The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a 1961

1961 in film

The year 1961 in film involved some significant events, with West Side Story winning 10 Academy Awards.-Top grossing films : After theatrical re-issue- Awards :Academy Awards:* Atlantis, the Lost ContinentB...

 nudie cutie sexploitation

Sexploitation

Sexploitation, or "sex-exploitation", describes a class of independently produced, low-budget feature films generally associated with the 1960s and serving largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and gratuitous nudity. The genre is a subgenre of exploitation films...

 film created by exploitation film

Exploitation film

Exploitation film is a type of film that is promoted by "exploiting" often lurid subject matter. The term "exploitation" is common in film marketing, used for all types of films to mean promotion or advertising. These films then need something to exploit, such as a big star, special effects, sex,...

makers Herschell Gordon Lewis

Herschell Gordon Lewis

Herschell Gordon Lewis is an American filmmaker, best known for creating the "splatter film" subgenre of horror...

 and David F. Friedman

David F. Friedman

David Frank Friedman was an American filmmaker and film producer.-Life and career:Friedman first became interested in entertainment after spending part of his childhood in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama, traveling carnival sites. He met exploitation film pioneer Kroger Babb during his stay in...

. The first of its kind to be filmed in color, the film starred comedian

Comedian

A comedian or comic is a person who seeks to entertain an audience, primarily by making them laugh. This might be through jokes or amusing situations, or acting a fool, as in slapstick, or employing prop comedy...

 Billy Falbo. It was unique for its time and genre, adding successful comedy to the nudity and sensationalist material.

History

The film was conceived by Lewis and Friedman when film distributor Alfred N. Sack offered the two $7000 to create a single-reel, "color 35mm film of cute girls carousing around with beach balls, or whatever." Upon learning of this reel, another distributor offered a deal to expand the film into a full-length feature film

Feature film

In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...

. The two spent around five hours writing the film, and, with Falbo, proceeded to film the movie over a four-day period in Chicago, Illinois.

Plot

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a series of vignettes featuring the title character, Lucky Pierre, in a series of unrelated storylines involving scantly-clad or nude women. Pierre, named after a childhood rhyme Friedman and Lewis remembered, would end up in a short segment where he encounters various naked women - for instance, in "Drive-In Me Crazy," Pierre attends a drive-in movie where the ticket taker and concession workers are all nude women who also appear in the film he's seeing. In another, Pierre, as a painter, has three nude women posing for him in a park, and another vignette had Pierre come upon two sunbathing women while birdwatching.

Reception

The film was a financial success, grossing over $12,000 in a single theater over a week's run upon opening and continued to enjoy financial success while avoiding the type of censorship previous exploitation films such as Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad is a feature-length 1945 film directed by William Beaudine, and largely produced by the exploitation filmmaker and presenter Kroger Babb. Mom and Dad is considered the most successful film within its genre of "sex hygiene" films...

faced. The film ushered in a new form of sexploitation film, the "nudie cutie," and Friedman, who worked with the American Film Institute

American Film Institute

The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...

 to catalog such films for them, estimated over 600 Pierre-style films were released between 1961 and 1970.

Legacy

The film has had a unique influence on popular culture, given the film's b-movie

B-movie

A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....

 status. Aiden Moffatt of Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 band Arab Strap

Arab Strap (band)

Arab Strap were an indie rock band from Scotland that consisted of core members Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton. The band were signed to independent record label Chemikal Underground, and split in 2006...

 released a solo album under the name "Lucky Pierre" in 2002, and novelist Robert Coover

Robert Coover

Robert Lowell Coover is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.-Life and works:...

 released a novel of the same name in 2002, about "the last of the great pornographic icons," in a plot similar to the film that inspired it.