Dwain Esper

Dwain Esper was probably the most obscure of the 'Hollywood hack' filmmakers of the 1930s alongside Victor Adamson, Robert J. Horner and others whom directed low-budget Westerns feature films and serials. Esper's film career was focused on softcore exploitation features which have a hard, merciless edge and a serial killer pathology. His films are too sick and mean-spirited to be guiltless kitsch and too weird to enjoy just for laughs. Born in Washington state in October 1893, Esper's pre-cinematic background, unsurprisingly, was in the tawdry underbelly of the early 20th century carnival circuit as a barker. But after receiving a film lab as part of a settlement, he had the same revelation that later would dawn on the owners of burlesque theaters as "nudie cutie" loops: talent could balk, show up late, or ask for more money, but a film runs uncomplainingly every time it's reeled up. With dollar signs dancing in their eyes, Esper and his wife, Hildegarde Stadie, moved to Los Angeles, California and immediately plunged feet first into the underground world of exploitation film making in Hollywood. Operating in a gray netherworld as divorced from the mainstream studio system as the underground film scene of the 1960s would later be, exploitation films back in the 1930s were pure sleaze masquerading as "education films" for an imperiled great unwashed that had a right to know about the sex menace, or the drug menace, or the white slave trade, or whatever invisible horror lurked at the perimeter of their domestic tranquility. Films like Reefer Madness (1936) (which Esper produced) played in grind-house theaters or at fly-by-night tent screenings, operating just outside the all-grasping influence of the Hays Code. It was this governing body of Hollywood censorship that prohibited film depiction of narcotic abuse, scantily dressed women, and explicit mention of sex-related indelicacies like syphilis or childbirth that were the exploitation film's stock in trade. Esper, like other exploitation directors, didn't care whether audiences left his films more enlightened about polarizing issues of the day. Esper's first feature film which he personally produced and directed was Narcotic (1933) which is a loosely fictionalized recount of Hildegarde Esper's uncle's descent into drug addiction is a sterling example of the incomprehensible hallmarks of Esper's style: stertorous dialogue, soundtrack music that stops and starts in sudden jumps, abrupt cutaways to barely relevant stock footage (usually of some atrocity) and a narrative so spotty you're convinced several reels went missing on the way to the projection booth. His next feature film, Maniac (1934) is a criminally perverse, very loose adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Black Cat" involving grave robbing, murder, impersonation, human psychosis, animal mutilation, along with brief snipes of topless female nudity. Esper continued directing and exhibiting films until the late 1940s, even picking up films like Tod Browning's cult classic Freaks (1932) for reissue on the exploitation circuit after it bombed at the box office. One of his last films was a sleazy 1948 documentary titled 'Hitler's Strange Love Life' which was re-titled 'Conform or Die'. Esper also personally traveled across the country to finance and promote his own films. People who worked with Esper used to describe him as "one of the greatest con men" they ever encountered. He would routinely swindle friends and enemies alike for a quick and easy dollar and then invite them over to his house for dinner to charm them into not suing him. His films often played in out-of-the way movie houses either from Catholic conservative New England states to Mob-controlled Chicago where no other exploitation films had ever been shown to the public. He ran afoul of the law numerous times for obscenity charges, but was never tried or convicted because of either using his charisma charm or just plain sheer luck. While his drug hysteria films like Marihuana became popular stoner midnight movie fare in the 1960s, little is known about his later years. He sold his studio and production company to the Sonney family in 1948 and then retired from film making for good having already become quite wealthy from the profits earned from his films and lived the rest of his life out of the spotlight. He died on October 18, 1982 at a hospital in San Diego following complications after surgery at age 89. But opuses like 'Maniac' and 'Narcotic' are, with a little sleuthing, still easy to obtain, thanks to an ironic twist of copyright law: every film created by Dwain Esper, the guy who went into movie making just to make a buck, is now in the royalty-free public domain.