If there was an art to grindhouse movies, it was the art of the spiel. As Prohibition created the bootleg-booze industry, Hollywood moralizing gave birth to exploitation films. With the adoption of a Production Code in 1922, the major studios ostensibly promised to renounce the ribald. After he added some skin, Esper retitled the film Reefer Madness and made a bundle. Good, bad or worse, exploitation directors were the independent filmmakers in an era dominated by Hollywood.
Exploitation films come in all genres, but the staple was sex.
And in the late '50s, as bold European films lured the art-house crowds, a new breed of grind gurus revived sexploitation. Michael was decapitated in 1977 by the blade of a helicopter crashing atop Manhattan's Pan Am Building. The running times were as short as a starlet's skirt. Then again, the numbing incompetence of some adults-only films made that one hour seem endless. The tone of even the best of them was not so much sexy as seedy.