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

And you're listening to the important cinema club. And today, we're going to the city part of town.

Because we're going to be talking about Poverty Row. What is that, Will?

Poverty Row in the golden age of

hollywood you had your paramounts your warner brothers your m gmses making the big musical comedies

for the whole family to enjoy but you know sometimes you got to have stuff for the second

half of that double bill especially during the war years so there were the other studios.

The studios in the not great part of town, the studio with the lesser facilities,

the studios that instead of taking a gross percentage on the box office,

would sell their movies to states and theaters on a rental basis.

And then if you could calculate in advance how much you were going to make from

those rentals, you could be in profit before you even started the movie. So there's no motivation

to even make them good. But supposedly, they wouldn't even have that much of a big cut. They

would make only 10% over their line of what the movie costs to make. And they made them cheap.

And there was also no motivation to make them

much better because, like, did you really want to chip away at that small percentage of profit

you were guaranteed to get? Dave Kerr, the critic, wrote in 1990, a director on Poverty Row

labored on films in the absolute certainty that no film critic would see them, no sophisticated

public would encounter them,

and no financial reward whatever would accrue, and no financial award would ever accrue.

And Dave Kerr recently programmed a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art of some of the

better Poverty Row films. I think for those of us who are interested in movies, the Poverty

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