By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: Rayland Jensen, the founder of production company Sunn Classic Pictures, who pioneered the popular concept of the “pseudoscience” documentary in the 1970s.
In today’s climate, you can scratch pretty much any itch you’ve got…usually in mere seconds. If you’re interested in a certain topic – from the political or pop cultural to the scientific and historical – you can literally be down an online rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and overt, strident opinion within minutes. The internet has become a comfortable home for deep, against-the-mainstream lines of thought, and also for the rabid brand of discussion that often grows insidiously outward from that. Back in the 1970s, however, those with a bent for conspiracy theories and alternate takes on history couldn’t get their fix instantaneously. They had to go to things like, you know, books, magazines, discussion groups, clubs, and yes, the cinema.
The 1960s and particularly the1970s saw the rise of what could perhaps best be described as spurious documentaries, or “docsploitation” or “shockumentary” if you’d prefer to be glib. The most scabrous of these were the grotesque, often faked likes of Mondo Cane (1962), Women Of The World (1963), Faces Of Death (1978) and The Killing Of America (1981), but occupying just as important a place in the world of spurious documentaries was the Utah-based American production company Sunn Classic Pictures. While they didn’t wallow in blood, death, ethnocentrism and sex in the manner of the aforementioned shockers, the documentaries produced and distributed by Sunn Classic Pictures took a similar approach to things like evidence, and the presentation of assumption as fact. The founder and driving force behind Sunn Classic Pictures was Rayland Jensen, whose singular focus and approach to filmmaking makes him a very likely Unsung Auteur indeed. Though he didn’t direct the company’s films, Jensen guided them in a deep, highly creative manner that speaks of a man with a true cinematic vision; sure, it’s a slightly cock-eyed vision, but it’s a vision nonetheless.
Rayland Jensen’s entry into the world of film production and distribution came with the 1968 documentary Alaskan Safari, which enjoyed great success at the box office. Jensen’s rise happily coincided with a desire on behalf of the executives at the razorblade company Schick to get into film production…and yes, you read that correctly. The 1970s were indeed a curious time, with the likes of Faberge cosmetics also getting into the movies via its short-lived Brut Films banner. Anyway, we digress. Rayland Jensen was joined at what was coined Sunn Classic Pictures (the extra ‘n’ was added later to avoid confusion with a publisher of porn with the same name) by Schick exec Patrick Frawley and Charles E. Sellier, who would later go on to direct the cult classic 1984 horror flick Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Using groundbreaking methods derived from their business and marketing backgrounds that would eventually become the norm in Hollywood, Sunn Classic Pictures spent buckets of money on research to determine what potential American audiences wanted to see before expending one inch of celluloid. The company’s market research teams would literally hit up teenagers and families in heartland shopping malls and ask them what they were interested in and what they wanted to see when they visited the cinema. The company’s second bold, and very successful, move was to utilise the distribution process of “four walling”, whereby Sunn Classic Pictures would actually rent a cinema, screen their films, and then keep all of the profits generated by ticket sales. In short, the risk – and the win – was all on them. The risk was great, and so was the win, and it was a distribution method that paid off handsomely for the company.
With a focus on family-friendly, G-rated entertainment, Sunn Classic Pictures enjoyed its first success with 1974’s The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams, a kinda-sorta based-on-fact western-style drama about the eponymous wanted man (played by heavily bearded and long-haired man-mountain Dan Haggerty, previously a regular in biker flicks) who flees into the wilderness, where he eventually carves out a peaceful existence on his own, and even forges a friendship with an abandoned bear cub that he raises and names Ben. The independently produced film was a massive success, and even led to a popular family-friendly TV series (also starring Dan Haggerty) likely very familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s and consumed hours of commercial network television.
The profits from The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams really upped production at Sunn Classic Pictures, and saw the company find equal success in the field of “pseudoscience” documentaries, whereby they would tightly grab a subject; powerfully present decidedly spurious evidence (often accompanied by appropriately persuasive and stentorian narration) as irrefutable fact; throw in some recreations and re-enactments; and then wrap things up with a neat, tidy narrative bow that would have audiences leaving cinemas with no doubt that what they’d just witnessed was fact. The format was a winner.
To great and growing success, Jensen and Sunn Classic Pictures applied this approach to titles like 1975’s The Mysterious Monsters (featuring Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster et al), 1975’s The Outer Space Connection (according to this doco, aliens built our ancient civilisations), 1976’s In Search Of Noah’s Ark (it’s apparently buried on Mt. Ararat in Turkey), 1976’s The Amazing World Of Psychic Phenomena (ghosts, astral projection, hypnotism and the like), 1977’s The Lincoln Conspiracy (it wasn’t John Wilkes Booth, but rather some guy who escaped to Canada after assassinating Honest Abe), 1978’s Beyond And Back (near-death experiences), 1979’s In Search Of Historic Jesus (which looks at the historical aspects of The Big Guy), and 1981’s The President Must Die (which takes on the assassination of JFK, the Moby Dick of conspiracy theories), amongst others. Though all dealing with often strange and slightly lurid subject matter, the docos created by Sunn Classic Pictures were all G-rated, and most of them enjoyed enormous box office success in relation to their meagre budgets.
While Rayland Jensen eventually formed the Sunn Classic Pictures subsidiary Jensen Farley Pictures with Clair Farley (which released a few crackers, including 1983’s Cujo and 1987’s The Monster Squad, as well as 1981’s decidedly non-family-friendly “cougar classic” Private Lessons with Sylvia Kristel), the impact of the documentaries he helped create with the company in the 1970s was enormous. Their influence on the eerie Leonard Nimoy-narrated TV series In Search Of… (retitled Great Mysteries Of The World in Australia, and again likely very familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s and consumed hours of commercial network television) is plainly obvious (there is an actual connection between the two), while terms like “fake history” and “alternative facts” could comfortably be applied to the spurious but guiltily enjoyable output of the now largely forgotten Sunn Classic Pictures.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, 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.
