Put That in Your Bikini and Smoke It : FLYING THROUGH HOLLYWOOD BY THE SEAT OF MY PANTS By Sam Arkoff with Richard Trubo , (Birch Lane Press: $18.95; 253 pp.)

By Kenneth Turan

July 12, 1992 12 AM PT

Turan is The Times' film critic.

Shlock was so much simpler when Sam Arkoff was king of the hill. If you needed oozing blood, you used chocolate syrup. If you wanted a quick script, you asked your brother-in-law. If, as in the case of something called “The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes!,” your director ran out of money before managing to shoot the monster footage, you put 40 holes in a teakettle, ran steam through it and laughed all the way to the bank.

As co-chairman of American International Pictures, the mighty monarch of exploitation films, Sam Arkoff spent quite a bit of time at the bank, thank you very much. To take one of many examples, he produced “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” in six days for $100,000 and saw it earn more than $2 million in its first year alone. Tougher, smarter, more flexible than the heads of hidebound major studios, Arkoff also had a nose for what people wanted to see in the movies. “At AIP,” he proclaims in this, his autobiography, “we knew why and for whom we were making every picture.”

Actually, that was not quite so proud a boast as it may sound, for Arkoff made just about each and every one of his 500-odd pictures for the same bunch of movie-mad young people. “We didn’t invent the American teen-ager,” he says with atypical modesty, but AIP coined more money off them than anybody had ever dreamed possible.

Hard as it is to believe in this age of John Hughes and “Wayne’s World,” there was a time when the major studios felt the summer was only a so-so movie season and that young people didn’t really need a cinema of their own. It was Arkoff and his partner, James Nicholson, who first realized that “teen-agers need to get out of the house and be with kids their own age.” While perhaps not an insight of Newtonian proportions, this did turn out to be a discovery of such unforeseen and unsettling consequences for the movie business that one frankly doesn’t know whether to shake the man’s hand or think seriously about wringing his neck.

In many ways, Arkoff was an unlikely person to strike this kind of gold. Born in Ft. Dodge, Iowa, he was movie-struck as a teen-ager, but when he ended up in Hollywood, it was as an attorney. Then, at age 33, he was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage that put him in a coma for a week and left him with the determination to make his mark as quickly as possible. Producing films with titles like “The Amazing Colossal Man,” “It Conquered the World,” “Reform School Girl” and “Diary of a High School Bride” (all thought up by partner Nicholson), he soon did.

AIP not only came up with titles that wouldn’t quit, they were quicker and slicker than the lumbering studios in exploiting what they made. Ad campaigns were already in place before the movie was even filmed and there were many ingenious promotional ideas (for “Buckets of Blood,” one suggestion was that “paths of red drippings should lead from various strategic points of the city to your theater”). AIP was so adept at this end of the business that one theater owner suggested, “Why don’t you put sprocket holes in the posters and throw the movies away?”

Through it all, Arkoff tried never to veer from what he calls his No. 1 commandment: “Thou shalt not put too much money into any one picture.” What this meant in practice, as far as the acting and directing talent was concerned, was getting a second wind out of bleary veterans like Anna Sten, Peter Lorre and Vincent Price, working extensively with tireless penny-pinchers like Roger Corman, and giving talented young people like Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Towne, Nick Nolte and Don Johnson major exposure early in their careers.

The key element in Arkoff and AIP’s success, however, was an almost preternatural ability to sense not only when to switch genres but what genre to switch to. After teen-age horror played out, Arkoff went to Italy and bought action-adventure films like “Sign of the Gladiator,” of which Variety insisted, “The deepest thing about it is Anita Ekberg’s cleavage.”

After that came a baker’s dozen of full-color Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, followed quickly by kicky beach epics like “Beach Blanket Bingo” and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.” Inspired by the typically Arkoffian brainstorm that “it doesn’t hurt to show some girls in skimpy bathing suits,” the beach pics drew a stern rebuke from Walt Disney himself, who howled at Arkoff’s plan to use ex-Mouseketeer Annette Funicello: “Sam, what are you doing to my little girl?”

None of this is to suggest that Arkoff was always right. He did start the 1960s cycle of protest and rebellion films with “The Wild Angels,” but he backed out of the highly successful “Billy Jack” and lost out on “Easy Rider” when he felt queasy about having Dennis Hopper direct. And, after his biggest-grossing film ever, “The Amityville Horror,” he let himself in for his biggest heartache by agreeing to what turned out to be a fatal merger with Filmways.

Given all this, the sad news about “Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants” is that it is not as interesting as the man who nominally wrote it. Part of the problem is that too many of Arkoff’s stories turn out to have a ya-hadda-be-there quality. An elaborate tale about having to wake up Fats Domino has to make do with a flabby “Give me five minutes to get ready” for a punchline; ditto for the ballyhooed account of getting Federico Fellini to cut 10 minutes out of “Spirits of the Dead” (“Sure,” the director cheerfully replied).

More of a problem is that Arkoff’s collaborator, Richard Trubo, has not been able to come up with a compelling voice for his co-writer, making the man sound at best like a generic producer and at worst like an unflappable Rotarian. Maybe Arkoff, afraid of exposing too much conflict, put a lid on himself. Whatever the cause, it considerably hampers his book.

Still, you have to admire the old lion. “At AIP we were in the business of making pictures,” he growls near the end. “At times, it seems like the studios are in the business of making development deals.” Put that in your bikini and smoke it.

Richard Eder is on vacation.