Legendary movie producer David F. Friedman died today, February 14th, aged 87.

It's no exaggeration to say that Friedman was one of the most important figures ever to work in exploitation cinema. He was a pioneer of the nudie film and the splatter movie, and in the 1970's headed up the Adult Film Association of America. Without his work, the catalogues of companies like Something Weird - and quite possibly the entire US adult industry - would be a lot smaller.

Friedman came to movie making from his childhood fascination with carnival life - back in the 1940's, an alternative exhibition circuit was evolving for low budget exploiters that featured teasing nudity, drugs, baby birth scenes and other shocking content that was strictly forbidden in mainstream American cinema, with films shown by hucksters who kept one step ahead of the law. Having first worked with the notorious Kroger Babb (who's Mom and Dad was packing them in across the country), Friedman really made his mark when he teamed up with Herschell Gordon Lewis to make The Adventures of Lucky Pierre - one of the first nudie-cutie movies. The pair produced several more films in similar style before noticing that the market was becoming flooded. Needing a new gimmick, they hit on the idea of gore, and so pretty much invented the splatter movie in 1963 with Blood Feast.

After two more gore films (Two Thousand Maniacs and Color Me Blood Red), the pair split up, and Friedman spent the rest of the decade producing various adult movies - from gritty roughies like The Defilers to soft porn like Starlet and Trader Hornee- as well as oddities like the sideshow-themed horror film She Freak. He also appeared in the infamous Love Camp 7 in 1967, and the success of the film would later inspire him to produce Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS in 1973 (the only one of his films he denied involvement in for many years!).

Friedman was a master of promotion - "selling the sizzle, not the steak" as he put it, with epic trailers and incredible posters plastered with breathless straplines - Thar She Blows was promoted as 'An Adult Story of MEN and WOMEN who GO DOWN to the sea in ships!' that was 'wet and wild and wooly'! Yet many of his films delivered on the promise, making them hugely entertaining even today.

By the mid 1970's, Friedman reluctantly moved into hardcore production. The lack of tease didn't appeal to the old salesman, but nevertheless, his films include some of the best of the period - Seven Into Snowy, Chorus Call, The Budding of Brie and his last hurrah, the semi-autobiographical Matinee Idol, where he also appeared as a thinly disguised version of himself.

The first volume of his autobiography, A Youth in Babylon, was published in the late 1980s (sadly the second part remains uncompleted), as fresh interest in his work was prompted by the new wave of exploitation fanzines. I interviewed him in 1988 for Sheer Filth, and he was a great supporter of the scene - several times, I received packages of rare promotional material from his classic movies out of the blue. In those later years, he appeared in documentaries like Sex and Buttered Popcorn and Mau Mau Sex Sex, and in 2002, he finally re-teamed with Lewis for Blood Feast 2.

His death marks the end of an era. The film world is a much duller place without The Mighty Monarch of the Exploiation Film World in it.