As the audience grew more and more uncomfortable, he would release noxious gas through the air vents and wait for the first person to pass out. In what has to be the most outlandish publicity stunt in film history, he would start the film and turn off the ventilation. He assured further controversy by sexually segregating the audience - women only in the afternoon and men only at night. Did he figure the voyeuristic audience would just ignore the baby and focus on the anatomy? Four-walling a theater in each city, Babb picked up some added pocket change by having a phony nurse hawk sex-education pamphlets in the aisles before the feature began.
Babb realized this was a chance to legally show full-frontal female nudity. Since the film contained footage of an actual birth of a baby, Mr. We can even go way back in history to Mom and Dad, a boring pseudo sex documentary from the forties brilliantly hyped by the great-great-grandfather of exploitation, Kroger Babb. Levines who used to hype films? Why do today's producers waste untold millions on media junkets, national television spots, and giant print ads when they could come up with something as delightful and effective as handing out vomit bags at horror films? Or how about the high-profile but dirt-cheap antics of the producers of a 1977 redneck oddity entitled The Worm Eaters? Realizing that competition for attention from film buyers at the Cannes Film Festival was fierce that year, these ballyhoo experts blithely ate live worms from a bucket as startled distributors filed into their screening. Who's to follow in the footsteps of the great low-rent Samuel Z. They may have hated the picture, but they loved the gimmick, and that's all they ended up remembering anyway. After all, with so many bad movies around these days, couldn't the promotional campaigns at least be fun? What's happened to the ludicrous but innovative marketing techniques of yesteryear that used to fool audiences into thinking they were having a good time even if the film stunk? Did the audiences care? Hell, no. The word was "showmanship" - but lately this term seems to have disappeared from movie moguls' vocabulary. Chapter Two: Whatever Happened to Showmanship?
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