“You Gotta Tell ‘Em to Sell ‘Em”: How Real-Life Showman Kroger Babb Inspired The Rib from Which I Remake the World

Before I began working in earnest on my novel The Rib from Which I Remake the World, I knew I wanted to write something else dealing with exploitation cinema, but in an entirely different way than I had with my previous crime novel The Forty-Two. That book was set in 1970s New York City, amongst the sleaze and spectacle of 42nd Street’s infamous row of Times Square grindhouse movie theaters. 

For The Rib, I wanted to explore an earlier era of grindhouse films—proto-exploitation, if you will—and I wanted to do it in a surreal, magical horror setting. As for the plot and the antagonist of the novel, I needed look no further than Howard “Kroger” Babb, the granddaddy of American exploitation cinema, for inspiration. 

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“America’s Fearless Young Showman,” as he dubbed himself, started his career in show business with appropriate carnie conman flair, traveling to small Midwestern towns with a circus stunt performer named Herbert O’Dell Smith. Smith, billed as “Digger O’Dell, the Living Corpse,” claimed to have been buried alive nearly 100 times, and many of these public events were promoted and hosted by Kroger Babb. The pair would set up in a vacant lot, hang banners and streamers, and sell tickets from a portable booth after interring the intrepid O’Dell, who would stare up through a narrow airshaft at the inquisitive ticketholders above. 

Cheap and shocking, it was classic Depression-era showmanship that outdid the popular trends of the day, such as multi-day dance marathons and the art of perching high atop flagpoles. Developing a reputation as a master snake oil salesman, Babb easily secured a gig directing the marketing for an Ohio movie theater chain, where he got the movie itch that laid the path for the rest of his career and life. From here on out, Babb’s spectacles would be on the big screen.

“You gotta tell ‘em to sell ‘em,” Babb was fond of saying, a motto that succinctly spelled out the exploitation cinema experience for the next few decades. It was all about the extravagant advertising, the publicity, regardless of what actually happened after the ticket was purchased. Promise the audience everything, and give them as much as you can get away with—financially, morally, and legally. 

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In the 1940s, the Motion Picture Production Code forbade practically any and all prurient spectacles, from the mere suggestion of sex to outright nudity. But there were workarounds for the savvy sleaze merchant, one of which was presenting an ostensible exploitation picture as “educational.” Thus, the “hygiene picture” was conceived. 

In The Rib from Which I Remake the World, Babbian villain Barker Davis rolls into town touting a morality drama titled Motherhood Too Soon! In the 1940s, Kroger Babb personally schlepped his own masterpiece of sin and consequences, Mom and Dad, from town to town and theater to theater, on roadshow engagements he presaged with large bursts of marketing that included hiring local actors to portray doctors and nurses at screenings. 

These faux medical experts would bolster the film’s credentials and sell informational pamphlets for a buck apiece. All of this bravado increased the overall profits, but it also helped to solidify the notion that, although there were promises of salacious sights in store for the interested viewer, it was all in the name of moral hygiene and medical knowledge.

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Directed by down-and-out Hollywood veteran William Beaudine for a touch of class, Mom and Dad tells the story of a naïve young woman who becomes pregnant by an Air Force pilot after her mother refuses to let her learn about the birds and the bees (from booklets and films like Mom and Dad, naturally). Intercut with explicit live birth and gut-churning VD footage Babb purchased from medical supply companies, the picture managed to feature scenes both titillating and horrifying, while circumventing censorship issues by virtue of its supposed educational value. 

Four-color handbills pledged theatergoers would see such forbidden sights as “When Life Begins,” “Historic Moments in Surgery,” and “A Cesarean Section.” Further, not all screenings contained the same footage, as Babb played fast and loose with local levels of tolerance for his medicine show antics, alternately swapping out less or more graphic material depending on the region. Whether or not he contributed to these communities’ moral hygiene as advertised, Babb most certainly turned a tidy profit.

Of course, profits aren’t quite what my sinister, funhouse mirror version of the showman in The Rib from Which I Remake the World is after; Barker Davis craves chaos more than cash. Davis stirs the same base instincts and emotions, drawing equal numbers of eager curiosity-seekers and mortified champions of chastity, and he makes use of every tool in Babb’s arsenal of stunts and gimmicks. 

But more than plain old-fashioned hucksterism, Barker Davis uses the mediums of cinema, magic, and carnival ballyhoo to literally reshape reality around him in World War II-era small-town middle America—the same time and place one might have found Babb stopping over to hook in another audience for Mom and Dad, Child Bride, One Too Many, She Shoulda Said No!, or any of his other exploitation extravaganzas. 

And why not? After all, as Babb once proudly pronounced, “Nothing is hopeless if it's advertised right.” 

Ed Kurtz is the bestselling author of The Rib from Which I Remake the World, the Boon Trilogy, and The Forty-Two, as well as several other novels and novellas. He lives in New England.

All photos courtesy of Ed Kurtz