Ted Bonnit and Eddie Muller have followed in the footsteps of these charming and aged Sexploiters and not only made a film about their ingenious successes in the industry but also used the film to create some grand successes of their own.

This pastiche interview is built of pieces from a discussion Ted had with me (available in podcast) and the public discussion held by the Director Ted Bonnitt and Producer Eddie Muller, following the Yerba Buena Center Screening, Wednesday, December 7th, 2005.

Dan Sonney and David Friedman are exploitation film producers. I noticed that little credit was given to the directors. Blood Feast, for example, is usually credited as H.G. Lewis' work.Why no mention of Hershel Gordon Lewis?

Ted: Hershel is in one of the photos in the film. If we had to do it all over again, we would have continued that pan of the Blood Feast poster and show his whole goddamned name. Eddie and I made a conscious editorial decision that there was no way we could do justice to the whole genre of exploitation film.

About two years before we shot anything, I spoke to my musician friend Eddie Baytos, and I said ‘we're not going to have a narrator, the music has to drive them through because I felt like if these people can't adequately tell their own life stories then why am I doing the movie? This is anecdotal. The footage and the music drive the momentum of the film from start to finish and in the process it was like "if there's no Hershel moment, there's no Herschel moment." I wouldn't have cut away if there had been a place for it but it just never came up.

How did you get involved in the history of exploitation film? Or would it be more correct for me to ask how you got to know Dan Sonney and David Friendman?

Ted: I came at it [the subject of the film] through a fascination with elders. I found two American treasures. Eddie was an expert in the genre and I think that's what made it interesting: the joining of our separate angles. Because we were doing a profile of two individuals, we felt if we made mention of anyone other than the two men, we would then be doing injustice to anyone we don't, open a huge can of worms and what we neglected to mention was that Hershel Gordon Lewis was the director of most of these pictures.

Eddie: Dwayne Esper was mentioned but only as an aside and it was a great time for it to come up. We didn't have that opportunity with Hershel. We also didn't have a narrator. We didn't feel like these men took their films seriously, so why should we? The last thing we wanted was to have a stuffy UCLA professor discussing the social implications of these films.

Ted: First we shot the carnival and then we shot Dan alone and Dave was coming up for his annual trip to L.A. and for the car trip - really just 3 hours - they were old guys and they didn't have battery power to outlast the camera. Every 20 minutes we had to stop the car for them to pee. And we wanted to show that. It was important that we had fun with it. It was their humor that got me off and I wanted their "joi de vivre" to come through in their life stories. 

How did you get involved in the history of exploitation film? Or would it be more correct for me to ask how you got to know Dan Sonney and David Friendman?

Eddie: The first book I ever published was called Grind house: the Forbidden World of Adult's Only Cinema and the first talks we had about the film were from this historical approach. From that angle, the whole thing got to be unwieldy. And then we got the idea we should focus on these two guys and their relationship and how odd it is to see these charming likeable guys and see their work.

Ted: One of my favorite moments in the film is after you've met these guys, you see their lives, you see they've been married to the same women for all these years, you're on their side and then there's a transition and Dave starts talking about Blood Feast and it's like "what do you think of them now?" I really enjoyed that. It is kind of a challenge and it offended us. We weren't' trying to whitewash things. We were really dedicated to being non-judgmental.

We began, Eddie and I, to handle the two guys. He worked with Dave and I became friends with Dan Sonney. And I stayed friends with him too; we played cards up until he died. We played cards every week and that was sweet. It was just a great ride; like having a grandfather again. It's amazing to know someone so old who's so cool. We really hit it off. So Eddie went to Dave's house to get Dave ready and I went over to Dan's house in the Valley to pick him up for this drive to Dave's hotel. And before we got there I took Dan aside and said, "Dan, I just want you to know we've got the information we need in the interviews and this part is really about you two commiserating and going over your pasts together and seeing your chemistry. What I'm really getting at is, Dan, if you feel the urge, go ahead and fuck with him." And after that he just looked at me, gave me along pause and then said, "uh... okay".

After we did the vault scene and I met Vraney, I knew the film wasn't going to work unless I got the footage and Vraney had it. And I had no deal with Vraney. When we started, I called him and I said to Mike Vraney, "I'm making a film with these two men and you have their pictures and I'd like to use them, it would be good for the both of us" and he said "I don't care. I'm gonna charge $500 a second and I don't give a shit what you do with it." And I didn't get angry. I just let it go. So I decided to shoot the movie because the guys wanted to be ‘preserved' and I got really close to Rosy Sonney, Dan's daughter, who was my biggest booster. She wanted us to make the movie because she wanted to get her dad off her back because he was bored. I told Dan "you know we can't really make this film without the footage from your pictures" and once Dan vouched for us Vraney figured out we were legitimate and gave us a fair deal. In the end it was a deal for 15 minutes but we ended up using 20 and it was all part and parcel.

This film was one of the first to use a number technologies we consider industry standard now.

Ted: This film was shot on an XL1, the first model XL1 in 1998 and they said you couldn't shoot a film on it; they called it "a toy". And then we wanted to edit on Final Cut One and they said that we couldn't use that either because it was a toy too. And now they are all industry standards. We weren't the first ones but we were early using Final Cut One because they still didn't have basic ability to do feature work and we had to come up with the physical alga rhythm to get it [the edited footage] out of the program.

Eddie:  Ted sort of conned Apple out of a copy at a trade show and we got it home and, at three o'clock in the morning had to figure out how it worked. So there we were, calling tech support in the middle of the night and they finally told us... "When you figure it out call us because we'd like to put it in the manual."

Ted: Then we had one of the first digital features to sell and I was like "what do we do with it". I had to knock on doors and ask "do you have digital projection" and they would say "no". And I didn't want to spend $40,000 dollars to get a lousy film print made - I couldn't afford it. So I knew I had to lean on the digital, it had no stars and no budget. Though it does have sex in the title twice and that's made it a big hit on the Internet. Though a great number of our web guests are looking for action not independent cinema. It did make it interesting selling the film to theatres.

Fortunately film lovers usually run independent movie houses and they didn't know me but they knew Dave and they loved him. So, I knew that was going to play a hand in the publicity. We really did the theatrical release to get quotes on the box art. So the question was: "How can we play major theaters with no money?" Technology had been on our side that far. All we did was shoot 17 hours of footage in 5 days and we had a movie. It was always sort of a lark. We didn't know if we'd ever see our money back and didn't know how much it would end up costing us. I was in this situation where I had run through some festivals and made tapes of our film and sent the screeners to theatres in Philly, in Baltimore, here in SF, and theatre owners just said "okay" and it was so great but they couldn't show it. And no one could afford to spend $500 a day to rent a projector and a playback machine. So I was at this trade show in Las Vegas and I saw this box with a lens on it. It was an early video projector by Sharp and it had a handle on it and I looked at it like it was Aladdin's lamp. It was a prototype. And I said to the trade showman "This is for Independent film!" and he said, "What's independent film?" And I took one and tested it at the Cinemateque with a Beta SP of the film and it worked and at this conference of commercial theatre owners and they said it looked viable.

So I called Sharp Corp. in New Jersey and it turned out the guy who I got on the phone was from my home town and we were like instant buddies and he said "it's funny you called because this morning I said 3 words to my marketing department, I said ‘get me Hollywood!' and here you are calling!" He asked how many I needed and I said 2 and the next day I had 2 $10,000 projectors on my doorstep. So what I did was I called these theatres that wanted to book us and I said, "I'll send you the movie" and they said, "but I can't afford a playback" and I said "do you have a DVD player at home?" and they said "yes" and I said, "I'll send you this projector" and they said "cool". And that's how it went. Theatres traditionally, even the big boys, they do a 65/35 house split. House gets 65% and distributor gets 35%. So when I called, I said "isn't part of that 65% a facilitation fee? And didn't I just loan you a projector for my film, thus facilitating the screening?" I made deals with the theatre owners where all they had to do was pay the shipping on the projector, which was like $70 and they got the film, a 35mm trailer, ad slicks, other publicity media, the DVD and directions on how to plug their DVD player from home into the projector. As a result, and certainly not by design, Mau Mau Sex Sex became the first film to be distributed on DVD.

Schlock: the Secret History of American Movies came out in 2001, the same year your film did. What relation did Mau Mau Sex Sex have to Schlock? Were you in cahoots? Was it in the wind? 

Ted: I actually don't know anything about that film.

Eddie: We weren't even aware of it. The real long ago genesis of this, back in SF in 1981, I had a friend who was a projectionist at the Center Theatre on Market - a porn theatre - and he said "come down here and bring a car with a big truck" and it turned out he had found this treasure trove of old publicity material for these exploitation films that played the Center, I guess, before it was a porn theatre. And that was my first step as a social archeologist, per se. We found posters and lobby cards from Maniac and Wages of Sin and Narcotic and Girls from the Street and I had no idea what this stuff was. The Center theatre was actually like the major head quarters for the sex film business on the west coast. It's a 3-floor building: the first floor is the theatre, the second is the business offices and the top floor is this incredible party room. It's got a huge bar and all this stuff, and you can't even think what was going on in that place in 1934. And while that was really fascinating in 1990, there were very few people around the country who were actually studying this stuff and it all kind of happened simultaneously. Kind of like Dave meeting Mike Vraney opening the vaults, there were a few people who were young and who could do something with the information. Eric Schaeffer, at Duke University started his masters' thesis on the history of the Sexploitation Industry. I started my book Grindhouse at about that time and my meeting Dave in Las Vegas was what sealed the deal. A lot of books started being written all at the same time and research in SF did a book called Incredibly Strange Films and it was like a cultural zeitgeist happened and everyone was working on the same thing.

Ted: We were lucky because we caught Dan and Dave at a moment in their lives where they were willing to talk. If we had reached them 10 years earlier, they might not have been so open. I wanted to capture them before they were gone and we got them when they were perfectly ripe on the vine. If we had even waited half a year, Dan wouldn't have been walking anymore. We were really lucky in our timing.

I moved down from NY after I'd worked for 10 years on this radio show, playing a character I made up who was this unscrupulous talent agent. And it was my life for like 10 years and when I came out I met Eddie through an interesting serendipity and he gave me his book Grindhouse and that got me really into Friedman so I read his book. And I knew 80-90% of it was bullshit but what really turned me on was that this guy was like the embodiment of this character who I'd been living through for the past 10 years, except he was funnier and far more imaginative than I ever could have been. And I felt like I knew him. After we talked to him I felt like we needed to find his compliment and we needed to meet this Dan Sonney but I was afraid. I'd heard he was a real mean son of a bitch. And when I was working at NBC I had this friend who said she had told her landlord about my film and said her landlord had been in that business too. And I said, "who is he?" and she said "Dan Sonney" and I was like "Dan Sonney's your landlord?" and then she told me that he wanted to meet me and I said "really?" and she said..."no, now. He's over here Now" and I that's how I met Dan. He found me. Walking to the apartment I was afraid, I had heard these stories but walking through that door, I saw his smile and it was like love at first sight! We totally melted together and he said, "If Rosy wants me to do it, I'll do it" and it was like the Universe was telling us "Do the movie! What else do you need us to put in your lap, just do the movie"!

Dan and Dave are available through GreenCine's Video on Demand Service, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's 80 minutes of love.