Sam Sherman & Me

I don’t know if Sam Sherman is aware of this, but he is the reason that I got into this wild business in the first place. It was the summer of 1972 when my 8-year old eyes first locked onto the cover of a Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Sam’s film “Dracula vs. Frankenstein” was on the cover in all its psychedelic glory. The image burned into my retinas…I was a changed boy.



For those of you who do not know, Sam and his partners Al Adamson and Dan Q. Kennis started Independent-International Pictures in the late 1960s. For a decade they were a soup-to-nuts studio - producing, marketing and exhibiting films across America and beyond. “Satan’s Sadists,” “Blood in Dracula’s Castle” and the above-mentioned “Dracula vs. Frankenstein” are just of few of the low-budget classics that blazed across theater screens and on independent TV stations in the 1970s.



I now make a living creating, marketing and selling independent films on DVD, squarely wearing the producer’s cap in a manner very similar to Sam Sherman a few decades earlier. When my labels Retro-Seduction and Retro-Shock handled the marketing and distribution of Sam’s films on DVD a few years ago, I was thrilled by the opportunity to release these films in the newest format (DVD) as well as introduce a new generation to Sam’s films. Imagine “Blazing Stewardesses sitting on the shelf in a local Best Buy…right next to “Blazing Saddles”….the very film that it hyped all those years ago in Sam’s theatrical ads! The voice booming …. “Out-blazing Blazing Saddles.” Putting all business aside, it is that love of movies that brought us together again on my studio’s current project, “Shock Fest”.



“Shock Fest” or rather, “Stephen Romano’s Shock Festival”, is the novel voted by Rue Morgue Magazine as “The Best Fiction Book of 2008”, and by Fangoria Magazine as “One of the greatest homage to B-cinema ever undertaken”. The Shock Fest project is the DVD-companion to Stephen’s book. Shock Festival DVD is a 3-disc collection featuring 101 of the most unusual, amazing grindhouse trailers ever made, television spots, radio ads, authentic and contemporary grindhouse film scores, as well as all-new original exploitation tribute trailers and short films by noted independent artists and filmmakers including Dave Hartman (visual FX supervisor for Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep and director of Rob Zombie’s music videos American Witch and Lords of Salem), Dave Neabor of New Jersey’s punk/ rock/rap phenominon, Dog Eat Dog, Argentinean writer, producer and filmmaker Nicanor Loreti (Dying God, Left for Dead), frequent Shock-O-Rama contributor and friend Richard Griffin (Feeding The Masses, Splatter Disco) and Fangoria Magazine’s own Michael Gingold. The very talented Mars of Dead House Music contributed original exploitation music to the DVD, as well as many of the tribute trailers. Of the independent film production and distribution companies who contributed trailers to Shock Festival, I should mention Grindhouse Releasing, Blue Underground, Media Blasters.



Sam Sherman’s years of experience as producer, filmmaker, marketing executive and (yes!) trailer–editor for some of the most outrageous and unforgettable “B” and exploitation films ever made ensure Sam is the ideal individual to comment on the subject of exploitation cinema. When Paige Davis (POP’s VP of Sales and Marketing and co-producer of Shock Festival) brought Stephen’s novel and the project to Sam’s attention, he was effusive in his admiration for the authenticity of the various faux film posters, one-sheets and lobby cards that illustrate the novel, and immediately offered to not only contribute some of his best-loved trailers to the project but also volunteered to go on record with his compliments. I’m very happy and proud to say that the Shock Festival DVD will include an interview with Samuel M. Sherman, a true independent and the man who brought us Dracula vs. Frankenstein – thank you, Sam!

Check out www.AlternativeCinemaPodcast.com for exclusive interviews and video footage from the many talented people involved in Shock Festival.

“Shock-Fest” is coming to DVD Fall of 2009.