Samuel Zachary Arkoff (
June 12 1918 –
September 16 2001) was an
American producer of
B movies.
Born in
Fort Dodge, Iowa to a
Russian
Jewish family, Arkoff first studied to be a
lawyer. Along with business partner
James H. Nicholson and producer-director
Roger Corman, he produced eighteen films. In the 1950s, he and Nicholson founded the
American Releasing Corporation, which later became known as
American International Pictures and produced over 125 films before the company's demise in the 1980s. These films were mostly low-budget, with production completed in a few days, though nearly all of them became profitable.
Arkoff is also credited with starting a few genres, such as the
Beach Party and
outlaw biker movies, and his company played a substantial part in bringing the
horror film genre to a novel level with successes such as
Blacula,
I Was a Teenage Werewolf and
The Thing with Two Heads. American International Pictures movies starred many established actors in principal or cameo roles, such as
Boris Karloff,
Elsa Lanchester and
Vincent Price, as well as up-and-comers who later became household names, including
Don Johnson,
Nick Nolte,
Diane Ladd, and most notably
Jack Nicholson. A number of actors shunned or overlooked by most of Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s, such as
Bruce Dern and
Dennis Hopper, also found work in one or more of Arkoff's productions. Arkoff's most financially successful film was the 1979 adaptation of
Jay Anson's book
The Amityville Horror.