Exploring a fascinating lost chapter in 20th Century pop culture, HELL'S HIGHWAY: THE TRUE STORY OF HIGHWAY SAFETY FILMS revisits the shock-value driver's ed films that haunted American teens throughout the 1960s and '70s.

Originating in Mansfield, Ohio, in the late 1950s, the company innovated an approach to driver's ed films in which unflinching color footage of fatal car accidents was shown in an effort to scare young drivers into adopting good driving habits. With the cooperation of the Ohio State Highway Patrol and Mansfield Police Department, cameramen (and women) were dispatched by radio whenever serious traffic accidents were reported -- sometimes riding along with ambulances. The resulting footage is a tragic glimpse of life and death in small-town America. These films, produced between 1959 and 1979, combined shock value with statistical data, won numerous awards and were widely used in the American educational system.

Since the 1980s, however, they have vanished from the classroom, as schools have shielded America's young people from the reality of death on the highway. But the mystique of these films continues to grow. Films such as Signal 30 (1959), Wheels of Tragedy (1963) and Highways of Agony (1969) have become mythical to those too young to have seen them... and like a half-remembered nightmare to those who had been scarred by their graphic imagery.

Filmmaker Bret Wood presents an inside view of Highway Safety Films, from its origins as a grisly slideshow presented in Ohio classrooms and county fairs, to its growth into the Highway Safety Foundation, which spawned educational programs, crime prevention films, vehicle test tracks, and even a national telethon (hosted by Sammy Davis Jr.).

HELL'S HIGHWAY features interviews with HSF cameraman John R. Domer, production supervisor Earle J. Deems, former Mansfield Police Chief John F. Butler, as well as cultural historians Richard Prelinger (the Prelinger Archives) and Mike Vraney (Something Weird Video). Journalist and private investigator Martin Yant discusses a series of articles he wrote in the 1970s pursuing rumors of moral and financial corruption within the Highway Safety Foundation.

HELL'S HIGHWAY explores not only the "death on the highway" phenomenon (with scenes from more than twenty driver's ed scare films), it offers a cultural history of the classroom film in general, with excerpts of more than fifteen other educational shorts, from whimsical "social guidance" films to the liberal-minded "open classroom" shorts of the late 1970s.


ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Production of HELL'S HIGHWAY: THE TRUE STORY OF HIGHWAY SAFETY FILMS began in August 1999, when Atlanta filmmaker Bret Wood, producer Tommy Gibbons and director of photography Steve Anderson traveled to Mansfield, Ohio to film interviews with Earle Deems and John Domer, two of the few surviving people who made films for the Highway Safety Foundation. The original idea had been merely to document the story behind the shocking driver education films produced in cooperation with the Ohio State Highway Patrol in the 1950s and '60s. Films such as Signal 30, Wheels of Tragedy and Mechanized Death had become cult items among film aficionados, but the story of their production remained cloaked in mystery.

It became obvious during this visit -- listening to the stories Deems and Domer told, viewing the scrapbooks of photographs and documents, viewing HSF productions that were rarely seen -- that a feature-length documentary would be required to tell the full story of the "death on the highway" driver's ed film phenomenon.

Wood approached two archivists of educational and industrial films, who represent very different approaches to such "ephemeral films": Richard Prelinger and Mike Vraney. Prelinger (who established the Prelinger Archives, acquired by the Library of Congress in August, 2002) and Vraney (founder of the cult video label Something Weird Video) both eagerly supported the project, consenting to videotaped interviews and providing a wide array of strange, memorable and uniqure driver's ed films from their collections.

The stranger-than-fiction story of the Highway Safety Foundation (HSF) became even more intriguing when Wood discovered the shocking exposÈs of the organization written by Martin Yant, who had been an investigative journalist in Mansfield in the 1970s. On June 24, 2000, in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, Yant expounded in great detail on the rumored misdeeds of the foundation, and it was clear that HELL'S HIGHWAY was becoming something more than an examination of the gruesome driver education film.

In the summer of 2000, John Butler, former chief of the Mansfield Police Department, agreed to be interviewed on film at his home in Punta Gorda, Florida. A gifted storyteller -- who was also the executive vice president of the HSF at the time of its demise -- Butler revealed many little-known details about the organization. He recounted meeting with Jimmy Hoffa in an effort to sell the HSF's trucking safety film (Carrier or Killer), discussed the nationally-televised HSF telethon (hosted by Sammy Davis Jr.), explained the idea behind the HSF's controversial police training films, and spoke frankly about Yant's accusations.

Throughout the filmmaking process, it was important not to stray from the germinal idea of the driver's ed scare film. To offer a more diverse perspective, interviews were conducted with driver education instructor (and football coach) James Waller, and brothers David and Eric Krug, who had vivid memories of seeing HSF's most notorious film while in elementary school).

In the two years that followed, Wood sought out additional prints of HSF's legendary films, while gathering a collection of educational films from other companies, on diverse topics. In the end, HELL'S HIGHWAY does more than tell the story of the Highway Safety Foundation and its legendary films. It offers a wide survey of the educational film movement of the 1950s-'70s, and raises many important questions about the "scared straight" approach to education.

The most difficult part of editing the documentary was deciding the amount of graphic accident-scene footage that would be shown. Very few viewers could endure feature-length exposure to such films as Highways of Agony, The Third Killer and Drive and Survive, yet it was integral to the project that the most brutal aspects of these films be revealed. The filmmakers hope and believe that HELL'S HIGHWAY captures the sensational shock value of the original films without trivializing the efforts of the HSF filmmakers or demeaning the lives that were lost in the making of these tragic motion pictures.