by Stephen Vagg
The final instalment of our series of New World nurse pictures features the most famous one of the series, even though it doesn’t have any nurses in it.
By 1975, the sun had set, it seemed, on the three girls nurse movie cycle at New World, which began back in 1970 with The Student Nurses. There had been declining box office receipts for The Young Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses, so Roger Corman decided that the stethoscopes be put away for good as his studio focused on other genres.
Still, Summer School Teachers, about three teachers, had done very well, which was when one of his young assistants, Jon Davison, approached him about a three girls movie set in the world of filmmaking. Davison’s genius idea – and the New World trailer editors Joe Dante and Allan Arkush, who would co-direct – was to pitch the movie as the cheapest film made by New World, through using a heap of footage from previous New World pictures.
The reason this was a genius pitch to Roger Corman is that it was (a) cheap (b) involved promoting new talent and (c) involved a puzzle. As pointed out by Quentin Tarantino, Corman loved financing “puzzle pictures”, where he would set aspiring filmmakers the challenge of making movies based on pre-existing footage – thus, he financed the transformation of Soviet science fiction films into Battle Beyond the Sun (from Francis Ford Coppola), Queen of Blood (from Curtis Harrington), Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (from Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt) and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (from Curtis Harrington); footage from The Terror was used for Targets (from Bogdanovich and Platt); a Yugoslav thriller became Blood Bath (from Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman). Thriftiness was clearly a motivation for Corman to make such movies, but we sense that “puzzles” also greatly appealed to the engineering side of his nature; after all, he’d studied engineering at college and brought those skills to his long filmmaking career.
Corman agreed to finance what became Hollywood Boulevard, about the adventures of three aspiring actresses in Los Angeles, who go to work for Miracle Pictures (“if it’s a good picture, it’s a miracle”), a cheapskate production house not entirely unlike New World. Unlike most three girls movies, there’s one big overall plot, a murder mystery inspired by the 1932 movie The Death’s Kiss – someone is killing people on movie sets. There are some other subplots, but none have a socially progressive/feminist slant apart from being about women dealing with dodgy men. Also [SPOILERS], two of the three women are killed off, so that gives the film an entirely different vibe to other three girls movies.
The three girls were played by Candice Rialson, Tara Strohmeier and Rita George, who are all terrific and very likeable. Rialson has the star role and she’s wonderful as usual; the lesser known Strohmeier and George hold their own too – so much so [SPOILER], that when they’re killed, you feel sad. Jeffrey Kramer (the deputy in Jaws) is affable as Rialson’s screenwriting love interest, but the breakout support cast players were Mary Woronov (as a starlet) and Paul Bartel (as a pretentious director, continually giving highbrow meaning to his exploitation work, not unlike Corman was inclined to do around this time). Back then, Bartel was best known for directing (Private Parts, Death Race 2000) and Hollywood Boulevard really started his magnificent career as a character actor. Woronov was a terrific exploitation star – she looked like this magnificent alien goddess from Mars, with those high cheek bones and incredible legs; she was also very funny. Dick Miller has a sizeable role as an agent, and the film is full of support bits played by people familiar to film buffs, such as director Jonathan Kaplan, writer/director Charles Griffith, writer Mark Hanna, director Lewis Teague, editor Forrest J Ackerman, biographer/writers Joseph McBride and Todd McCarthy, and so on. The movie was partly edited by future writer/director Amy Holden Jones (who directed her first movies for Corman – Slumber Party Massacre and Love Letters).
As promised to Corman, the film features an abundance of footage from other New World/Corman movies, including sky diving (Private Duty Nurses), car chases (Caged Heat, Crazy Mama), a period car crash (Big Bad Mama), a cobra (Night of the Cobra Women), roller derby (Unholy Rollers – actually made for AIP but produced by Corman with Martin Scorsese editing), shoot outs in the jungle (The Hot Box, Women in Cages, The Big Doll House, Savage, The Big Bird Cage), The Terror (they see it at the drive in, with Miller commenting on himself on screen), Battle Beyond the Sun (seen at the drive-in), a futuristic car chase (Death Race 2000, perhaps the largest amount of footage used).
Hollywood Boulevard does suffer from some New World requirements of the time. The wet t-shirt scene is clunky (in contrast with the threesome scene involving Strohemier, George and a producer which is funny, sexy and in context). There’s a scene where Rialson plays a rape victim in a movie, which starts off humorous but then becomes stressful, because Rialson gets her top ripped off and is really traumatised by the experience. Later on, Rialson watches this sequence on screen at the drive-in, then is assaulted by the drive-in projectionist – we think, maybe this was meant to be funny, but it’s not great. There’s also an extended knife murder scene, a homage to Mario Bava, which is stylishly directed, and you might enjoy if you’re into slashers but, like the rape sequences, we found out off-kilter with the cheery tone of the rest of the movie.
However, the film is packed with so much talent, energy and sheer love for cinema that its faults can be forgiven. Hollywood Boulevard is a valentine to movie making, stuffed full of references to not just New World and Corman but Bava, Bela Lugosi, Alfred Zugmsith, Robbie the Robot, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sergio Leone, The Petrified Forest, and many others. It has a definite Mad magazine vibe.
Hollywood Boulevard was not overly successful at the box office – it was possibly too “inside baseball” and certainly didn’t lead to Corman investing in any more three girls movies – but it did make a profit, and encouraged Corman to let Dante direct Piranha and Arkush to direct Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, which really launched their careers (it also started Davison off on his long producing career). The movie should have kicked its female leads up to another level but that didn’t happen – Rialson’s last lead was in the notorious Chatterbox and the other two faded from view.
That was the thing about three girls movies that can’t be avoided – it was the girls who made them great, but while many of the (white) men associated with them went on to bigger films (George Armitage, Dennis Dugan, Jonathan Kaplan, Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, Paul Gleason, Chuck Norris), few of the women did (Stephanie Rothman, Barbara Peeters, Karen Carlson, Barbara Leigh, Candice Rialson, Mittie Lawrence, Pat Anderson, Elaine Giftos, Patti Byrne). That’s not to say that some didn’t go on to do interesting things and have long careers – particularly Robin Mattson, Angela Gibbs, Alana Collins, Mary Woronov and Julie Corman – but it’s fairly clear that none had the same opportunities as the men. This feels particularly unfair in the case of Rothman and Peeters, who made the best movies in the cycle.
Still, the films remain, and while they have to be viewed in context, warts and all, they are full of pleasures (notably being about women), and do say something about the spirit of a crazy time. As Sex and the City demonstrated, there continues to be money in the three girls movie if you get the girls and their tone right. It really is one of the (secretly) strongest genres.
