David F. Friedman was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to a local newspaperman father and a professional musician mother who played the piano and organ in silent-movie theaters and churches. From the age of four or five, Friedman was exposed to the adult world, accompanying his parents on outings to restaurants, movies, and stage shows. His father passed away when Friedman was 13, and his mother remarried a few years later. After graduating from high school, Friedman was drafted into the US Army and served in Europe during World War II. After his discharge in 1945, he settled in Chicago, where he married and found work in filmmaking at Essanjay Films, collaborating with co-owner Irwin Joseph on making 8mm and 16mm underground sex hygiene films.
During the 1950s, Friedman worked for Paramount Pictures, Essanjay Films, and Apex Attractions, producing and working on numerous short pictures in the underground softcore set. In 1960, he met Herschell Gordon Lewis while pitching for producers for his first low-budget film, The Prime Time (1960). They formed a partnership, with Friedman in charge of obtaining production financing, to make "nudie-cuties", very low-budget, crudely made films featuring female nudity.
Over the next few years, Friedman and Lewis worked as mercenary filmmakers, producing a series of softcore sex films, including The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961),Daughter of the Sun (1962),Nature's Playmates (1962),Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963),Boin-n-g (1963),and Scum of the Earth (1963). Most of these films were shot on location in and around Miami, Florida, during winters when Friedman and Lewis lived there.
Wanting a change of pace away from the nudie-cutie exploitation genre, Friedman and Lewis worked together to produce Blood Feast (1963),which was filmed in Miami just a few days after filming their last nudie-cutie effort, Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963). Despite many bad reviews and low production values, "Blood Feast" brought in more money than they had gotten making "nudie-cuties", which soon led to their turning out Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964),followed by Color Me Blood Red (1965). After that, Friedman ended his partnership with Lewis for a variety of reasons, both artistic and financial. Friedman moved to Los Angeles in 1964 to continue his production work there.
In 1965, Friedman formed his own filmmaking company to make "roughies", and produced, co-wrote, and co-directed The Defilers (1965),a low-budget exploitation film about two guys who kidnap and hold hostage a young woman "just for kicks". The film was a hit and restarted his career in the softcore field. A stream of more roughie and soft-core exploitation movies followed throughout the 1960s, including A Sweet Sickness (1968),A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine (1966),The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966),The Brick Dollhouse (1967),and The Lustful Turk (1968),among many others.
By 1969, Friedman's career began to slide as the Hollywood film industry abolished the Hays Code and adopted the new Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system, which led to the production of X-rated, hardcore sex films. Unwilling to get into the hardcore adult film industry, Friedman turned down several offers to direct hardcore sex films, opting instead to continue producing and directing softcore sex films. He continued to produce and direct a number of softcore sex films during the early and mid 1970s, including The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide (1972),The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972),Come One, Come All (1970),and the violent grindhouse vigilante flick Johnny Firecloud (1975).
In addition to producing, Friedman also ran a theater in Los Angeles for several years, which ran many of his exploitation films. Though producing exploitation movies was no longer lucrative, he occasionally dabbled in various independent productions in Los Angeles through the 1970s and into the 1980s. By then, Friedman more or less retired from film producing and re-settled back in Alabama, though he continued to come out of retirement to lend a hand at producing independent erotic or gore horror films, as he put it, "just for fun." Most recently, he was reunited with Herschell Gordon Lewis in 2001 to produce Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002),as well as co-produce a remake of "Two Thousand Maniacs!" titled 2001 Maniacs (2005).
