Doris Wishman

The story of Doris Wishman seems cute when you read about her. She had thirty-one directing credits. She never learned to record live sound and she didn't want to go through the trouble of lip sych dubbing, so she would do everything she could to avoid showing the person speaking. The camera would drift around, film stuff around the room. It actually worked pretty well.

But she was such a seedy character, making nudie and sexploitation films, "roughies" and, eventually, actual porn.

I may be over-extrapolating, but she seemed to come from kind of a degenerate family.  She worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg who distributed exploitation films. Wishman took up movie making herself to help cope with the death of her husband who died of a heart attack at age 31. She borrowed $10 thousand ($88 thousand today) from her sister to do this.

Some of her movies were worse than others. I thought Bad Girls Go To Hell had some nice touches, like when young woman meets the alcoholic. They tend to have twist endings even when it doesn't make sense.

I read an interview with her late in life. She was making a porno film. The interviewer asked her what she would do with it when it was done. She said she'd take it to a distributor, that she had worked in distribution so knowing where to take them was her strong point.

With that in mind, I suggested a film student I knew go into distribution. I assumed that making the movie itself was the easy part so focus on making connections with people who can help you make your money back. That's where filmmakers always get ripped off. If it got her terrible movies into distribution it seems like the way to go.