"Poverty Row" sounds like a slum, possibly filled with people whose Hollywood dreams had long since dimmed. In actuality, "Poverty Row" wasn't really a place but more a state of mind. The term Poverty Row in the golden age of Hollywood referred to the small, also-ran studios whose product would most often be considered C-List material. While many of the smaller studios were centered around Gower Street in the eastern most outskirts of Hollywood, the term was used to refer to any bottom rung studio, such as PRC, Monogram or Republic Pictures.
If one pictures the major studios as clothing manufacturers, producing top quality clothing for sale, the studios on Poverty Row were like scavengers, grabbing the cloth and materials cut away from the top quality stuff and trying to make something of it. They had a symbiotic relationship with the major studios who often needed cheap C-List product to fill out a program. If a studio wanted an actor to get more experience, they might loan them to a Poverty Row studio. Some of the studios on Poverty Row would even take advantage of sets and set dressings that were originally designed for bigger budget pictures. If MGM had a set that was no longer needed but hadn't been struck yet, they might notify PRC who could use the set for whatever they had going at the time.
A studio on Poverty Row would, therefore, try to stay in the good graces of the bigger studios. It was rough going for a Poverty Row studio that got on the bad side of one of Tinseltown's moguls. They could lose access to budget studio time, talent and the larger theater circuits. For the most part, the more successful Poverty Row studios knew their place and never tried to be more than they were.
Most of the films produced by these studios therefore, were ambition-less duds that often took advantage of Hayes Code loopholes to depict "depravity" and "delinquency". After all, if the moral of the movie was that young people shouldn't commit crimes or engage in lewd displays of depravity, wouldn't the film have to depict those scenes of licentiousness? Not if you were making a film for Louis B. Mayer at MGM. If the movie was at PRC, however, you could do just that. Since the depraved acts were punished in the end, the Hayes Code was typically cool with it- up to a point. This enabled the creation of many a future MST3K feature.
"I accused my parents and I killed them. Who's laughing noooooooooow?"
Ironically, the fall of the studio system spelled the end of Poverty Row. Without double or triple bills, their product was no longer easy to book into theaters. Even worse, filmmaking at the majors became less of an assembly line, meaning that spare studio time and resources were no longer available for scavenging. This did spawn a more vibrant "independent" film ecosystem, though in many instances independent films just became more pretentious but not necessarily better.
