Many of his extremely low-budget films have landed on "worst movie" lists or in the public domain, but all at least broke even and many made a profit.
He played some bit parts in movies, and the studio gave him the stage name "Larry Buchanan", which he used for his entire career.
[5] In the early 1950s, Buchanan began producing, directing, writing, editing, and acting in his own low budget movies.
Buchanan is perhaps best known for exploitation, science fiction, and other genre films, including Free, White and 21 (1963), The Naked Witch (1964, made for $8,000), High Yellow (1965), A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970), Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976), Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell (1977), Mistress of the Apes (1979), The Loch Ness Horror (1981) and Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn (1989).
In 1984 he produced Down on Us, which charged that the U.S. government was responsible for the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.
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.