Stephanie Rothman

)[2] "It was rare for anyone who did not have family connections to find employment in the film industry, in or outside of the jurisdiction of the labor unions", recalled Rothman later.

"[3] Rothman worked in a variety of jobs for Corman, on films such as Beach Ball (1965), Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), and Queen of Blood (1966).

Rothman: I did everything: write new scenes, scout locations, cast actors, direct new sequences and edit final cuts.

But he did share his greater experience with me, giving me useful criticism and, equally important, information on how to efficiently organize work on the set so that a film could be shot on schedule.

Her work impressed Corman enough to give her her first full directing job on It's a Bikini World (shot in 1965 but not released until 1967), which he financed.

Although an exploitation movie, Rothman was given creative freedom to explore political and social issues which interested her such as abortion and immigration.

[1]Rothman turned down Corman's offer to make both a sequel to Student Nurses and a woman in prison film, The Big Doll House (1971)[6] because she was not enthusiastic about either project.

"[1] Rothman directed three films for Dimension, Group Marriage (1973), Terminal Island (1973) and The Working Girls (1974).

She also wrote the script for Beyond Atlantis (1973), supervised the re-editing of The Sins of Adam and Eve for the US market, and had creative input on Sweet Sugar.

[5] The films that Rothman directed – Group Marriage in particular – placed emphasis on female as well as male desire.

Rothman stated in a 1973 interview that: I'm very tired of the whole tradition in western art in which women are always presented nude and men aren't.

But I certainly am going to undress men, and the result is probably a more healthy environment, because one group of people presenting another in a vulnerable, weaker, more servile position is always distorted.

[9]Film director and historian Fred Olen Ray later claimed that the best movies made by Dimension were the in-house productions from Rothman and Swartz.

Furthermore, I had to show up to the limit of what was allowed in an R-rated film (i.e., no pubic hair, no genitals, no simulated intercourse), which looks quite tame by today's standards, but wasn't at the time.

I had good agents and together we tried very hard to get me work, but we repeatedly discovered I was stigmatized by the films I had made.

The irony was that I made them in order to prove that I had the skills to make more ambitious films, but no one would give me the chance.

No one told me directly, but I often learned indirectly that this was the decisive reason why many producers wouldn't agree to meet me.

We're getting a new script ready for a first time director who we want to use and we were talking about the fact that we would like it to be a vampire film.

She says, "for a few years I ran a small proto-union for a group of University of California professors, doing their lobbying and writing a political newsletter about labor issues of concern to them.

"[3] However her movies have come to receive much critical appraisal, particularly from feminist writers such as Pam Cook and Claire Johnson.

Cook stated that: Rothman often parodied the codes of exploitation genres to expose their roots in male fantasies and so undermine them, and it is this use of formal play to subvert male myths of women that has interested some feminists and that, it has been argued, places Rothman's work inside the tradition of women's counter cinema.

[16]Terry Curtis Fox stated that: Without stretching a point too greatly, one can see the influence of this feminism in such recurrent Rothman themes as the reorganization of society and the extension of options to otherwise disenfranchised individuals.

A classic liberal, Rothman states her themes wholly in terms of disparate individuals whose needs propel them to make a common bond.

More than anything else (and perhaps even more commercially damning than working in restrictive genres), Rothman's films are contemporary comedies of manners, centered around attitudes, around the way that style serves as both an expression of and a screen for meaning.

[4]In addition, Rothman also used her movies to comment on social issues of their time, like abortion in The Student Nurses.

I have always enjoyed writing and directing comedy– I was, in fact, more comfortable working in a comic idiom than a dramatic one–and so I also used comedy to modulate a scene's tone.

Visual style and comic invention were my personal salvation or... the "special opportunity" to escape what troubled me about the exploitation genre.