Cars and Girls (and Burgers and Weed): Branding, Mainstreaming, and Crown International Pictures' SoCal Drive-in Movies
Abstract
When not detailing its connections to art cinema or quality cinema, academic and popular film historiography has tended to spotlight the more salacious elements of the American exploitation cinema boom of the mid-to-late 1970s, cementing its image as violent, sexually explicit, profane, and reactionary. Yet, as this chapter argues, the most prominent company operating in the sector, Crown International Pictures, actually positioned itself squarely within the imagined mainstream of American youth culture.
The chapter shows that central to this producer-distributor's branding strategy was a concept dubbed Crownsmanship; a multifaceted discourse activated in and around its flagship series of youth-oriented drive-in releases - The Pom Pom Girls (1976), Malibu Beach (1978), Van Nuys Blvd. (1979), and others. This strategy represented an attempt to maintain the supply chain linking Crown to regional distribution exchanges, open air theaters, and the "multi-tasking" youngsters imagined attending screenings of these films.
As an analysis of movie content, marketing materials, and trade press statements demonstrates, Crownsmanship conjured a nostalgic vision of California youth which predated the upheavals of the previous decade and the controversial Hollywood Renaissance pictures they furnished; one built around the anodyne leisure pursuits from which Crown and its partners generated revenue and from which they hoped young moviegoers would derive pleasure - cars and girls and burgers and weed.