For three decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s, American International Pictures (AIP) supplied America's drive-ins and movie theatres with cult favorites such as It Conquered the World, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Beach Blanket Bingo, and The Pit and the Pendulum. The studio not only made the movies that the younger generation wanted to see, but it also helped to create the stars of the future. AIP gave directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorcese their first jobs, and cast actors such as Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Peter Fonda in their first movies. Hollywood had always made "B" movies, but no one made them as fast or with as much enthusiastic abandon as AIP. With miniscule budgets, ten or fifteen-day shooting schedules, recycled sets, and churned-out screenplays, AIP changed the way movies were made by creating a...