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Melissa Starker, Creative Content & PR Manager
Jul 02, 2019
"That was the movie we were told would make us go to hell. They would sell sex education literature at the movie. I learned from all that; I used all that."—John Waters in Esquire on Mom and Dad
The July film series Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture highlights saucy low-budget movies made by independent studios in the 1930s and '40s, when the Hollywood studios were under the heavy censorship of the Motion Picture Production Code. Kicking it off this Friday, July 5, is one of the biggest indie hits of all time: Mom and Dad, directed by William Beaudine and produced by Wilmington, Ohio native Howard W. "Kroger" Babb. And the story of how the movie spent over a decade racking up box office profits is a master class in old-school showmanship.
Made for $65,000 and released near the end of World War II, Mom and Dad is a classic example of the "sex hygiene" genre, a term coopted from social progressives who'd been advocating for sex education in schools since the early 20th century. Mom and Dad tells the story of Joan, a high school girl who goes all the way with her boyfriend and lives to regret it. Short, graphic films depicting actual childbirth and the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases were folded into the narrative to add an "educational" element—and to try, not always successfully, to slide the film past local censorship boards.
The promise of daring subject matter was a draw on its own, but Babb also went above and beyond the standard promotional campaign to lure viewers. According to a Library of Congress essay on the film, he had publicists work each screening location in advance. Prints of the film were accompanied by a live lecturer to speak on the evils of premarital sex. Nurses (or actresses playing nurses) stationed in theater lobbies with cots (presumably for faint-of-heart audience members) would sell booklets full of not-necessarily reliable information about pregnancy and STDs. Of course, Babb produced the booklets himself to supplement the profits from ticket sales. (We'll have replicas on sale in the Wex Store for Friday's screening.)
Newspaper ad for the premiere of Mom and Dad in Kroger Babb's hometown of Wilmington, Ohio. The variety of local businesses that worked the film into their own ads include insurance companies, car dealerships, and dry cleaners.
In its heyday, Mom and Dad had 300 prints touring the country. For some engagements, audiences were segregated by gender—the same tactic used for years by school systems to teach students about the facts of life—to appease censor boards. Babb also hired an all African-American publicity unit to accompany the film to theaters in predominantly black communities. And in another move to keep the censors at bay, Babb also toured an edited version that cut out the medical footage, for towns with stricter community standards.
Babb's all-out approach worked like a charm. Modern estimates put the film's total gross between $40 and $100 million, and it toured theaters around the country through the 1950s. Soon after, studios got back into the business of sex with the breakdown of the studio system and the Production Code.
