the music for the film, which was completed with the last-minute help of a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby. It premiered in April 1971, distributed by Cinemation Industries, a small company then best known for releasing dubbed versions of the Italian Mondo Cane "shockumentaries" and the Swedish skin flick Fanny Hill, as well as for its one in-house production, The Man from O.R.G.Y. (1970). These were the sort of films that played in the "grindhouses" of the day—many of them not outright porno theaters, but rather specializing in all manner of exploitation cinema. As director Quentin Tarantino describes in a 2007 interview, "Grindhouses were usually in the ghetto. Or they were the big old downtown movie theaters that sometimes stayed open all night long, for all the bums. At the grindhouse that I went to, every week there was the new kung fu movie, or new car-chase movie, or new sexploitation movie, or blaxploitation movie." The days of six quickies for a nickel were gone, but a continuity of spirit was evident. In 1970, a low-budget crime drama shot in 16 mm by a first-time American director won the international critics' prize at the Venice Film Festival. Wanda, written and directed by Barbara Loden, is both a seminal event in the independent film movement and a classic B picture. The plot—involving a disaffected divorcée who drifts away from her coal-town life and aimlessly falls in with a small-time, would-be hardboiled crook—and the often seedy settings would have been suitable to a straightforward exploitation film or (with a little shifting of sex roles) an old-school B noir. Loden, who spent six years raising money for the sub-$200,000 production, created a film that Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised for "the absolute accuracy of its effects, the decency of its point of view and the kind of purity of technique that can only be the result of conscious discipline." While Wanda would be the only movie Loden ever made, she "left us with a film that anticipated the independent spirit that would reinvigorate the industry." Like Romero and Van Peebles, other filmmakers of the era made pictures that combined the gut-level entertainment of exploitation with biting social commentary. The first three features directed by Larry Cohen, Bone (a.k.a. Beverly Hills Nightmare; 1972), Black Caesar (1973), and Hell Up in Harlem (1973), were all nominally blaxploitation movies, but Cohen—also the screenwriter