Among the talent they recruited was the artist Albert Kallis, who was responsible for many of the striking – and now highly coveted – posters advertising such titles as The Cool and the Crazy, Diary of a High School Bride, The Beast with a Million Eyes and Attack of the Puppet People. From the start, Nicholson and Arkoff decided that subtlety was out, and their first double-bill, The Day The World Ended and The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1956), had typical slogans as part of its advertising – "See! The Horrible Mutant Who Seeks A Mate!. See! Fantastic World of Death and Horror!"The film which turned AIP into a major force was a shrewd combination of horror and teenage angst, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), starring the young and little-known Michael Landon (who beat Jack Nicholson for the role). The film was a sensational hit, and spawned a sequel, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), which gave its scientist a much-quoted line when he says to his creation, "Answer me! You have a civil tongue in your head. I know – I sewed it in there!"Arkoff refused to accept that "exploitation" was an unflattering word:It simply means to exploit what you have. Barnum and Bailey did it, and there was Mike Todd and all kinds of people throughout history. I can only say that maybe we added a little more gilt to the process.Arkoff and Nicholson would often start with just a title and drawing, which they would test on exhibitors before putting a film into production, and most of their films were made within 10 days.

Noting the success of Hammer horror films, AIP imported Mario Bava's Italian classic Black Sunday (1960) and Corman started his series of Poe adaptations with The House of Usher (1960), the first AIP film in colour and Cinemascope. When the producer Joe Levine had a hit with the Italian epic Hercules, AIP quickly followed the trend."There were a lot of Hercules pictures being made," said Arkoff,so we also got a Steve Reeves Hercules picture. But we didn't want to make ours Hercules so in the dubbing we changed it to Goliath, and the picture became Goliath and the Barbarians [1959]. We also picked up a picture called The Sign of Rome [1958] which had no gladiator, but in the dubbing we had the guy talk about the days when he was a gladiator and we called the picture Sign of the Gladiator.In time, the company's budgets improved and such stars as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre appeared in their movies. Beach Party (1963) was the first of a string of popular movies starring the teen singing star Frankie Avalon with Annette Funicello, and other hits for the studio were The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), The Wild Angels (1966), Wild in the Streets (1968), Bloody Mama (1970), Blacula (1972), Dillinger (1973) and Love at First Bite (1979).In 1979, after all the major studios had passed on it, AIP acquired the rights to the Australian film Mad Max, starring Mel Gibson, and in the same year the studio produced their biggest hit ever, The Amityville Horror (1979), which grossed $65m in the United States, making it the biggest independent film until Teen-Age Mutant Turtles 10 years later. In the same year, Arkoff was honoured by a retrospective of AIP films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.After selling the company to Filmways in 1980 (Nicholson had resigned in 1972 to go independent), he formed the Samuel Z. Arkoff company in 1980 and produced Brian DePalma's chilling thriller Dressed to Kill starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson.

In 1981 he formed Arkoff International Pictures, but was largely retired for the last 20 years.In 1992 he published his memoirs, Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants, and last September he attended the premiere of a documentary, It Conquered Hollywood: the story of American International Pictures. He recently served as executive producer of Creature Features, a series of five new television films produced by his son, Louis Arkoff, and inspired by five of his monster films from the 1950s.A constant champion of independent film-making, Arkoff told the writer Tom Weaver in 1988,There's always a place for an independent, because there's always somebody who's going to come out of the woods with a picture that's a little different.Tom Vallance. Patrick John Cosgrave, writer and journalist: born Dublin 28 September 1941; married 1965 Ruth Dudley Edwards (marriage dissolved), 1974 Norma Green (one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1981 Shirley Ward; died London 16 September 2001. Patrick John Cosgrave, writer and journalist: born Dublin 28 September 1941; married 1965 Ruth Dudley Edwards (marriage dissolved), 1974 Norma Green (one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1981 Shirley Ward; died London 16 September 2001. The writer Patrick Cosgrave was by birth an Irish Roman Catholic and by choice a British patriot and Anglican agnostic; known mainly as a political polemicist, he was above all a romantic. That his third wife should want his first wife to write his obituary is a recognition that the fragile man she nurtured throughout his dying career was in essence the same brave, starry-eyed, lovable and often impossible boy whom I married at a time when his energy, brilliance and promise seemed limitless.The modest comfort of Patrick's Dublin childhood gave way to drab poverty when his intelligent father, a builder, gambler and drinker whom he adored, died painfully of cancer, leaving behind him debts that consigned his wife and only son to a bleak council house. Patrick's mother worked selflessly as a cleaner to support him and her motherless nieces and nephew, but the unthinking piety, orthodoxy and knee-jerk nationalism she shared with the Christian Brothers who taught him came to epitomise everything Patrick Cosgrave loathed in de Valera's Ireland.A compulsive reader, he emerged in his mid-teens from a year in bed with rheumatic fever with a faulty heart-valve but fired by the ideals of such heroes as John Buchan's Richard Hannay, T.E Lawrence, Lord Salisbury and Winston Churchill.