21 Facts About Doris Wishman

Doris Wishman was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.

In 1979, Doris Wishman filmed her first and only feature horror film, A Night to Dismember, which she spent several years editing after multiple reels were destroyed during post-production.

Doris Wishman made a further three films in the early 2000s before dying in 2002, aged 90.

Doris Wishman was born on June 1,1912, in New York City, the daughter of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants.

Doris Wishman's father was a hay and grain salesman; her mother died when she was still a child.

Doris Wishman was raised in the New York City borough of the Bronx, where she graduated from James Monroe High School.

Doris Wishman later worked as a film booker for her cousin Max Rosenberg, an independent film distributor who handled both art films and exploitation film fare during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Doris Wishman worked as an actress in New York City throughout the 1950s, and for some time worked with Joseph Levine.

Doris Wishman was familiar with the appeal and potential of nudist camp movies due to her acquaintances with Walter Bibo, whose film Garden of Eden gained notoriety due its influence of swaying censorship laws for filming nudity.

Doris Wishman's next film, Nude on the Moon, released in 1961, was a science-fiction nudie.

Doris Wishman produced eight nudist films in total between 1958 and 1964.

Doris Wishman had produced, directed, and written more films in the nudist-film genre than anyone else at the time, when she decided to switch direction.

Moya Luckett considers that the cutaway style Doris Wishman used was possibly to disrupt male gaze and incorporate a feminine gaze.

When producing roughies, Doris Wishman shot them with a handheld camera, a tactic used by experimental filmmakers, and exploitation filmmakers trying to cut down shooting costs.

Doris Wishman's work in the 1970s-'80s was all in the soft-core genre of exploitation, except that in the mid-1970s, Wishman directed two hardcore pornographic features entitled Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me, My Love, both of which featured Annie Sprinkle.

Doris Wishman was not fond of working on pornographic films and later in her life denied having directed them.

In 1968, she released The Hot Month in August and Passion Fever, two already completed Greek films, which Doris Wishman bought and added minimal original material, such as voiceover.

In light of the expanding slasher film craze that began with Halloween in 1978, Doris Wishman's final feature was a horror film entitled A Night to Dismember.

Doris Wishman won Best Comeback Kid at New York Underground Film Festival for the drama film Satan Was a Lady starring Honey Lauren, unrelated to her 1975 pornographic film of the same name.

Doris Wishman died on August 10,2002, in Miami, Florida, shortly after being treated for lymphoma.

Doris Wishman made more films than any other female director of the sound era.