His career has been an anomaly in Hollywood. He has been called everything from ‘the King of the B’s to ‘the Pope of Pop Cinema’¬ directing over 50 low-budget independent movies and producing and/or distributing another 250 for his own companies. Although, he worked primarily outside the Hollywood system, he became one of the most commercially successful filmmakers in Hollywood's history. While there’s a tradition in Hollywood that no one sees profits on a movie no matter what the box office, he has seen profits on probably 280 of those 300-odd films, many of them produced at breakneck speed using meagre resources. While his sheer productivity would be notable, it’s the films that really matter, and he's assembled a consistently smart, entertaining body of work that stands apart in the ranks of exploitation films. Despite their low budgets, his films have been shown at prestigious festivals, and he was the youngest director to have retrospectives at the Cinemacheque Française in Paris, the National Film Theatre in London, and the Museum of Modern Are in New York. While he produced R-raced exploitation films through the 1970s, he also imported distinguished art films by Bergman, Fellini and Truffauc - five of which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. A virtual one-man American Film Institute, this former ‘King of the Drive-Ins’ merits our esteem both for his own body of work and for giving first opportunities to much of the top talent in Hollywood today.