Babb was involved in the production and marketing of many films and television shows, promoting each according to his favorite marketing
sex education
-style dramas to "documentaries" on foreign cultures, intended to titillate audiences rather than to educate them, maximizing profits via marketing gimmicks.
Youth
Babb was born in 1906 in
Ripley's Believe It Or Not for refereeing a record number of youth sports games.[2] He started out with jobs in sportswriting and reporting at a local newspaper in his 20s, and even showed signs of his later work while showcasing "Digger" O'Dell, the "living corpse",[5] but first achieved success after his promotion to publicity manager for the Chakeres-Warners movie theaters, where he would create different kinds of stunts to lure audiences[4]—for example, a drawing to award two bags of groceries to one ticket holder at selected theaters.[2]
In the early 1940s Babb joined Cox and Underwood, a company that obtained the rights to poorly made or otherwise unmarketable films of subjects that were potentially controversial or shocking. It would often remove entire sections of these films and add material such as medical reels that lent itself to sensational promotion.[1] Babb went on the road with a Cox and Underwood concoction titled Dust to Dust, a reworking of High School Girl with a childbirth scene added to the end. Its profits allowed Cox and Underwood to retire from the business, leaving Babb to start his own company, Hygienic Productions.[2] He opened it near his childhood home in Wilmington, Ohio, and hired booking agents and advance salesmen along with out-of-work actors and comedians to present repackaged films and new features.[1]
Babb is best known for his presentation of exploitation films, a term many in the business would embrace.[2] According to The Hollywood Reporter, his success came from picking topics that would be easily sensationalized, such as religion and sex. His expenses were estimated at 5% for selling, and his distribution overhead near 7%, resulting in some of the largest per-dollar returns in the film industry.[6]
Babb's biggest success was Mom and Dad, which he conceived and produced and which
morality tale about a young girl who becomes pregnant and struggles to find someone to turn to,[4] cost $62,000 and over 300 prints were struck and sent to theaters all over the country,[7] with a "presenter"—later known as an advance man—and the presenter would stir up his own controversy in the weeks preceding the film's arrival by writing protest letters to local churches and newspapers and fabricating letters from the mayors of nearby cities relating tales of young women encouraged by the film to discuss similar predicaments.[1]
The third highest-grossing film of its decade,
The Story of Bob and Sally, that eventually flooded the market,[1] but it was still being shown around the world decades later[9] and ultimately was added to the National Film Registry in 2005.[7]
The success of Mom and Dad was mostly due to Babb's marketing strategy of overwhelming a small town with ads and generating controversy. Eric Schaefer explains:
Acknowledging that his films were unknown quantities, Babb advocated a "100% saturation campaign". In his sample situation--The Deadwood Theater in Movie-hater, Missouri, with a potential audience base of twenty-four thousand--Babb suggested sending tabloid heralds to all seven thousand homes in the area at a cost of $196, spending $65 for newspaper ads, $50 on radio, plus an additional $65 for three hundred window cards, hand-out teaser cards, pennants, and posters. The total came to almost $400, or the same amount the theater owner would normally spend on advertising in the course of an entire month. Babb always claimed that with his formula the profit would outweigh the investment...[1]
The film became so ubiquitous that
African-American areas, Olympicgold medalistJesse Owens appeared instead,[4] a trend he'd continue with films like "She Shoulda Said 'No'!"[10]) According to entertainer Card Mondor, an Elliot Forbes in the 1940s who later purchased the Australian and New Zealand rights for Mom and Dad, the Forbeses were "mostly local men (from Wilmington, Ohio) who were trained to give the lecture . . . [I]t was a cross-section of the male population, mostly clean-cut young guys . . . The whole concept would have never worked with a trashy look."[11]
During the intermission and after the showing, books relevant to the subject of the film were sold. Mom and Dad's distributor Modern Film Distributors sold over 45,000 copies of Man and Boy and Woman and Girl, written by Babb's wife,[9] netting an estimated $31,000.[1] According to Babb, these cost about eight cents to produce, and were sold for $1 apiece. While Modern Film was able to sell 45,000 on its own, Babb estimates sales of 40 million, citing "IRS figures."[9] This sort of companion selling would become common practice for Babb: with the religious film The Lawton Story (AKA-Prince of Peace), he would sell Bibles and other spiritual literature; and with his fidelity film Why Men Leave Home books featuring beauty tips.[1]
With other films, Babb would try different approaches. For
marijuana film of the 1950s, he highlighted the sexual scenes and arranged "one-time-only" midnight showings, claiming that his company was working with the United States Treasury Department to release the film "in as many towns and cities as possible in the shortest possible length of time" as a public service.[1]David F. Friedman, another successful exploitation filmmaker of the era, has attributed the "one-time-only" distribution to a quality so low that Babb wanted to cash in and move to his next stop as fast as possible.[2] At each showing of a film, a singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was also required.[12]
As well as being at the forefront of the battles over censorship and the
motion picture censorship system, the exploitation genre faced numerous challenges during the 1940s and 1950s.[1] It was estimated that Babb was sued over 400 times just for Mom and Dad[2] (Babb himself claimed 428[3]). He would often use the supposed educational value of the films as a defense, also recommending it to theater owners; in his pressbook for Karamoja, he wrote, "When a stupid jerk tries to outsmart proven facts, he should be in an asylum, not a theater."[1]
Despite the criticism that Babb drew for Mom and Dad, in 1951 he received the first annual Sid Grauman Showmanship Award, presented by the Hollywood Rotary Club in honor of his accomplishments over the years.[13]
Later films
Following the success of Mom and Dad, Babb renamed his company
Hallmark Productions, continuing the marketing approaches of Hygienic Productions while going beyond health and sex education films. He would later set up a larger distribution company, named Hallmark's Big-6.[14]
Babb cheaply acquired the rights to what would become "She Shoulda Said No!" shortly after Robert Mitchum and Lila Leeds were arrested for marijuana use. Its original producer had struggled to get it distributed as Wild Weed, and Babb quickly presented it as The Story of Lila Leeds and Her Exposé of the Marijuana Racket, hoping that the title would draw audiences. When it failed to stir up much interest, Babb instead focused on the one scene of female nudity, using a photo of Leeds in a showgirl outfit, and retitled it "She Shoulda Said 'No'!", with taglines such as "How Bad Can a Good Girl Get . . . without losing her virtue or respect???"[1] According to Friedman, Babb's midnight presentation of the film twice a week made more money than any other film at the same theater would earn over a full run; Friedman proceeded to use the film in his own roadshow double features.[2]
Babb's associates agreed with his belief that "Nothing's hopeless if it's advertised right", stating that he "could take any piece of junk and sell it".
telephone poles could be seen behind the crucifix. Its cast consisted of local non-professionals whose Oklahoma twangs were so thick that all of their lines had to re-recorded by professional voice-over actors; upon release, one reviewer described it as "the only film that had to be dubbed from English to English".[3] In addition to re-dubbing it, Babb re-edited and re-titled it The Prince of Peace; it was so successful that the New York Daily News called it "the Miracle of Broadway".[3]
Another film,
self-mutilation as a form of ornamentation",[1] as well as a full-color circumcision scene.[2]Karamoja proved less controversial than many of Babb's other films and grossed less.[1]