Film producer David F. Friedman died of heart failure on 14 February 2011. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 24 December 1923, he was, to quote The New York Times, “a film producer who cheerfully and cheesily exploited an audience’s hunger for bare-breasted women and blood-dripping corpses in lucrative low-budget films like Blood Feast and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.… [He was] part carnival barker, part adman, part good-natured, dirty-minded adolescent.”
Mica Brook Everett (a relative who was also his caretaker, and who announced his death), said he attended Cornell and “sat next to Kurt Vonnegut in a calculus class.” Friedman also worked for a time as a film booker and projectionist in Buffalo, and then served in the Army during World War II. After the war, he worked for film producer Kroger Babb.
In the 1960s, he teamed up with the director Herschell Gordon Lewis to make “a handful of films in a genre known as ‘nudie-cuties’, in which young women would perform ordinary household tasks or cavort in sun-dappled settings half-dressed or entirely undressed. (Some of the films were shot at Florida nudist colonies.) These movies were not openly erotic—there was no sex—but in their deadpan presentation of public nudity, they delivered a naughty, subversive wink at censorship standards.”
In 1963, they made the first splatter film, Blood Feast, for less than $25,000. It has reportedly earned millions of dollars since. They followed it up with Two Thousand Maniacs! and Color Me Blood Red.
He all but retired by the mid-1980s, though he did have producer credits on five films over the past 15 years. His films started reappearing on video about 20 years ago, mostly from Something Weird Video, which brought him some cult celebrity status. Mike Vraney, of Something Weird, told the Times, “He partied like an animal. He ate huge meals, drank and smoked enormous cigars. He lived with gusto.”
His genre productions include: 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010), Crustacean (2009), 2001 Maniacs (2005), Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002), 7 into Snowy (1978), Bummer (1973), The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide (1972), The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried (1971), Love Camp 7 (1969), Space-Thing (1968), The Head Mistress (1968), Mundo depravados (1967), She Freak (1967), Color Me Blood Red (1965), Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), and Blood Feast (1963). In addition to his producing, he also appeared as an actor in a number of films. Genre credits include: An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), Hollywood Rated “R” (1997), Search for the Beast (1997), and The Sore Losers (1997).