American International Pictures

Since we're in the first full week of a new month, we're going to be getting a new Star of the Month on TCM (that's coming tomorrow), and a new monthly spotlight. That spotlight starts tonight and continues every Thursday this month, looking at American International Pictures.

AIP is the company that brought us a lot of cheap horror films, especially the ones that made Vincent Price nearly synonymous with horror movies, never mind that Price had had a pretty good first half of his career in non-horror movies like Laura and Leave Her to Heaven. AIP also made many of the beach movies of the 1960s which were a popular genre at the time. TCM will be showing Beach Party in a couple of weeks; it doesn't look as though Beach Blanket Bingo is on the schedule.

According to TCM's page, the spotlight is going to be presented by producer Roger Corman, who helped create many of AIP's iconic movies. Corman turned 90 last month and is apparently still going strong; I think I saw him on one of the pieces TCM ran from the recent TCM Film Festival.