David Cronenberg, one of the leading B-movie auteurs of the , had stepped up in financial grade with "Scanners" (1980), a $3.5 million production that "Time" critic Richard Corliss associated with his earlier, low-budget films as well as George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) and John Carpenter's "The Fog" (1980) as "hip parables of contemporary moral malaise." Cronenberg's crowning achievement in that vein would come a decade and a half later: Like that of "Scanners" in 1980, the budget of "Crash", $10 million, wasn't comfortably A-grade by 1996, but it was hardly B-level either. The film's imagery was another matter: "On its scandalizing surface, David Cronenberg's "Crash" suggests exploitation at its most disturbingly sick," is how Janet Maslin's "New York Times" review begins. The review ends with an explanation of the film's rating: ""Crash" has the NC-17 rating (No one under 17 admitted) that it fully deserves. It includes frontal nudity, many sexual encounters and coolly grotesque situations linking sex and violence in graphic, sickening ways." Financed, like "King of New York", by a consortium of production companies, it was ultimately picked up for U.S. distribution by Fine Line Features. In more ways than one, this result resonated perfectly with the way the film scrambled definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire—specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor's arthouse division.