds exaggerated, remember that I worked in the American film industry from 1965 to 1974, and some of those years I was the only woman directing feature films.” Even in television there were no directing and writing jobs. “I didn’t leave the film industry—it left me,” says Rothman. “I couldn’t find work.”
A screenplay she sold became 1978’s Starhops, about a trio of girls working as carhops at a Venice Beach drive-in restaurant. But by the time she saw the finished, butchered film, “there was not an idea, a scene, a word, or even a comma left from my original script.” Not wanting her name associated with the picture, she used the pseudonym “Dallas Meredith.” It remains Rothman’s final credit.
For a few years, Rothman took on lobbying work for a small group of U.C. academics, and then, with a modest inheritance, invested in commercial real estate. Recently, however, Rothman’s films have been experiencing a long-overdue critical re-appraisal. The Criterion Channel is currently running a double-feature showcase of The Student Nurses and The Velvet Vampire.
Does she feel bittersweet about it taking more than half a century for her trailblazing movies to finally be getting the recognition they deserve? “More sweet than bitter,” Rothman says. “Bitterness, like hate, poisons the person who lets it fester inside them. I am very happy there is renewed interest in [my films]. I hope that interest will live on after me.”
Spike Carter is a writer and filmmaker
