It was almost exactly 20 years ago that I drove to Anniston, Alabama, to spend a day with Dave Friedman. The following profile, written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was pegged to the release of Dave’s autobiographical A Youth in Babylon. I had a hell of a good time hanging out with “The Kingly Quack of the Iridescent Dream,” and this archival post is offered as a tribute. Dave died Monday at the age of 87. Heaven just got a little sleazier.

Hoisting a Bloody Mary that faintly radiates Tabasco, a calculated chuckle filling the room, David F. Friedman greets the afternoon with a sly twinkle in his eye.

“No one,” he declares, echoing writer H.L. Mencken, “ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

Least of all Mr. Friedman, whose notions of what would appeal to common folk often sank below gutter level. And once there, he raked in boffo box office.

The self-anointed “Hitchcock of Exploitation,” Mr. Friedman, 67, is one of the cinema’s canniest con men. The producer of “Blood Feast,” “She Freak” and three dozen similar movies, the avuncular Alabamian has trafficked Grade-F epics of comedic sleaze, dime-store carnage and wink-of-the-eye titillation.

“Dave’s particular genius is that he always knows what will offend the greatest number of people at any given time,” says Joe Bob Briggs, a syndicated drive-in movie critic in Dallas. “Whether it’s nudist camp movies, gore movies, Nazi torture-camp movies or the immortal `Scum of the Earth,’ Dave knows exactly what kind of movie will drive your mama crazy.”

Retired to his native Anniston after a life in the celluloid sin trade, Mr. Friedman tells all in his colorful new autobiography, “A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King” (Prometheus, $19.95).

It’s the picaresque saga of an America gone by, a nation of medicine shows and carnival follies, tent revivals and burlesque tease. In that more innocent time, drive-ins were big, and the biggest drive-in draws were a natural outgrowth of geek-and-girlie shows: lurid, sensational films that promised cheap thrills and supple feminine forms.

Thirty years later, in the age of tabloid TV and direct-to-video porn, it’s difficult to imagine traffic jams being caused by the likes of “Daughter of the Sun,” a Friedman nudist-camp spectacular from 1959. Nonetheless, the producer says, with a sideshow barker’s flourish, “These are the pictures that shocked your fathers and your grandfathers and sent ‘em out talking!”

As a boy, Dave Friedman craved a life in the circus, a natural thing for the son of a Birmingham newspaperman whose home always was open to touring carnival agents. “I would listen, mesmerized, to tall tales told by such viceroys of verbosities . . . about giraffe-necked women of Burma . . . unimaginable human freaks of nature . . . gorgeous girls, trained tigers,” he writes. “By the time I was 7, I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.”

Mr. Friedman’s fascination with the big top is evident in his hilltop estate outside Anniston. The walls of Chez Friedman are dotted with circus memorabilia, his oak-lined study is a virtual museum of movie arcana with leering poster art from films such as “Trader Hornee – The movie that BROKE the law of the jungle!” The soundtrack is provided by Lolita and Big Louie, squawking exotic birds that he and his wife, Carol, have owned for years.

Now stout and gray-haired, Mr. Friedman accents his conversation for dramatic emphasis, slipping with ease from aw-shucks bumpkin to the grandiloquence of a Confederate colonel.

“I’ve always liked this town,” he says of Anniston, where he returned in 1988 after 27 years of traffic and smog in Los Angeles. “It’s a nice, quiet, easy place to live.”

In a way, it was Uncle Sam who gave Mr. Friedman his start in the exploitation film business. As a member of the Army Signal Corps during World War II, he screened venereal disease reels for GIs at bases across the South. “These big tough guys from Brooklyn see these VD shots and they pass out like flies,” he recalls with a chortle.

The bad seeds were sown. Discharged from the service in 1946, Mr. Friedman couldn’t stay away from show biz. He briefly flirted with becoming an amusement park manager in Phenix City, Ala.

“It was so wide open, you couldn’t even believe it,” he says. “The games were all gaffed, the sucker didn’t have a chance. I checked into this little hotel, two rooms that they used for traveling guys, the other eight rooms they had 24-hour hookers in there. And these soldier boys from Fort Benning were lined up morning, noon and night. I thought, well, this is not for me.”

Mr. Friedman left and took a job as a publicist for Paramount. The work took him to Atlanta, Charlotte, New York, Chicago and endless points in between, hyping movies, escorting stars such as Rosalind Russell and Bob Hope, always looking for new ways to generate a headline.

It was good practice for an experience that would prove formative: a job as a roadshow man touring the country with “Mom and Dad,” a ’50s “birth-of-a-baby” stunner and a classic example of exploitation film.

What was exploitation?

“You had to have subject matter that the majors could not or would not touch,” Mr. Friedman explains. “So you made pictures about dope, you made pictures about roadhouses, you made pictures about abortion, you made any of the forbidden subjects.”

While it lasted, exploitation was a dream racket for roadshow men. Instead of selling snake oil, they peddled movies, working a circuit of independent exhibitors unhindered by Hollywood or the prohibitive Hays Code, the precursor of today’s rating system.

“We could go through these towns like a dose of salts, milk ‘em, get out of town before the cops came, go on to the next town carrying the films ourselves, put up the posters and do the big ballyhoo,” Mr. Friedman says.

In the 1940s and early ’50s, the ballyhoo revolved around “Mom and Dad” and similar movies – “Because of Eve,” “The Story of Bob and Sally,” “Street Corner” – that probed the mysteries and origins of human reproduction and capitalized on Eisenhower-era gullability.

The films were sold as educational, a smokescreen tone of moral advisement to fool censors. Screenings usually were followed by a lecture by an “eminent sexual hygiene” expert: a fast-talking roadshowman with an Anglo-Saxon pseudonym (“Eliot Forbes,” say) who was really touting $1 sex-ed pamphlets full of purloined carnal knowledge.

“This book was actually nothing more than a reprint of stuff that came from the public health service,” Mr. Friedman admits. “But in those days there were no Playboys, there were no X-rated movies. And to show a birth of a baby was considered very, very daring.”

After all this time, “Mom and Dad” is the producer’s only venture to offend Carol, his high school sweetheart and wife of 40 years. “She thought [it] was a terrible scam!” he says. His later, more sexually explicit movies never bothered her, though. “She thought some of them were quite funny.”

Not that she will say so. Mrs. Friedman, a former vice president of the Los Angeles Audubon Society, steers clear of media inquiries, politely insisting, “I don’t get discussed.”

As the gray-flannel ’50s gave way to the tie-dye ’60s, friskier exploitation fare resulted. Along with colleagues Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis, Mr. Friedman helped launch the nudie-cutie genre.

It started when they recast the formats of popular European imports as low-comic skinflicks. Thus the portly, Chaplineqesue hero of Jacques Tati’s classic “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” became the randy buffoon of Mr. Friedman’s “The Adventures of Lucky Pierre.” Shot in a few days in Chicago, “Pierre” cost a mere $7,500. It grossed more than $100,000.

“Innocuous little things,” Mr. Friedman calls nudie-cuties. He often scripted their pun-laden dialogue and made cameo appearances, exaggerating his Southern drawl. His voice drops a notch as he recites the purple prose that served as advertising copy:

“Thar She Blows”: a story of men and women who go down to the sea in ships aboard a 100-foot twin screw cruiser!

“The Erotic Adventures of Zorro”: The first movie rated Z!

“Adam and Eve”: Millions spent on production, not one dime for costumes!

Censorship was less a problem than a publicity opportunity for Mr. Friedman.

“In the U.S., sex is the big taboo, yet violence – that’s fine,” says the staunch Republican. “God help you if you show somebody touching a lady’s breast, but it’s OK to cut it off with a hacksaw. I mean, that’s what American censorship is about.”

Not that Mr. Friedman hasn’t seen his share of hacksaws. Along with director Lewis, he cooked up “Blood Feast,” the first slasher movie and one of the worst films ever made.

“Probably my personal favorite,” says Joe Bob Briggs, who has included it as one of eight Friedman-produced films in his home video series, “Joe Bob’s Sleaziest Movies in the History of the World.”

“This is, of course, the story of Fuad Ramses, maniac Egyptian caterer played by the mugging part-time realtor Mal Arnold. Mal, after being ground up in a garbage truck at the end of the movie, didn’t act again for 17 years.”

Unleashed in 1963 on an unsuspecting audience at a drive-in in Peoria, Ill., “Feast” has made $6 million. Mr. Friedman unwisely sold his rights after recouping 10 times the picture’s $24,500 budget.

When his wife called the film “vomitous,” Mr. Friedman wasted no time in buyi ng 100,000 airline sick bags to hand out to moviegoers. He promptly filmed two more slashers – “Two Thousand Maniacs” and “Color Me Blood Red.”

Those were the glory days of exploitation – but they were numbered.

Parting company with his director, Mr. Friedman moved to Los Angeles to join exploiteer Dan Sonney’s Entertainment Ventures. They released a succession of nudies, “roughies” (hardboiled action flicks with skin) and takeoffs on popular film trends, such as “Bummer!” a 1973 answer to “Easy Rider.”

By then, “Deep Throat” and porno-chic had arrived and were more explicit than old-time exploitation ever dared. Mr. Friedman adapted to the times – he was a founder of the Adult Film Association of America -but he no longer was the life of the party. He likens his situation to that of a bartender who doesn’t drink.

“There was nothing left to show,” he laments. “It became a big home video business, which is all right. Maybe they took sex out of the theaters and put it back in the home where it belongs.”

It’s this state of affairs that finds Mr. Friedman in his new role as exploitation’s Boswell, eager to chronicle his years inventing the genre. He’s working on a second volume of memoirs, “Kings of Babylon.”

“To some people, I’m a pariah,” he says. “To others, I’m an adventurer. But the only thing I can add to that, after all the things I ever did: Nobody ever asked for their money back.”

Heh heh heh.

David Frank Friedman

PERSONAL: Born in Anniston, Ala., 1923. Married Virginia Carol Everett, 1951.

JOBS: Worked as carnival barker, movie publicist, roadshow man, film producer, screenwriter, actor, director, co-founded Adult Film Association of America.

FILM GENRES he helped spawn: the “nudie-cutie” and nudist-camp “volleyball” epic; the “roughie” (tough-guy black-and-white action flicks, with women); the “gore” movie.

NICKNAMES: “The Sultan of Sleaze,” “King of the Celluloid Gypsies,” “Kingly Quack of the Iridescent Dream.”

FILMS include: “The Prime Time” (1957), “The Adventures of Lucky Pierre” (1959), “Daughter of the Sun” (1959), “Nature’s Playmates” (1960), “BOIN-N-N-G!” (1960), “Goldilocks and the Three Bares” (1960), “Bell, Bare and Beautiful” (1961), “Scum of the Earth” (1961), “Blood Feast” (1963), “Two Thousand Maniacs” (1964), “Color Me Blood Red” (1965), “My Tale Is Hot (Pantie’s Inferno)” (1965), “The Defilers” (1965), “A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine” (1966), “She Freak” (1967), “Love Camp 7″ (1968), “The Lustful Turk” (1968), “Space Thing” (1968), “The Acid Eaters” (1968), “Starlet” (1969), “Thar She Blows!” (1969), “The Ramrodder” (1969), “Trader Hornee” (1970), “The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried” (1971), “The Erotic Adventures of Zorro” (1 971), “Bummer!” (1973), “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS” (1974), “Johnny Firecloud” (1974).