THEY PUT SHOW IN ROADSHOW : At 92, He’s Still Grinding ‘Em Out

Roy Reid, 92 and still active in low-budget moviemaking, makes no pretense at being a roadshow auteur.

“There’s never been any of our pictures out for an Oscar, and if any of them were ever found at a film festival, it was pure accident. ‘Damaged Goods,’ ‘High School Girl,’ ‘Narcotic’ and the rest of our library were made for one purpose: to sell tickets. And they did just that.”

It’s been 70 years since Reid has been in the business. Today, he lives in a modest El Monte home with his second wife. And if his days of hawking peek-a-boo screen fare from the trunk of a Reo, Terraplane or Cadillac are over, his career isn’t (in fact, he declined to be photographed for this article, not wanting to be lumped in with retirees).

He pulled up to his Hollywood office in a beat-up eight-cylinder Classic Chevy, and took his visitor into a back room filled with editing machines, splicing tables and dozens of neatly labeled film cans. After viewing some documentary footage of gangster activity from the ‘30s and ‘40s (recently discovered in a shipping depot’s junk pile) through his Moviola, he said, “Great stuff. I’ll throw in some scenes of my ‘Vanishing Gangsters,’ a shot or two from ‘True Gang Murders’ and it’ll zing. I’ll call it ‘Violent Years.’ A helluva good title, don’t you think?” (He’s trying now to make a feature film using both vintage documentary and feature footage.)

Reid, who crisscrossed the country dozens of times as a roadshow firebrand, has recently been involved in editing and dubbing martial arts films from Korea, China and Hong Kong.

He no longer works in sex exploitation films “because everyone’s in it today--even Disney.”

Reid thinks that many good, big-budget films fail at the box office “is because they’ve overlooked the basics. First they have to know they are selling competitive entertainment, TV still its biggest rival. Split skulls and bare behinds are not enough to get the customer away from ‘Dallas’ and ‘Love Boat.’ Today’s marketplace is sophisticated, but the gimmicks we discovered with ‘Confessions of a Vice Baron’ and other roadshow hits could still be adapted successfully: out-of-the-ordinary subject matter, plenty of tease, garish posters and a good title.

“More important,” he said, “is the sell.”