B is for Beach Dickerson, Jack of All Trades

So many Roger Corman alumni, so little time! I could easily write several hundred words on Peter Bogdanovich, who joined the Corman entourage at the time of The Wild Angels. (He started out as Roger’s personal assistant, then a few weeks later ended up directing second unit, en route to making films like The Last Picture Show.) But I’ll save Peter for another day, while I focus on a more obscure Corman colleague: the late Beach Dickerson.

Beach, an early member of the informal Corman Stock Company, had minor roles in several early Corman cheapies. For Attack of the Crab Monster, he also helped pull the piano wires that made the monster move. He got a costume credit on War of the Satellites when Roger demanded he come up with credible astronaut uniforms overnight: “So I went out to the war surplus store.  I could not believe it: I found eight uniforms. At $10 a piece. They had $60 worth of zippers on them.  The only thing was, we could not have over eight people in one scene.”

For the notorious Teenage Caveman, Beach played so many roles that he ended up with three death scenes in the same film. What was it like being directed by Roger Corman? Beach explained to me, “He told you what to do, and by god you’d better do it.” As a young boy in Teenage Caveman, Beach was supposed to feign drowning in a pond at the Los Angeles Arboretum. He was swallowing scummy water and feared throwing up. When an angry Roger accused him of faking and demanded that he drown more effectively, Beach remembers thinking, “You’d better die, Beach. This man is serious.”   

More recent Corman alumni mostly remember Beach Dickerson as the jack-of-all-trades who served as an unlicensed building contractor on several Corman projects. One was a nearly 5,000-square-foot house—perched rather precariously on the lip of a  Brentwood canyon—designed by noted architect Cliff May. It featured large expanses of glass, a fifty-foot living room with lofty ceilings, and clean, contemporary lines throughout. Beach called his work on this house “the crowning joy of my life,” but he told me of fierce battles with Roger, who’d get sudden notions about moving a fireplace two feet, or subverting the requirements spelled out in local building codes. Roger’s love for outsmarting city inspectors continued when he commissioned the shoddy little headquarters he still occupies on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood. Picture a dilapidated two-story building with a leaking roof, cramped hallways, a steep staircase, and no lobby to speak of. Some of the rear offices were bootlegged onto the roof of neighboring structures, and when I worked for Roger he toyed with further grandiose plans to expand his turf, building codes be damned.