Yesterday I woke up to the
sad news that Dick Miller had left this world. Dick—pugnacious but lovable—had
reached the ripe old age of 90, but was appearing in B-movies right up to the
end. Dick, of course, got his start with Roger Corman, back in the heyday of
American International Pictures. His first Corman film was Apache Woman, in which the budget was so low that he was hired to
play both a cowboy and an Indian. (As a member of the posse tracking the
Indian, he almost killed himself off in the final reel.) Later he played a jive-spouting vacuum
cleaner salesman in Not of This Earth
(1957) and a good-guy astronaut in War of
the Satellites (1958) before taking on the leading role of would-be artist
Walter Paisley in Corman’s ghoulishly hilarious A Bucket of Blood.
I knew none of this when I
went to work at Corman’s New World Pictures in 1973. I only knew that this very
short, very feisty fellow emblazoned with sailor tattoos was often seen
wandering through our office suite, kibitzing with everyone who came his way.
He and I hit it off immediately, and he gave me a signed headshot I tacked up on my office wall.
Referring to the location week we’d both
spent in a small California town shooting Big
Bad Mama (he played a comically inept lawman), he joked about nibbling on
my ear and asking me the all-important question, “What’s for lunch?”
Though Roger had started Dick
on his acting career, they didn’t always get along. When Roger decided to make
Kurosawa’s classic Yojimbo into a
kung fu movie called TNT Jackson, he
hired Dick to play a friendly bartender and also to write the screenplay.
Accounts differ as to what happened next. Dick felt that one too many free
rewrites had been demanded of him; the office scuttlebutt was that Dick
incurred disfavor by padding his own role. In any case, there was a shouting
match, during which Corman ripped up Dick’s submission. Dick has described for
me what happened next: “I finally said, ‘Shove it!’ He got up—without his
shoes—and kicked a lamp, and broke it. I heard years later that his biggest
bitch was that he had broken the lamp.” Miller’s audacity swiftly won him
respect among Hollywood underlings who had been dying to tell their producers
to go to hell. But it came at a price: for years afterwards, the two men barely
spoke.
Over the decades, Corman
alumni have delighted in casting Dick in colorful character parts. For Martin
Scorsese, he played a nightclub owner in New
York, New York. For James Cameron, he was a pawnshop clerk in The Terminator. When, with Piranha, Roger turned trailer-cutter Joe Dante into a
director, Joe gave Dick the plum role of a crass resort owner whose lake just happens
to be stocked with man-eating fish. Dick quickly became Joe’s good-luck charm,
appearing in virtually every Dante film, most memorably as the hapless Murray
Futterman in Gremlins.
When I started working on the
biography that became Roger Corman:Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, Dick
was one of the very first people I chose to interview. I knew he’d be both
funny and honest—and he was. I last saw him in 2014, at the Hollywood premiere
of an affectionate documentary called That
Guy Dick Miller. One of its producers was Lainie Miller, Dick’s wife of
nearly fifty years. Lainie too is quite a talent: you can see a great deal of
her as the well-endowed stripper in The
Graduate.
Farewell, Dick, wherever you are!
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