I wrote previously about Rothman's Terminal Island (1973) on Feb. 14, 2017. Rothman was mentored by Roger Corman after her graduation from film school and made seven movies between 1967 and 1978, all of them low-budget exploitation films (small budgets, nudity, violence and unknown actors) and eventually started her own company, where she was unable to find financing for additional films; it was thought she could only make exploitation films -- which she had done mainly to get a foothold in the business -- and she was a woman, few of whom were allowed to direct in the seventies. She quit making movies and went into the real estate business.
My own feeling is that part of the problem was that the exploitation films Rothman made all had strong leading women asserting themselves, as in The Velvet Vampire, where Susan Ritter (Sherry E. DeBoer) battles it out with vampire Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall) for the soul of Susan's husband Lee (Michael Blodgett) in the desert (LeFanu is a reference to nineteenth-century writer Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, who wrote the lesbian vampire novella Camilla). The film takes place mostly in the desert and the desert home of Diane, though after Diane kills Lee she chases Susan into the Greyhound bus terminal in Los Angeles, where Susan kills Diane with a cross and bright sunlight. Rothman and her cinematographer Daniel Lacambre shot the film in bright primary colors, primarily red (of course), yellow and blue and included a number of effectively erotic scenes, with Rothman (who wrote the film with Maurice Jules and Charles S. Swartz) using some standard vampire lore while also inventing new rules of her own.
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