Keeping Abreast: The Films of Stephanie Rothman

Magnificent shots of the Pacific Ocean and Southern California beaches recur throughout the films of Stephanie Rothman. And her singular oeuvre is, fittingly, the product of two overlapping, cresting waves: second-wave feminism and second-wave exploitation. As feminists were addressing women’s unequal position in the workplace, imbalances in the domestic sphere, and reproductive rights, exploitation films made during the late 1960s through to the mid-’70s were capitalizing on the era’s youthquake and its seismic shifts in sexual mores. Rothman, a former tutee of B-movie maestro Roger Corman—and a stealth utopian—was one of the very few women making exploitation pictures at this time. While her six solo-directed features, released between 1967 and 1974, are filled with the sex and violence mandated by genre, many of them earnestly promote a host of progressive ideas: above all, about women’s bodily and sexual autonomy. “What I do with my own body is my business,” one protagonist proclaims in The Student Nurses (1970). “My sex life is my business,” declares a frustrated job seeker in The Working Girls (1974). Although tits and ass are bared quickly and frequently in Rothman’s work, her movies are never business as usual.

Born in 1936, Rothman studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California in the early ’60s; while enrolled in that graduate program, she became the first woman to receive the Directors Guild of America fellowship. She began working in 1964 as an assistant to Corman, who was then a honcho at American International Pictures. Her responsibilities expanded to shooting some original footage for a beatnik gore-fest called Blood Bath (1966), for which she shared director’s credit with Jack Hill (whose later movies would establish Pam Grier as the queen of blaxploitation). Impressed by Rothman’s work, Corman partially financed her first lone directorial effort, It’s a Bikini World (1967), one of the final entries in the beach-party genre, which she cowrote with Charles S. Swartz, her husband and frequent collaborator (and another Corman vet).

Produced and distributed by Corman’s New World Pictures, The Student Nurses, Rothman’s second feature, evinces her signature style (lush cinematography belying a minuscule budget, agile choreographing of ensemble casts) and themes (distaff camaraderie, radical ideas). The movie follows four leggy, idealistic caregivers-in-training sharing an apartment in Los Angeles—where one of them will undergo an abortion, a remarkable sequence in a film that premiered three years before Roe v. Wade. 

New World Pictures also released The Velvet Vampire (1971), an outlier in the Rothman corpus; it focuses not on female solidarity but a lady bloodsucker who lures a married couple to her lair and seduces them both. Owing to the exceptionally wretched acting by those who portray the ravaged husband and wife, The Velvet Vampire may rank as Rothman’s most excruciating film. Yet its visual brilliance—lysergic dream sequences that seem art-directed by de Chirico, for instance—more than compensates for the inept performing. In a 2010 interview, Rothman herself rued the compromises necessitated by the requisite nudity and sex in her films: “Because of these scenes I also had to cast very attractive people, which meant that sometimes I couldn’t cast the best actors, which I considered a very serious constraint then, and which continues to disturb me even now.” While it’s true that many performers in her movies—several of whom have filmographies that do not extend past the late ’70s—lack professional polish, some are able to mask this deficit with innate charm.

The ménage à trois in The Velvet Vampire is doubled in Group Marriage (1972), one of the first films from Dimension Pictures, the production and distribution company that Rothman and Swartz helped establish, which would also release her next two (and final) features: Terminal Island (1973) and The Working Girls. A romantic comedy written by Rothman, Swartz, and Richard Walter, Group Marriage concerns a sextet of straights determined to live outside heteropatriarchal norms. Complementing this sanguine sociopolitical aim is the sun-kissed splendor of two of the film’s main locations: the Pacific Palisades and LA County beaches. Rothman, who moved to Los Angeles as a child, stands as one of the finest chroniclers of SoCal’s elysian light and scenery, natural elements that always seem to promise transcendence. Significantly, this romantic comedy advances ideas about multi-partner relationships in good faith, in marked contrast to Paul Mazursky’s uptight, immensely successful Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969).

A squabbling live-in couple, Sander (Solomon Sturges) and Chris (Aimee Eccles), form the nucleus from which the film’s polycule will develop. She is an employee of a rental-car company and a genius at diagnosing automobile troubles. Her mechanical skills upend gendered stereotypes; played by an Asian actress, Chris is also spared racial ones. Sander operates a bumper-sticker business specializing in anhedonic slogans. “Sex is a bore,” announces one—a sentiment reflecting his own grumpy disposition and the core of Chris’s dissatisfaction with their bed-death-plagued relationship.

But their acrimonious home life changes when Dennis (Jeff Pomerantz), a probation officer Chris meets by chance, stays the night at their place and becomes her lover. Chris explains the situation to her peeved boyfriend with utmost equanimity, typifying the film’s nonsensational approach to its subject matter: “Sander, I love you. But I like Dennis.” Sander’s libido returns when he is introduced to Jan (Victoria Vetri), Dennis’s romantic partner of some years. The quartet grows to include Phil (Zack Taylor), a lifeguard going through a divorce; he, in turn, invites Elaine (Claudia Jennings), a lawyer, to join their polyamorous arrangement. 

Although Group Marriage emphasizes the ideal aspects of this free-loving household—the men and women engaged in home repairs side by side; their promise to Chris, after she announces she’s pregnant, to raise the baby together—it does not shy away from presenting its difficulties. Chris is consumed with jealousy when Sander and Jan first pair off. The notorious sixsome is besieged by obscene phone calls and vandalism from the poly-phobic. After a Molotov cocktail is tossed onto their yard, Elaine suggests to her erotic cohort that they all tie the knot together. “We ought to be able to lead our lives the way we want.” That such an act is illegal is precisely the point. “We’ll make it a test case. We’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to,” the attorney insists. 

These heterosexuals aren’t the only ones saying “I do.” Also exchanging vows—43 years before gay marriage was legally recognized by all 50 states—during the group’s elaborate beachfront wedding are Rodney (Bill Striglos) and Randy (John McMurtry), the nelly neighbors of Chris, Sander, et al. One person from the hexad, though, has refused to walk down the aisle. Any kind of marriage is too confining for Jan. “I gotta be free,” she insists—a line that could stand as the credo for any of Rothman’s female protagonists.

A much more fundamental freedom is at stake in Terminal Island, written by Rothman, Swartz, and James Barnett—a film that boldly imagines not only the abolition of prisons but a new way of harmonious living altogether. Taking its name from the isolated land mass where, after the death penalty has been declared unconstitutional, California now sends criminals convicted of first-degree murder, this taut carceral thriller focuses on the four women inmates on the cay trying to liberate themselves from sexual slavery. Following a prologue sending up the cynicism of TV-news programmers who are planning a segment on the island, the film tracks the latest arrival to the abject atoll: Carmen (Ena Hartman), an Angela Davis surrogate. She and the other femme prisoners—Lee (Marta Kristen), a Weather Underground–type insurrectionist; Joy (Phyllis Davis), who killed her husband; and Bunny (Barbara Leigh, also in The Student Nurses), rendered mute ever since she committed double parricide—are vastly outnumbered by the men, whom they must service nightly. 

Their sororal ties take some time to form. Lee, Joy, and Bunny impassively look on as Carmen is brutalized by Monk (Roger E. Mosley), second-in-command to Manson-like caudillo Bobby (Sean Kenney); later, the women will get into petty skirmishes about sleeping arrangements. But once they are kidnapped—or are they rescued?—by a breakaway faction of male prisoners led by more enlightened A.J. (Don Marshall), they join forces both within and across gender lines to overthrow maniacal Bobby. 

Treated as equals, the women consensually engage in sex with the men in A.J.’s gang (soon to include a physician played by Magnum, P.I.’s Tom Selleck). Their sisterhood is powerful—and it can kill. Lee identifies niter in the wild and concocts DIY grenades to detonate Bobby’s camp; Carmen harvests plants that can be boiled down to the lethal curare that will lay waste to members of his brigade. The male-female alliance triumphs. Terminal Island—which begins as a dystopian saga, filled with far more brutality than in any other Rothman movie—concludes as an Edenic vision of an egalitarian, collectivized, off-the-grid compound; even onetime enemies are brought into the fold. The real prison now exists on the mainland, still mired in sclerotic customs and codes. On this once-forsaken key, a new social order thrives.

A collective ethos also animates The Working Girls, for which Rothman was the sole screenwriter. Although not as utopian as many of her films—neither matrimonial bonds nor society at large is reenvisioned—it highlights the ties formed by three young women sharing an apartment in LA’s Venice neighborhood as an exercise in mutual aid. Elfin newcomer Honey—played by Sarah Kennedy, a poor (wo)man’s Goldie Hawn but just as winning— arrives in town with only a backpack. Dead-broke but determined to get a job, Honey quickly finds a place to stay when she meets Denise (Laurie Rose), who invites the waif to crash at the place she shares with Jill (Lynn Guthrie). While Honey pounds the pavement, turned away from one office gig after another, Denise and Jill resign themselves to the compromises they’ve made to pay the rent: the former, an artist whose large canvases adorn the flat, toils as a sign painter; the latter, a law student who aspires to be a judge, has just started work as a cocktail waitress at The Tiger’s Tail, a strip club.

Inevitably, Jill advances from taking drink orders to taking off her clothes on the advice of The Tiger’s Tail headlining attraction, Katya (Cassandra Peterson, later to become the cult-horror luminary Elvira, Mistress of the Dark). The ecdysiast performances of Katya and Jill are filmed lovingly, playfully—the former often in full shot, all of her undulations and thrusts on fabulous display—part of the film’s emphasis on the female characters’ body and sexual confidence. (And it should be noted that a naked beefy guy, a model for Denise, appears early in The Working Girls, long before any woman shows her breasts. Rothman firmly believed in equal-opportunity nudity.) 

Honey finally lands a job, as an assistant of sorts to a millionaire crackpot. Thanks to an investment tip she gives her employer, she nets 60k in cash, for which she has grand socialist plans: “I could start a business and give people jobs. And everyone could own equal shares and there would be no bosses.” But her altruism starts much closer to home. She leaves two bags of twenties for her roomies, who have to vacate their building, before heading out to parts unknown, last seen hitching a ride by the Pacific. 

As Rothman’s swan song, The Working Girls might be viewed as her lament for her own career blocks in the film industry; Alicia Kozma, in her 2022 book, The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, deems the movie the director’s “most melancholic.” By the end,  none of the women have quite arrived: Denise is still painting signs, Jill is now managing The Tiger’s Tail but is years, if not decades, away from a potential judgeship, and Honey is chasing a dream.

“Something must be out there waiting for me,” Honey says in voiceover as The Working Girls concludes. Sadly, nothing was waiting for Rothman. Unlike Corman’s male protégés—most notably Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich—she was never given the opportunity to advance from exploitation films to “legitimate” cinema. As she explained in that same 2010 interview: “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. Then there was the other reason, the so-called elephant in the room: I was a woman. 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.” The parity between men and women that Rothman’s films envisaged would escape their maker. But, following her utopian instincts, we can, at the very least, imagine the films Rothman might have made with more money, more access—more freedom from genre decrees.

Melissa Anderson is a contributing editor and columnist at Film Comment and formerly the film editor and lead film critic at 4Columns. Her collection The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024 is available from Film Desk Books and her monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.