A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Lost Prairie, Texas, USA
Born:
January 31, 1921
Died:
December 2, 2004
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Larry Buchanan (born Marcus Larry Seale Jr.) (January 31, 1923 – December 2, 2004) was a film director, producer and writer, who proclaimed himself a "schlockmeister". Many of his titles have landed on "worst movie" lists, but all at least broke even and many made a profit. Buchanan was born in Mexia, Texas. He was orphaned as a baby, and was raised in Dallas in an orphanage. It was while growing up there that he became fascinated with the movies which were shown in the orphanage's theater. He considered becoming a minister, but visited Hollywood and landed a job in the props department at 20th Century Fox. He made movies for the United States Army Signal Corps during World War II. In the early 1950s, Buchanan began producing, writing, editing and acting in his own movies. The first was The Cowboy in 1951. He is perhaps best known for exploitation, science fiction, and other genre films, including Free, White and 21, High Yellow, The Naked Witch, The Loch Ness Horror, and Mistress of the Apes. Among Buchanan's work, eight direct-to-television films he wrote, produced, and directed under his own Azalea Films production entity in the mid- and late-1960s, for American International Pictures, still generate a good degree of fan adoration. The titles — The Eye Creatures, Zontar, The Thing from Venus, Creature of Destruction, Mars Needs Women, In the Year 2889, Curse of the Swamp Creature, Hell Raiders, and It's Alive! — were largely remakes of AIP films from a decade earlier. Buchanan's instructions from AIP were We want cheap color pictures, we want half-assed names in them, we want them eighty minutes long and we want them now. In 1964, Buchanan created The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, which presented an alternate history in which John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald both survived Kennedy's assassination. In 1984 he produced Down on Us, which charged that the United States government was responsible for the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. Buchanan's autobiography is entitled It Came from Hunger: Tales of a Cinema Schlockmeister. After he died in 2004 in Tucson, a long obituary in the New York Times summarized his work thus: "One quality united Mr. Buchanan's diverse output: It was not so much that his films were bad; they were deeply, dazzlingly, unrepentantly bad. His work called to mind a famous line from H. L. Mencken, who, describing President Warren G. Harding's prose, said, 'It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.'" Description above from the Wikipedia article Larry Buchanan, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Cinematography:
1951 The Cowboy
Creator:
1951 The Cowboy
1968 The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde
Director:
1951 The Cowboy
1952 Grubstake
1960 The Naked Witch
1961 Common Law Wife
1963 Free, White and 21
1964 Naughty Dallas
1964 The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
1964 Under Age
1965 High Yellow
1967 Creature of Destruction
1967 Sam
1967 The Eye Creatures
1967 Zontar: The Thing from Venus
1968 Comanche Crossing
1968 Curse of the Swamp Creature
1968 Mars Needs Women
1968 The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde
1969 Hell Raiders
1969 In the Year 2889
1969 It's Alive
1970 A Bullet for Pretty Boy
1971 Strawberries Need Rain
1976 Goodbye, Norma Jean
1978 Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell
1979 Mistress of the Apes
1981 The Loch Ness Horror
1984 Down on Us
1989 Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn
Editor:
1951 The Cowboy
1952 Grubstake
1960 The Naked Witch
1961 Common Law Wife
1963 Free, White and 21
1964 Naughty Dallas
1964 The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
1964 Under Age
1965 High Yellow
1967 Creature of Destruction
1967 Sam
1967 The Eye Creatures
1967 Zontar: The Thing from Venus
1968 Comanche Crossing
1968 Curse of the Swamp Creature
1968 Mars Needs Women
1968 The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde
1969 Hell Raiders
1969 In the Year 2889
1969 It's Alive
1969 Sex and the Animals
1970 A Bullet for Pretty Boy
1971 Strawberries Need Rain
1976 Goodbye, Norma Jean
1978 Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell
1979 Mistress of the Apes
1981 The Loch Ness Horror
1984 Down on Us
1989 Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn
Producer:
1951 The Cowboy
1952 Grubstake
1960 The Naked Witch
1961 Common Law Wife
1963 Free, White and 21
1964 Naughty Dallas
1964 The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
1964 Under Age
1965 High Yellow
1967 Creature of Destruction
1967 Sam
1967 The Eye Creatures
1967 Zontar: The Thing from Venus
1968 Comanche Crossing
1968 Curse of the Swamp Creature
1968 Mars Needs Women
1968 The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde
1969 Hell Raiders
1969 In the Year 2889
1969 It's Alive
1969 Sex and the Animals
1970 A Bullet for Pretty Boy
1971 Strawberries Need Rain
1976 Goodbye, Norma Jean
1978 Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell
1979 Mistress of the Apes
1981 The Loch Ness Horror
1984 Down on Us
1989 Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn
Screenplay:
1951 The Cowboy
1952 Grubstake
1960 The Naked Witch
1961 Common Law Wife
1963 Free, White and 21
1964 Naughty Dallas
1964 The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
1964 Under Age
1965 High Yellow
1967 Creature of Destruction
1967 Sam
1967 The Eye Creatures
1967 Zontar: The Thing from Venus
1968 Comanche Crossing
1968 Curse of the Swamp Creature
1968 Mars Needs Women
1968 The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde
1969 Hell Raiders
1969 In the Year 2889
1969 It's Alive
1969 Sex and the Animals
1970 A Bullet for Pretty Boy
1971 Strawberries Need Rain
1976 Goodbye, Norma Jean
1978 Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell
1979 Mistress of the Apes
1981 The Loch Ness Horror
1984 Down on Us
1989 Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn
Story:
1951 The Cowboy
1952 Grubstake
1960 The Naked Witch
1961 Common Law Wife
1963 Free, White and 21
1964 Naughty Dallas
1964 The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
1964 Under Age
1965 High Yellow
1967 Creature of Destruction
1967 Sam
1967 The Eye Creatures
1967 Zontar: The Thing from Venus
1968 Comanche Crossing
1968 Curse of the Swamp Creature
1968 Mars Needs Women
1968 The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde
1969 Hell Raiders
1969 In the Year 2889
1969 It's Alive
1969 Sex and the Animals
1970 A Bullet for Pretty Boy
1971 Strawberries Need Rain
1976 Goodbye, Norma Jean
1978 Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell
1979 Mistress of the Apes
1981 The Loch Ness Horror
1984 Down on Us
1989 Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn
Writer:
1951 The Cowboy
1952 Grubstake
1960 The Naked Witch
1961 Common Law Wife
1963 Free, White and 21
1964 Naughty Dallas
1964 The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
1964 Under Age
1965 High Yellow
1967 Creature of Destruction
1967 Sam
1967 The Eye Creatures
1967 Zontar: The Thing from Venus
1968 Comanche Crossing
1968 Curse of the Swamp Creature
1968 Mars Needs Women
1968 The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde
1969 Hell Raiders
1969 In the Year 2889
1969 It's Alive
1969 Sex and the Animals
1970 A Bullet for Pretty Boy
1971 Strawberries Need Rain
1976 Goodbye, Norma Jean
1978 Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell
1979 Mistress of the Apes
1981 The Loch Ness Horror
1984 Down on Us
1989 Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.