Hello, my name is Justin the Clue, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we're talking about a director,

shocker. We haven't done someone that's not a director in a long time, have we? Yeah, we should do

an actress, don't you think? Yeah, I think so. That would let us talk about someone who's a woman again, which we definitely need. But instead, today we're

talking about Edgar G. Almer, who is the king of Poverty Row Cinema. A man who his following is

very small, but very passionate. The most maudit of Maudit Oteurs. Mm-hmm. Cage Cinema took him under their wing

and just kind of rose him to the ranks in their magazine of artists that worked under

difficult situations but created things that are actually worthwhile, sometimes in their opinion.

So let's set the scene for how a man like Edgar G.

Ulmer could flourish.

Back in the Hollywood studio era, you had your major studios, the MGMs, the Warner

brothers, to a lesser extent, the universals.

And then you had the Poverty Row Studios, which specialized in B movies, distributed basically for a flat rate.

If you made a B movie, you didn't take the profits, you just rented it out to theaters.

And so B movie studios could send them to theaters and figure out, okay, if we send them

this many theaters, we can make a guaranteed profit.

So there's really no incentive to make great work. Movies like the Bowery Boys or Charlie Chan Mysteries or Bella

Lagosie horror movies. And these are studios like Monogram, PRC, Republic Pictures. The most

influential piece of writing on Edgar G. Elmer was by Andrew Serris. The mascot of the important cinema club, if you will, considering how many times he mentioned

him.

Andrew Saris and Peter Bogdanovich are probably the two most mentioned people on this podcast.

Orson Wells coming a third and Peter Bogdanovich is doing impersonations of Orson

...