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"This September, Spectacle Theater is honored to present this once-in-a-lifetime retrospective of the work of renowned independent filmmaker, Stephanie Rothman. Though often labeled as an exploitation filmmaker, Rothman’s work stands as some of the most politically and socially astute works documenting the period of transition between 1960s and 70s America.
"Rothman got her start in the early 1960s working as an assistant to Roger Corman, tasked with performing a variety of odd jobs on his productions that ranged from casting and location scouting to re-writing and editing scenes. This experience would eventually land Rothman in the director’s chair on a couple of mid-60s Corman releases: Conducting reshoots on BLOOD BATH (for which she shares directorial credit with Jack Hill), and making her solo directorial debut with the beach party film, IT’S A BIKINI WORLD.
"It wasn’t until the early 1970s, though, that Rothman would break out with her work on THE STUDENT NURSES (1970) and THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1972) for Corman’s newly-established production and distribution company, New World Pictures. With few opportunities available to woman directors at the time, Rothman was relegated to making exploitation films with a high volume of sexual content. Despite this, and with the creative freedom afforded to her at New World, Rothman was able to suffuse these works with her own ideological positions and ethics, incorporating plots— and by extension, her own commentary— that openly tackled issues of abortion, drug use, immigration, policing, and sexual empowerment; issues directly relevant to contemporary audiences but that largely absent from major studio productions.
"Rothman and her husband, fellow Corman alum, Charles S. Swartz, would eventually leave New World to establish Dimension Pictures alongside Lawrence Woolner, where she continued her streak of progressively-minded productions with GROUP MARRIAGE (1973), TERMINAL ISLAND (1973), and THE WORKING GIRLS (1974). Each of these works expanded the scope of her films’ social politics further, now incorporating topics of queerness, sex work, polyamory, domestic abuse, incarceration, and capital punishment.
"Rothman struggled to find work with major studios after leaving Dimension Pictures in 1975, discovering, rather ironically, that she had been stigmatized by her earlier exploitation-adjacent work, despite the obvious filmmaking talent behind them. Regrettably, Rothman wound up leaving the industry less than a decade later, though the legacy of her filmmaking career, its cultural relevance and its importance in the history of women’s filmmaking labor, endures to this day.
"Join us on Sunday, 9/17 for a remote Q&A with Stephanie Rothman following a special screening of her final film, THE WORKING GIRLS." —Spectacle Theater