Azalea Pictures (Larry Buchanan)

Larry Buchanan was born Marcus Larry Seale Jr. in Texas and orphaned in infancy. He grew up in a Dallas orphans' home, where he learned to love movies in the home's theater. A trip to Hollywood got him a job in 20th Century Fox's prop department. The studio gave him a new name and some small acting parts. He worked on films in the Army Signal Corps during World War II and briefly in East Coast television, then came home to Texas to work as an independent filmmaker. One of his first features, Grubstake, was finished in 1952 for $17,000.

In 1963 Buchanan made Free, White and 21, which the Los Angeles Times described as one of the first blaxploitation films and which earned good money. American International Pictures then asked him for 'cheap, fast color pictures' for its direct-to-television and overseas distribution, and Buchanan delivered about a dozen and a half. They included The Eye Creatures, Zontar, the Thing from Venus, In the Year 2889, It's Alive!, Curse of the Swamp Creature and Mars Needs Women, starring Tommy Kirk and Yvonne Craig. The Texas Film Commission's records credit Mars Needs Women to Azalea Pictures, shot in Dallas, Richardson and Houston. They credit Curse of the Swamp Creature to the same company, shot in Dallas and the East Texas town of Uncertain. Buchanan wrote, directed, produced and edited most of his films himself and called the method 'guerrilla filmmaking.'

Critics savaged the results, but the Times reported that every one of his films recouped its modest cost and most turned a profit. The paper called him one of the first makers of feature films specifically for television. In Texas he also made The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (1964), a docudrama imagining the trial that never happened, and later A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970), shot around Dallas with Fabian.

After the AIP years Buchanan kept making low-budget pictures, including biopics of Howard Hughes and Marilyn Monroe, for well under $1 million each into the late 1980s. He titled his 1996 autobiography It Came From Hunger! Tales of a Cinema Schlockmeister. He died in Tucson in December 2004 at 81.