Don't forget another
very important factor: Ronald Wilson Reagan. With a B-movie actor in the White House, the nation was receptive to less-than-stellar entertainment. With the co-star of
Bedtime for Bonzo at the helm of the nation, we had little choice but to embrace new extremes in movie cheese. He even started a black-budget campaign to influence the film-making world to produce more low-budget movies, appointing Roger Corman to the secret post of Secretary of Film. Under Corman's regime, Hollywood and independent producers were "influenced," sometimes forcibly, to produce run-of-the-mill horror rip-offs and cornball slasher flicks to fill the minds of the viewing public with fluff to distract them from the tensions with the Soviet Union. He even launched a secret war against Sony and the Betamax video recording system just to gain a measure of revenge against the company that had purchased Columbia Pictures, all because of a perceived slight from Columbia back in 1962. With the concurrent rise of VHS and cable, Reagan was able to pull the strings (with Corman's help) and launch the movie boom that started so many of us on the road to utter mindlessness. The evidence can be found in
.
