By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: producer and mini-mogul Earl Owensby, who produced and starred in Death Driver, Dark Sunday, and Buckstone County Prison.
In the Unsung Auteurs column, we have spoken a few times about the concept of “quality”, and the argument that a filmmaker can only be classified as an auteur if they produce artful, meaningful, high-tone, deeply personal work. We vehemently disagree with this line of thinking, and believe instead that a cinematic auteur is simply a creative with a recurring, identifiable style or set of thematic or narrative concerns. Not every auteur has to be a high falutin’ one in the mold of Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles or John Ford, as we have argued in the case of filmmakers like Joe Camp, Betty Thomas, Dennis Dugan, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian and many others.
This brings us to Earl Owensby, whose work could never be mistaken as high art, or even medium-level art for that matter. A producer and actor with a long list of credits, Earl Owensby has for decades been making exploitation movies, principally for the American drive-in circuit and other ancillary, often derided markets. But while the late Roger Corman has been lionised internationally for doing pretty much the same thing (but on a considerably grander scale), Earl Owensby is almost an unknown quantity on the world scene, at least when it comes to film criticism and commentary.
Once dubbed “the Cecil B. De Mille of the South” by no less than industry tome Variety, Owensby opened the boldly titled Earl Owensby Studios (a 200-acre motion picture facility located in Shelby, North Carolina) in 1974, which was established to produce and distribute action and genre films. Owensby preceded this with the 1974 action flick Challenge (aka Frank Challenge: Manhunter), which he both produced and starred in. The hard-punching tale of a US Senate candidate (!!!) who reaches for his rifle when his family is murdered, Challenge was a big hit on the drive-in circuit and in international markets too, to the extent that it largely bankrolled the creation of Earl Owensby Studios, along with the money that the self-made Owensby (who started out as a tool salesman) had made through his other successful company Carolina Pneumatic, which dealt in a variety of products and services.
“We’re sneakin’ up on ’em,” Earl Owensby told The Charlotte Observer in 1977. “We’re trying to break in big. It’s not easy – a stigma’s there if you’re not from LA. We’re not trying to make Gone With The Wind. No artsy-craftsy – I by-pass on that. There’s good drama to show we can do it and good gun stuff to sell tickets.” With the establishment of Earl Owensby Studios, the savvy “country boy” (as he liked to call himself) producer honed his on-screen image as a kind of backwoods Clint Eastwood and pumped out a steady stream of actioners during the 1970s, driving the films himself but leaving the actual directing to crafty, no-nonsense, budget-hitting locals like Martin Beck, Jimmy Huston and the wonderfully named Worth Keeter. Delivering fast moving, violent and exciting films, often with high body counts, Earl Owensby Studios enjoyed hit after hit with their low budget flicks. Earl Owensby has even long echoed Roger Corman’s famous claim that he never lost a dime on the films he produced and released.
While things got pretty loopy and low-rent (but always financially successful) at Earl Owensby Studios in the 1980s with cheap slasher and horror flicks like 1981’s A Day Of Judgment and 1983’s Dogs Of Hell, and a goofy array of 3D movies in the comedy and action genres (1983’s Hit The Road Running, 1984’s Hot Heir, Tales Of The Third Dimension, and Chain Gang, and 1985’s Gremloids, among various others), Owensby’s best days, as both actor and producer, were undoubtedly in the 1970s. He revived his hard-hitting Frank Challenge character for the tough-minded 1975 Challenge sequel The Brass Ring, and then gave his on-screen beatdowns a religious edge with 1976’s violent actioner Dark Sunday, in which Owensby plays a man of the cloth whose ministering in the ghetto brings down the wrath of a menacing drug dealer…cue holy bloodshed.
Owensby’s best films of the 1970s (and best films, period) were 1977’s Death Driver and 1978’s Buckstone County Prison. In Death Driver, Owensby plays Rex Randolph, a battered veteran carnival sideshow stunt driver famed for slamming his car through a ring of fire. A juiced-up adrenaline junky always ready for his next thrill, Randolph is a real good ol’ boy anti-hero, and he makes for a compelling, if not exactly likeable, protagonist. If Death Driver was something of a sideways detour, Buckstone County Prison saw Owensby pull tightly back into his lane, this time playing a Native American (!!!) bounty hunter who has to deal with brutal prison life when he’s banged up on phony murder charges. Painted in very, very broad strokes, the rigorously violent and entertainingly propulsive Buckstone County Prison is the most fully primed – and enjoyable – example of the kind of material that Owensby made millions on.
Proving how truly weird and wonderful Earl Owensby Studios was, Owensby also produced and starred in 1979’s Wolfman, a period Gothic horror film made on a shoestring in which Owensby plays the eponymous monster. Fascinatingly, the 1970s (what a decade it was!) also saw producer Earl Owensby attempt to make a star out of model and actress Ginger Alden, who was famed as the fiancée of Elvis Presley at the time of his death (The King introduces Ginger to just-audible groans during the concert film Elvis: That’s The Way It Is); self-made southern boys, Owensby and Elvis were allegedly friends. In 1980, Owensby starred opposite Alden in Living Legend: The King Of Rock And Roll, a bizarre cinematic amalgam weirdly built on the life of Elvis Presley, who is reconfigured here as a lookalike character called Eli Canfield, with songs by Roy Orbison on the soundtrack. Less peculiar and far more coherent was 1980’s Lady Grey, in which Alden plays a country singer struggling to make it big, and shares the screen with real life country legend David Allen Coe. Strangely entertaining and wholly indicative of Owensby’s canny take on the sly art of making a buck, these films make for two very curious footnotes in the exhaustive cultural history of Elvis Presley.
Quiet possibly the most successful regional film producer in America, Early Owensby is a truly fascinating figure, rating almost as a folk hero for the manner in which he has achieved great success on his own terms, staking his claim in North Carolina and refusing to ever even come close to playing the Hollywood game. “I wouldn’t go to Hollywood even to star,” Earl Owensby told The Charlotte Observer in 1977. “My favourite story is about a man who searches all over for diamonds, and finds them in his own backyard. Well, here’s my backyard – and I’m puttin’ my films there.” Southern auteur Earl Owensby certainly did that, and he crafted an instantly identifiable canon of winningly rough-and-ready exploitation films in the process.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
