Biography
Ronnie Ashcroft (sometimes credited as Ronald V. Ashcroft) was an editor and sometime director/producer, who made his major mark in motion pictures with the notoriously low-budget
The Astounding She-Monster. Born in Massachusetts, he entered the film business by way of the New York publicity department of 20th Century-Fox at the age of 20, in 1941. He liked the industry and planned on becoming a cameraman, but he was disuaded from that goal when he learned that the union for camera operators had a 1000-dollar initiation fee; he also discovered that the editor's union had only a 250-dollar initiation fee, and that was the direction he chose for his career. Ashcroft spent years as an editor's assistant, and then moved up to jobs such as sound effects editor for some of the smaller producers; he fulfilled the latter capacity in
Roger Corman's
The Day the World Ended, in 1956, and was the editor on the independent feature
Wetback, starring
Lloyd Bridges. Ashcroft turned to producing in 1956 with
Outlaw Queen, a B-western starring bandleader
Harry James and co-starring
Robert Clarke. In 1958, Ashcroft produced and directed what proved to be his magnum opus,
The Astounding She-Monster, a quickly made sci-fi thriller starring Clarke, which cost 18,000 dollars to shoot and which he reportedly sold to American International Pictures for 60,000 dollars.
The Astounding She-Monster became the movie that Ashcroft was best remembered for in any capacity -- the eerie (albeit cheap) special effects and oddly structured plot and action made the movie very diverting; Ashcroft's abilities as a filmmaker were sorely tested, and he reportedly called in Edward D. Wood Jr., the maker of
Plan 9 From Outer Space, as a consultant on the movie, for which the screenwriter was supposedly delivering pages of the script while they were shooting. His next film as a director, The Girl With an Itch, was notable for offering a late starring role to 1930s veteran leading man
Robert Armstrong, and for testing the tolerance of the censors with a plot that roughly paralleled the Italian-made Bitter Rice, about a voluptuous farm worker (Kathy Marlowe) who causes trouble wherever she goes. Ashcroft gave up directing after that, although he did assist Wood in the making of
Night of the Ghouls, the intended 1959 sequel to
Bride of the Monster and
Plan 9 From Outer Space (it went unreleased for more than 25 years). He edited a comedy called Stump Run in 1959, and edited one children's film,
Whale of a Tale, that was written and directed by Ewing Miles Brown (who had appeared as an actor in
The Astounding She-Monster). In between those credits, he won a Golden Reel award for his sound editing on
Von Ryan's Express, but most of his work from the 1960s on was in television, where he also won awards for his editing on the television series Hawaii Five-0 and
Battlestar Galactica, and the mini-series
QB VII. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide