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The emergence of the double-bill in the 1930s created a divide between A-pictures and B-pictures as theaters typically screened packages featuring one of each. With the former considered more prestigious because of their larger budgets and more popular actors, the lower-budgeted Bs served largely as a support mechanism to A-films of the major studios-most of which also owned the theater chains in which movies were shown. When a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court antitrust ruling severed ownership of theaters from the studios, the B-movie soon became a different entity in the wake of profound changes to the corporate organization and production methods of the major Hollywood studios.InThe Battle for the Bs, Blair Davis analyzes how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking at a time when many in Hollywood had abandoned the Bs. Made by newly formed independent companies, 1950s B-movies took advantage of changing demographic patterns to fashion innovative marketing approaches. They established such genre cycles as science fiction and teen-oriented films (thinkDestination MoonandI Was a Teenage Werewolf) well before the major studios and also contributed to the emergence of the movement now known as underground cinema. Although frequently proving to be multimillion-dollar box-office draws by the end of the decade, the Bs existed in opposition to the cinematic mainstream in the 1950s and created a legacy that was passed on to independent filmmakers in the decades to come.

A Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses is an outrageously rollicking account of the life and career of Roger Corman-one of the most prolific and successful independent producers, directors, and writers of all time, and self-proclaimed king of the B movie. As told by Corman himself and graduates of \"The Corman Film School,\" including Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, and Martin Scorsese, this comprehensive oral history takes readers behind the scenes of more than six decades of American cinema, as now-legendary directors and actors candidly unspool recollections of working with Corman, continually one-upping one another with tales of the years before their big breaks. Crab Monsters is supplemented with dozens of full-color reproductions of classic Corman movie posters; behind-the-scenes photographs and ephemera (many taken from Corman's personal archive); and critical essays on Corman's most daring films-including The Intruder, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Big Doll House- that make the case for Corman as an artist like no other. Praise for Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: \"This new coffee table book, brimming with outrageous stills from many of Corman's hundreds of films, looks at the wild career of the starmaker who was largely responsible for so much of the Hollywood we know today.\" -New York Post \"Vividly illustrated.\" -People \"An enthusiastic ode to colorful, seat-of-your-pants filmmaking, this one's hard to beat.\" -Booklist (starred review) \"It includes in-depth aesthetic appreciations of ten of Corman's movies, which, taken together, make a compelling case for Corman as an artist.\" -Hollywood.com \"Author Nashawaty deftly describes how Corman's legacy is far more nuanced than most realize.\" -American Way magazine \"Outrageously entertaining . . .\"A -Parade magazine \"Endlessly fascinating.\" -PopMatters.com \"You'd think it'd be impossible for any writer to put together a Roger Corman biography that's anywhere near as fun as his movies, but Entertainment Weekly writer/critic Chris Nashawaty has done just that.\"A -Complex magazine

The development of efficient electrochemical seawater splitting catalysts for large-scale hydrogen production is of great importance. In this work, we report an amorphous Co-Mo-B film on Ni foam (Co-Mo-B/NF) via a facile one-step electrodeposition process. Such amorphous Co-Mo-B/NF possesses superior activity with a small overpotential of 199 mV at 100 mA cm−2 for a hydrogen evolution reaction in alkaline seawater. Notably, Co-Mo-B/NF also maintains excellent stability for at least 24 h under alkaline seawater electrolysis.

Death of the Mogulsis a detailed assessment of the last days of the \"rulers of film.\" Wheeler Winston Dixon examines the careers of such moguls as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Herbert J. Yates at Republic in the dying days of their once-mighty empires. He asserts that the sheer force of personality and business acumen displayed by these moguls made the studios successful; their deaths or departures hastened the studios' collapse. Almost none had a plan for leadership succession; they simply couldn't imagine a world in which they didn't reign supreme. Covering 20th Century-Fox, Selznick International Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Columbia Pictures, Dixon briefly introduces the studios and their respective bosses in the late 1940s, just before the collapse, then chronicles the last productions from the studios and their eventual demise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, which made actors free agents; the Consent Decree, which forced the studios to get rid of their theaters; how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the television era; and the end of the conventional studio assembly line, where producers had rosters of directors, writers, and actors under their command.Complemented by rare, behind-the-scenes stills,Death of the Mogulsis a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors as television, the de Havilland decision, and the Consent Decree forced studios to slash payrolls, make the shift to color, 3D, and CinemaScope in desperate last-ditch efforts to save their kingdoms. The aftermath for some was the final switch to television production and, in some cases, the distribution of independent film.

Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for Detour, often considered the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of fellow Austrian and German émigré directors like Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak, and spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films frequently overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg sheds new light on little-known details of Ulmer's personal life and his wide-ranging, eclectic films: features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the United States and abroad. As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmer's fortunes, Isenberg shows that Ulmer's unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more illustrious colleagues, advancing a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.