I've watched more of Jesus Franco's filmography and I'm still enraptured by the amazing level of skill vs his utter obscurity. I watched many lengthy interviews with the late master and was happily surprised to learn his biography is what I expected. He has a sensitivity to brown skinned people and young exploited women because of his Cuban mother and has an intense dislike of military and sadism because of his army doctor father. He resents the Vatican for its censorship and the rightwing for their disenfranchisement of his mentor the Marxist director Berlana. He was the best student of Soviet montage in his film school but originally got into film for a living to support his jazz career as a social anarchist. He references Libertarianism positively, but this is the more liberal, socialized party of Europe. He's anti-capitalism and against slavery, sadism, censorship and controls and loss of choice and corporatized undemocratic free markets. He hates totalitarian, fascist tyranny from all institutions, so he doesn't even identify as a political filmmaker. He is a social critic and amateur philosopher with an insanely diverse private education in literature, aesthetics, government, history, race, everything that the European middle class arthouses promoted 50 years ago but the American mainstream is only now accepting.

But I'm still confused as to why he was never approached by a Roger Corman, Cannon or more forward-thinking producers of exploitative world cinema. He had a minor moment as a U.K. director and some films ran successfully enough in the U.S. theaters and even earned fans from future film legends like Roman Polanski & Roger Ebert. Fritz Lang loved "Succubus" and even met Jess for what I assume was a powerfully educational & influential chat. And everyone knows Jess was one of Orson Welles' assistants for a year or two.

Without any confirmation, its just a logical conclusion that he inspired a generation of more famous and successful European genre filmmakers like Bava, Jose Mojica Marins ("Coffin Joe"), Fulci, D'Amato, Rollin and probably much bigger independent directors. Cinephiles love him and directors are some of the biggest cinephiles. But why didn't he get more support from other filmmakers? Its as if he was blacklisted by that ruling Hollywood corporate elite in the 60s/70s/80s. Look what they did to Polanski, a similar European director who attempted to uncover bourgeois Satanic cultism and was left a persecuted, destroyed, ghettoized artist working in soft erotica for a buck. I see Nicolas Winding Refn following that path and joining artists like Takashi Miike who were just too indie. Maybe I'm dramatic and Franco simply chose to work in grindhouses, but thats just the popular excuse by so-called "lovers of bad film". Why is he compared to an Ed Wood when he was so profoundly popular, prolific and positive?

Racism? Nationalism? Capitalism? All of the above? Something else? Whatever the reason, it feels like cinema's biggest injustice that this master was relegated to such tiny budgets and grimy theaters throughout the 2/3rds of his career. He was ahead of his time and is the exact prototype of the artistic genre filmmakers that film schools create now. He was the original "film school brat" that Hollywood catered to in the 1970s and 80s. Perhaps they are involved in keeping he and other world directors out. I certainly assume a group of 5/6 powerful young players who watch everything foreign probably appropriated ideas from Franco and others while conveniently letting them fade into obscurity. Its like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Elvis.

Jesus Franco definitely created a synthesis style from jazz, Euro and American cinema, Gothic literature and his own life, but he doesn't get the credit he deserves for helping create the modern horror film, the modern erotic film, the modern action film and the modern film, period. Cross genre films with multinational casts, testy sex and violence and a mix of highbrow culture and lowbrow geek obsessions. Fuck an Oscar or Walk of Fame star. Jess Franco deserves the best tribute Hollywood can give: a biography.