Friedman first became interested in entertainment after spending part of his childhood in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama, traveling carnival sites.
Examples of Friedman's roughies are The Defilers (1965),[1] The Lustful Turk (1968), The Head Mistress (1968) and The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hide (1971, directed by Byron Mabe).
He was also the producer of two of the first Nazi exploitation films, Love Camp 7 (1969)[3] and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1974), for which he wouldn't use his real name and was credited as Herman Traeger.
[6] In the early 1990s Seattle's Something Weird Video, owned by Mike Vraney, started to re-issue much of Friedman's work on videocassette, getting him the attention of a new generation of exploitation and b-movie collectors.
In 2000 Friedman was featured alongside cult filmmakers Roger Corman, Doris Wishman, Harry Novak and others in the documentary SCHLOCK!