Mystery Movie Solved! TEENAGE RUNAWAYS

Back in January of 2017 we posted about an unknown Hallmark release called TEENAGE RUNAWAYS that had played drive-ins in the mid '70s, usually on double and triple bills with Hallmark horror movies like MARK OF THE DEVIL, TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE and ASYLUM EROTICA. After nearly ten years, it looks like we've solved this mystery thanks to Temple of Schlock correspondent John Charles, who texted us an article in which George Mansour of Hallmark Releasing (being interviewed by Janet Maslin for the July/August 1975 issue of Film Comment) hinted at the true identity of TEENAGE RUNAWAYS...

MASLIN: As a distributor, Hallmark is generally considered the most effective exploitation outfit since AIP, what with LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT, MARK OF THE DEVIL, THE DRAGON DIES HARD, and TOGETHER. The rumors are that you're pretty audacious.

MANSOUR: Well, we will often test campaigns without having pictures! Rather than going to the expense of buying a movie and then trying to devise a campaign and hoping that the money we've risked in buying the film is going to bail us out, we will concoct a campaign, open it somewhere - in a drive-in, possibly - and use a film that has not been shown very much that more or less conforms to the campaign that we've devised. Then, if it's successful, we will go out and purchase a movie that more or less represents the campaign that we've used.

For instance, we played a movie called TEENAGE RUNAWAYS in several spots in New England. Now there is no such movie as TEENAGE RUNAWAYS. The movie that we used was four years old and had a very limited release by an independent company - it had Charlotte Rampling and Bruce Dern. I rented it for a flat sum of $50, we then put our title on it, spent a large amount of money on the campaign, and we had a big success.

Since there's also no such movie starring Charlotte Rampling and Bruce Dern, we're going to assume that TEENAGE RUNAWAYS is really THUMB TRIPPING (1972) and Mansour mistook that film's star, Meg Foster, for Charlotte Rampling.

Big thanks to John for bringing Maslin's Film Comment article ("Splitting Jaws with the Happy Booker: A Talk with a Circuit Buyer") to my attention - or rather, back to my attention; I'd actually pulled quotes from this article almost five years ago for my online essay The Samurai Cinema Slaughter of '74 and somehow completely missed the sidebar, "Releasing the Sharks," in which Mansour discussed TEENAGE RUNAWAYS. Better late than never!