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The Cool and the Crazy

The Cool and the Crazy
Coolandcrazy58.jpg
Directed by William Witney
Produced by Elmer C. Rhoden Jr.
Written by Richard C. Sarafian
Starring Scott Marlowe
Richard Bakalyan
Gigi Perreau
Music by Raoul Kraushaar
Dave Kahn (uncredited)
Cinematography Harry Birch
Edited by Helene Turner
Distributed by American International Pictures
(AIP)
Release date
  • 1958 (1958)
Running time
78 minutes
Country United States
Language English

The Cool and the Crazy is a 1958 motion picture that was distributed by American-International Pictures as a double feature with Dragstrip Riot. It stars Scott Marlowe and Gigi Perreau.

The producer of the film, Elmer Rhoden Jr., was president of the Kansas City, Missouri-based Commonwealth Theaters, a prominent chain of motion picture theaters with stretched through Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Back in 1956, Rhoden Jr. had seen that teenagers were the best new audience for films (as television was drawing most adults out of theaters), and had come up with the idea of starting his own small film complex in Kansas City to produce low-budget teen exploitation films for these audiences, primarily for showing in drive-in theaters. Already, such teen films as Rebel Without a Cause, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and Rock Around the Clock had been huge successes.

With $45,000 raised with the help of local businessmen, Rhoden Jr. hired Kansas City filmmaker Robert Altman to make the juvenile delinquency melodrama The Delinquents, which was sold to United Artists and released in 1957, grossing $1,000,000 and also firmly establishing Altman as a film director.

After the success of The Delinquents, Rhoden Jr. put up about $170,000 for a second film in Kansas City. Rhoden Jr. began with thinking up a title and nothing else (The Cool and the Crazy) and, because Altman was directing television shows in Hollywood, Rhoden Jr. hired Kansas City writer and a friend of Altman's - Richard C. Sarafian - to write the screenplay for the film.


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