Scott B and Beth B facts for kids

Scott B and Beth B (also known as Scott and Beth B, Beth and Scott B or The Bs after B Movies) were among the best-known New York No Wave underground film makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

They went on to form an independent film production company called B Movies (a pun on B movies), which made the feature film Vortex on 16-mm film, starring Lydia Lunch (of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) with James Russo, Bill Rice, Haoui Montaug, Richard Prince, Brent Collins, and Ann Magnuson, among others. Beth B is the daughter of painter Ida Applebroog, who has collaborated on two of her films.

Study and work history

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Scott B and Beth B were among the most significant proponents of the punk bohemia, No Wave, no-budget style of underground punk filmmaking that was concerned with issues of simulation typical of postmodernism. Beth studied art at the School of Visual Arts and Scott was an exhibiting sculptor. They married and became associated with Colab (Collaborative Projects) and worked out of New York City's East Village area in conjunction with performance artists and noise musicians. They created a series of noisy, scruffy, deeply personal short Super 8 mm films in which they combined violent themes and darkly sinister images to explore the manner in which the individual is constrained by society.

The Bs'8mm films were full of downtown obsessions. The brief length of these films allows them to effectively assault the viewer in a hit-and-run, belt-in-the-gut manner. They would cast musicians and other popular downtown personalities in their films. The Bs cleverly used the scene's social energy with weekly film shoots that were quickly edited and then screened as film serial episodes at music clubs such as the Mudd Club and Max's Kansas City. These films are at once contemplative and confrontational, penetrating and politically loaded. Films like this are virtually impossible to criticize because they glory in carefully DIY style of simulated amateurism.

Post-Collaboration work history

In 1987, Scott B and Joseph Nechvatal collaborated on an art performance at Hallwalls based on the poetry of St. John of the Cross, Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony and works of Jean Genet and Georges Bataille called Not a Door: A Spectacle, which featured the actors Richard Edson and Mark Boone Junior.

Beth B went on to direct such films as Salvation! and Two Small Bodies.

Scott B and Beth B filmography

• G-Man (1978)
• Black Box (1978)
• Letters to Dad (1979)
• The Offenders (1980)
• The Trap Door (1981)
• Vortex (1981)

Beth B solo filmography

• 1987: Salvation!
• 1989: Belladonna (short) (actor, co-director with Ida Applebroog)
• 1991: American Nightmare (short)
• 1991: Thanatopsis (short)
• 1991: Stigmata (short)
• 1991: Shut Up and Suffer (short)
• 1992: Amnesia (short)
• 1993: Two Small Bodies (co-writer, co-producer)
• 1993: Under Lock and Key (short)
• 1994: High Heel Nights (short)
• 1995: ”Out of Sight/Out of Mind” (short)
• 1996: Visiting Desire (documentary) (cinematographer, producer, sound)
• 2013: Exposed
• 2016: Call Her Applebroog
• 2019: Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over