So I made a thing called FREE, WHITE & 21. It was the first of the blaxploitation pictures. I had made other pictures before then, but you can almost forget them. You're talking about THE NAKED WITCH, which I made for $8,000 in color and 16mm. I made NAUGHTY DALLAS, in which we actually used clips of Jack Ruby, who would years later come to shoot Oswald. All kinds of weird things happened down there.

But I attribute my first feature with any real clout in the marketplace as FREE, WHITE & 21. It was in the spring of '63 and our film, which was made for $40,000 in black & white, was in the top ten grossing pictures in the U.S. for about four months. It was an incredible success for A.I.P. and they said, "Name your ticket. We need pictures. We want some cheap, fast, color pictures. We want half-ass names in them, and we want them now."

So we signed a contract for three at first. This went on to three more, and then three more. I did about nine to twelve of those. And inbetween those pictures I had a deal. I had a deal between a deal between a deal in which I could do my own "personal pictures." Things like, for example, STRAWBERRIES NEED RAIN, in which I defy you to tell that apart from a Bergman picture.

Now, I know that's a very specious, immodest statement. But I started out to prove something. I love to do these things. I said, "Look. I can take $5,000 and go into the German Hill country of Texas, where it looks like Sweden, and make a film with three characters. And I can put Ingmar's name on it and they'll accept it. We actually pulled it off. Now, of course later I put my name back on it after we got the distributi --

BF: You actually put Bergman's name on it?

LB: Absolutely. And we opened in an art house in Dallas, and all the SMU students came and raved about it. Of course the press was on it. I could not do that. It would be an illegal infringement. So I told them that it was nothing more than an experiment and that I would take it off after that engagement.

But, anyway, that's beside the point. That's a personal picture. I did several personal pictures. One was called HIGH YELLOW. Because I'd done so well with FREE, WHITE & 21, HIGH YELLOW was a picture about a young girl passing for white. So all of those pictures -- CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION, IT'S ALIVE -- by the way, mine was the first IT'S ALIVE. Larry Cohen came along later and made a thing called IT'S ALIVE, which of course did a whole lot better than we did. Then he made IT'S ALIVE 2. I don't sue people about anything, but I did have the first IT'S ALIVE.

BF: How much did those A.I.P. pictures cost to produce?

LB: They averaged, believe it or not, between $20 and $22,000, and that included John Agar, say, at $1,500 a week for three weeks. I never spent more than two weeks except on the Agar pictures.

On the Tommy Kirk pictures -- on IT'S ALIVE, for example -- we shot in a cave in Arkansas for seven days, for fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars, using fast 16mm Ektachrome. I never blew them up.

Some people saw IT CAME TO HOLLYWOOD. We got to talking at a gathering and very jokingly -- I had a drink in my hand, I think -- I said, "Well, I think I'm gonna take the best clips from all my pictures and make a film called IT CAME FROM HUNGER."

BF: I'll bet that if you put that out on video, it'd sell well.

LB: I honestly believe that. And now that my son Barry Buchanan has realized he's not going to make enough acting, he wants to try to learn to edit, so I think I'll put him to work.

There was an article in TV GUIDE that mentioned MARS NEEDS WOMEN twice as being on the BBC, and the guy who wrote it talked about the fact that England ran "The Fifty Worst Pictures of All Time," and he wound up loving MARS NEEDS WOMEN. He said he'd love to get it.

BF: What do you think of the Peter Wolf song ["Mars Needs Women," which was number one on the charts in its era -- Ed.]?

LB: I had fun listening to it. I think my sons would like it better than I do. I'm a folk musician, and made my living that way for a couple of years. But I love rock, such as Elton John.

As a matter of fact, the film... DOWN ON US, which is the story of the elimination, or just silencing, of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. It was all a conspiracy. We have all that on film.

BF: You're saying that it's true, there was a conspiracy?

LB: It's true. We can tell you now it's true. We couldn't tell you last year, but we can tell you now. It's true. The man who worked with us over the several years was the same man who helped me on THE TRIAL OF LEE HARVEY OSWALD.