Stephanie Rothman is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for her work in the 1960s and 1970s, when she was one of the first female directors to work in the horror and exploitation genres and one of the few to have creative control over her films. One of the few female directors (if not the only) to work in mainstream American commercial filmmaking between Ida Lupino in the 1950s and Elaine May in the 1970s, Rothman studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California and was the first woman to be awarded the Directors Guild of America fellowship. She started her career in 1964 as an assistant to the late Roger Corman, the legendary producer of low-budget films. She later directed several films for Corman’s company, New World Pictures. She left New World in 1971 and, with her husband Charles S. Swartz, who was also a producer and screenwriter, entered into a partnership with Dimension Pictures to make Group Marriage (1972), Terminal Island (1973) and The Working Girls (1974). She retired from filmmaking in 1983.
“I was reading a book called Future Shock [by Alvin Toffler] […] about the changes that were taking place, and what results this was going to have to society at large. One of the things he talked about was group marriage. I read about it and I thought, ‘You know, that might be a wonderful framework in which to create a sex comedy that said something about the temperaments of the people involved, their goals, the social pitfalls of trying to do something like this in a society where it’s neither legal nor admired particularly.’ And also, what would be the dysfunctional aspect of doing this, and what would be the comic possibilities of these? So the more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be a very rich subject for a film, if handled in a way that was not sordid and sleazy. I tried very hard to handle it in a way that wasn’t, that was humorous and pithy and imaginative. Whether I succeeded or not is not for me to say, but my intention at least was to make something that was a surprise.” (Stephanie Rothman)

Dave Kehr