Friedman first became interested in entertainment after spending part of his childhood in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama, traveling carnival sites. He worked as a film projectionist in Buffalo before serving in the US Army during the Second World War.
He met exploitation film pioneer Kroger Babb during his army service. This encounter got him interested in films. He then worked as a regional marketing man for Paramount, and sensed the money in independent distributing.
Friedman went on to produce the latter's 1963 film Blood Feast, an American exploitation film often considered the first "gore" or splatter film. He was also the producer of two of the first Nazi exploitation films, Love Camp 7 (1969)[3] and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1974), for which he wouldn't use his real name and was credited as Herman Traeger.[4][5]
With the advent of hardcore porn as a commercial factor in the mid-1970s, Friedman began to slow down his output. His motto was "Sell the sizzle not the steak" and he would not allow actual intercourse to be shown in his films. Still, he was president of the Adult Film Association of America, a trade association for hardcore porn producers.[6]
In the early 1990s Seattle's Something Weird Video, owned by Mike Vraney, started to re-issue much of Friedman's work on videocassette, getting him the attention of a new generation of exploitation and b-movie collectors. He can be heard on the audio commentary track of some of the company's releases. In 1997, Friedman appeared in a lengthy segment of the feature-length documentary Hollywood Rated "R" and in the half-hour documentary David Friedman, Portrait of an Exploiteer, in the both of which he goes over his entire career and the history of exploitation films in America. In 2000 Friedman was featured alongside cult filmmakers Roger Corman, Doris Wishman, Harry Novak and others in the documentary SCHLOCK! The Secret History of American Movies, a film about the rise and fall of American exploitation cinema.
In 1990 Friedman published his autobiography, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King.[7] He remained proud of his cinematic oeuvre: “I made some terrible pictures, but I don’t make any apologies for anything I’ve ever done. Nobody ever asked for their money back.”
