IVORY BASTARDS

Guido K. Schultz
(1920-1978)



	Schultz on the set of "Groundhog Flay" (1967), where he sat silently in the corner with a .357 magnum. Legend has it, this was a common 'film producing' technique for him.

Born as Guido Karl Famiglietti on August 24, 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Rocco Famiglietti, was a protégé of Guglielmo Marconi and met Schultz’s mother, Heidi Braun, who was a daughter of Karl Ferdinand Braun who shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marconi. Forced to marry after a brief courtship the couple moved to from Bologna, Italy to America where Rocco took a research position at Yale.

The marriage was a tempestuous one. Although well-educated in her own right, Heidi was forced to remain a frustrated house-bound mother and assumed the task of teaching Guido personally when he proved to be too advanced for public school and too ethnic for any private schools of the time.

When not learning he would go to the movies with his mother, which they attended nearly daily, crime stories and thrillers being particular favorites. Friendless and shy, the movies became a refuge for Guido.

At around the age of 10, Heidi developed a serious drinking problem. She and Rocco fought constantly. It was during this period of time that Rocco began to take more a spiteful interest in his son, claiming that he would turn Guido around from the awkward and timid boy he was. Rocco brought the boy to boxing matches, horse races, cock fights and other misguided attempts at "manly" pursuits.

Enjoying this exposure to a world only known to him through pulp magazines and film, coupled with a sudden growth spurt, young Guido began to come out of his shell. He began to venture on the train to New York City by himself on afternoons and weekends, under the guise of a part-time job. According to an interview given in 1977, Guido said that it was at this time that he had sex with his first prostitute, at around age 14.

His mother’s alcoholism worsened, as did his parents’ marriage. In the winter of 1936, Heidi took her own life with a lethal dose of sleeping pills. Less than two months after her death, Rocco told his son that he would be leaving to go back to Italy along with a Yale colleague he revealed to be seeing for the past eight years. Guido refused to go, furious at his father’s callous abandonment of the memory of his dead wife. He renounced his father, giving up his last name for the maiden name of his maternal grandmother. It is not known why he did not assume his mother’s maiden name.

Schultz moved to the Astoria section of the borough of Queens in New York City. He found various day jobs working as a messenger boy, grocer’s assistant and various menial manual jobs. On nights and weekends, he would work at area theaters either as a stagehand or usher.

In the winter of 1942 he was drafted into the Army. He was trained at Ft. Benning, Georgia and served as a translator because of his fluency of his parent’s native languages of Italian and German. Upon his return to the states after the war, Schultz returned to New York City, where he became a union projectionist for Loew’s Egyptian Theater in Midtown Manhattan. It was here that he gained the first of his understanding of, and passion for, the movie business.

Desiring to break in, he began to write unsolicited spec scripts for Silvercup Studios in Brooklyn. Recognizing that he had some talent, and was willing to work cheaply, Schultz was hired to punch-up previously contracted scripts. His work made its way into many low-budget, yet profitable, films of the time, including some by Rouben Mamoulian and Raoul Walsh.

Seeing the writing on the wall for the East Coast film industry, Schultz packed up for Los Angeles. Unfortunately for him, post-WWII saw a glut of like-minded people trying for a break in the film industry and even his respectable credentials as a script doctor garnered him little work. He took day work as a fuel driver and spent his nights again working as a projectionist for the La Brea Palladium Theater.

It was here in 1948 that he met Jerzy Czajak, owner and distributor for Star Grove Pictures. It was his friendship with this traveling movie man that introduced Schultz to the business end of the industry. His enthusiasm and curiosity led Jerzy to hire on Schultz as an assistant. It was during this time that Schultz learned the basics of his future business.

Schultz traveled from city to city in what was known as the ‘Chili Circuit". In bringing B-movies to area towns, he would be responsible for the advance promotions, media placement, and ticket sales of the films he shopped around. He learned many of the tricks of the trade, such as sequential merchandise tie-ins, local testimonial ads and "re-booking" where he would take films that underperformed in one area and re-title it with an ear toward a different prurient interest. Success at his job depended upon knowledge of the audience, a willingness to deal with salacious – nearly pornographic – material and a ruthless efficiency. Schultz excelled at all of this.

It was during this time that he met Inez Alvarado, a scenic painter from San Diego. After a four year courtship, Schultz and Inez married in January of 1956. Later that year, he assumed control of Star Grove Pictures after the retirement of Jerzy Czajak, renaming it Schultz K. Schultz Distribution.

Schultz relished the role of boss and he expanded the business, taking on new employees. He became much more forceful in his distribution deals and expanded the business to institute what eventually became known as the "Enchilada Circuit" which distributed films to townships with heavy Mexican migrant populations. Bringing in films from Mexico City, he would rent out barns or storage houses in which to display his films. He also came up with the "reverse drive-in" where he would drive short films on 16mm to labor camps and project the films on a screen he would set up on the back of a truck.

Schultz stumbled upon an unlikely vein of success by taking low-budget children’s fantasy films from Mexico and re-dubbing them for American audiences. Playing solely at matinees or at roller rinks these films provided a new revenue stream for the company. Schultz’s unintentionally hilarious dubbing for these films secured them "cult" status for years to come, some of his most notorious being "Hansel and Gretel vs. The Killer Robots", "The Naked Brain", "Candy Werewolves" and "Hansel and Gretel vs. Billy the Kid".

In 1961, Schultz and Inez were expecting their first child. Unfortunately, Inez and child both died in childbirth in early August. Schultz was inconsolable, throwing himself both into his work and, eventually, into vice. He started drinking heavily and eventually developed a voracious mescaline habit. Even though he willingly succumbed to the lure of the hallucinogens, the business didn’t suffer much as he shrewdly left most of the day to day business to appointed staff, instead indulging his habits and sometimes leaving work for up to weeks at a time.

It was during this period that he developed a strange fixation on competing film director/distributor William Castle. Known for his cheap, yet effective promotional stunts, Castle developed a very lucrative formula for high-return publicity. Declaring that he would take down "that schlock Kraut", he started in on an eye-for-an-eye gimmick campaign to gain as much attention as possible.

When Castle issued life-insurance policies for anyone who died of fright while watching "Macabre", Schultz retaliated with hired prostitutes dressed as nurses to dote on customers in "Recovery Corner" during showings of "Freak Ville". When Castle utilized shocking buzzers hidden in theater seats during his release of "The Tingler", Schultz introduced minute levels of phenobarbitol into the concession’s draft sodas to promote sluggishness and a dream-like state during showings of "The Hypno-Beast". When Castle introduced "Emergo" for "The House on Haunted Hill" (wherein a skeleton would fly out on a wire when a skeleton was revealed on screen), Schultz introduced "FistoVision" for "Behind You!" (wherein local vagrants were hired to hide under the seats and punch anyone they wanted).

The rivalry – which William Castle was unaware even existed – came to a head when Gudo challenged the son of the mayor of La Jolla, California to a public duel in an effort to promote "Fatties Attack!". Schultz was arrested for disturbing the peace and served two weeks in city lockup.

In late 1962 he disappeared for two months solid. Staff only received two cryptic telegrams during this period, one referring mostly to the poetry of Kurt Schwitters and another praising the TV show "Green Acres". In mid-January of 1963 Schultz returned, proclaimed himself clean and sober and off "the junk". He fired all of his male staff and brought on a full staff of figure models, former dance hall girls and aspiring starlets. Ironically, business did not flag as his new staff was well experienced with exploitation in show business.

Aware of the increasing multi-culturalism of southern California, and feeling he could do no wrong based on his prior success, Schultz decided to take on the "Won Ton Circuit" after the success of the English language version of Godzilla and other recent Asian imports. This would prove to be his near undoing as the fiercely protective Asian film distributors, already entrenched with this market, declared war on Guido K. Schultz and firebombed his house. Taking the hint, Schultz turned back toward his steady markets.

The desire to expand still burgeoned within Schulz, however, and after surveying the American landscape he decided that the new frontier lie in the rapid expansion of cable television which was just beginning to take a mainstream expansion. In 1973 he opened Guido K. Schultz Syndication.

He took a similar approach with TV as he did with film. Focusing on a formula of volume sales with cheaper deals, Schultz targeted cable companies and low-power UHF stations that couldn’t afford local-origination programming nor prime first-run syndication deals. Bringing in dubbed, imported shows from across the world, Schultz would provide inexpensive slot-fillers that attracted art-house crowds, college students and foreign residents.

Schultz was unable to secure purchase for a single one of his imported shows. His trip to Mexico netted him three series: Cocktails and Recriminations, a melodramatic telenovela, Cattle Ranch 2000, a macho drama about cattle rustlers, and Ivory Bastards. Unfortunately, his formula for success in the world of film distribution did not translate to television. After nearly a year of shopping the series from town to town with a syndication contract in hand, not one television station expressed any interest. Fustrated by the experience, Schultz had all prints of the three dubbed series destroyed and vowed never to work in television again.

Angered at his inability to realize new success, lonely since the death of his wife Inez and no longer excited with his business, Schultz abruptly closed up shop. He sold his home and his warehouse and decided to return to New York City. He opened a peep club just off of Times Square and lived a relatively quiet life.

An upswell of support of "trash culture" in the mid-seventies led to a new audience discovering his work. After a New York Times interview with John Waters for the release of "Desperate Living" reported him citing Schultz’s distributed film "Panic in the Fudge Factory" as a favorite film, art-theaters and colleges organized showings and retrospectives of his films. Schultz would be asked to come and appear at these showings and was occasionally interviewed in underground film magazines.

Giddy at the newfound notoriety, Schultz would appear to some of these speaking engagements absolutely smashed or coked to the gills. Obligatory five-minute intros to film showings would turn into hour-long diatribes about the film industry and television syndication, and he would sometimes have to be forcibly removed from the stage. In Parsippany, New Jersey, he was arrested for crapping in a theater lobby after another ejection from his own speaking engagement.

In February of 1978 he married a Filipino stripper named Lula. And divorced her three weeks later. In May of 1978, Guido K. Schultz was found dead in the bathroom of the Port Authority Terminal, having suffered a heart attack after loudly threatening a man he believed to be a homosexual hitting on him. He was 58 years young.