BARRY MAHON

Barry Mahon was born in Bakersfield, California in 1921. If the information online about him is accurate, he led one of the more unusual lives of anyone I have ever read about. First, some background. I sell movie posters for a living, and the posters of Russ Meyer have always been very popular, for obvious reasons. Meyer was one of the very first to bring super sexy movies into the mainstream, and the posters for his movies feature sexy outsized women. But at the same time Meyer was getting started another person was making wild sexy movies, and that man was Barry Mahon. Mahon started making movies in 1960, the year after Meyer made The Immoral Mr. Teas. But Mahon was far more prolific, churning out 44 movies in the next 8 years, with titles like Confessions of a Bad Girl, The Beast That Killed Women, Hot Skin, Cold Cash, etc, and most of the movies have really cool artwork posters, far more interesting than the Russ Meyer posters. In 1969 (in what appears to have been a sort of religious conversion!), Mahon did a complete 180 degree turnaround and directed seven kids movies, including The Wonderful Land of Oz and Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny! One assumes parents who took their children to these movies (shown in Saturday matinees) had no clue as to the lurid past of the director! But here's the really weird part! According to the Internet, Mahon had become a pilot while still in high school, and in 1941 before the U.S. entered WWII, he joined the Royal Air Force so he could get in the action, and he downed several German planes before he himself was forced to bail out of his plane, and he was captured and put in a German prison camp. He escaped and was re-captured, and was liberated at the end of the war, and if this sounds familiar it is likely because you saw this in The Great Escape, and supposedly the part of Hilts (played by Steve McQueen) was based on Mahon! It gets stranger after the war. Supposedly Mahon next became Errol Flynn's personal pilot, and after they became great friends, Mahon became Flynn's manager. Apparently this continued up until Flynn's death in 1959, and the next year Mahon re-surfaced as the director of "nudie" movies, and then ten years later became the director of seven Satuday matinee kids movies for three years, and then made no movies for the next 27 years until 1999, when he passed away in Las Vegas at the age of 78. Can anyone confirm that the above is accurate, and if so, that it all happened to one man?!!