The Fire Next Time: Roger Corman and Disaster Movies

I haven’t wanted to write about the terrible conflagrations in my part of the world because it just makes me too sad. Life in West Los Angeles right now seems, in bizarre and tragic ways, to be mirroring the climactic Burning of Los Angeles as depicted in The Day of the Locust. (This 1939 novella was made into a 1975 John Schlesinger film, but for me its on-screen finale doesn’t match in any way the power of Nathanael West’s original prose.)

 I’m lucky, at least, to be in a Santa Monica neighborhood that’s currently not being threatened, though of course anything’s possible. But friends (some of them elderly) have lost everything, and the heartbreak around here is overwhelming. Still, with stiff upper lip I’m turning away from the tragedy here to write about my late boss, low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman, and how he tried to turn disasters to his advantage.

 While I was Roger’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons, in 1989,  there was a major earthquake in the vicinity of San Francisco. It’s almost impossible to photograph an earthquake, since (believe me!) quakes happen without warning, so capturing the actual shaking on film wasn’t a consideration. Still, Roger dispatched a small film crew, which came back to L.A. with some unimpressive footage of cracks and rubble. Then there was the matter of a script. At first Roger got caught up with the issue of shoddy infrastructure, and wanted to make the villain of his piece a bureaucrat beholden to private interests who ignored safety protocols when issuing building permits. For this (with my encouragement) he hired a very good writer of prose fiction, Madison Smartt Bell, in hopes that he would become the next John Sayles, a man who could graduate from page to screen.

  Unfortunately Roger’s concept was too thorny for what was intended as an action flick larded with sex and violence. So the thoroughly-baffled Madison was canned, and Quake was ultimately written in-house by my colleague Rob Kerchner, along with Concorde regular Mark Evan Schwartz. Someone (probably Rob) had the good idea of using the post-quake chaos as a backdrop for a variation on a popular John Fowles novel called The Collector. In 1965 it had become a film starring Terence Stamp as a warped young man who abducts a beautiful woman (Samantha Eggar) and keeps her as a specimen for his “collection.” Our film, directed by Louis Morneau, starred Steve Railsback as a warped young man who abducts a young woman in the aftermath of the so-called Loma Prieta quake.  And what about that rubble footage that Roger had sent his minions to shoot? Quake (aka Aftershock)  was advertised as capturing the actual earthquake on film for the audience’s viewing pleasure.

 It didn’t always take a natural disaster to inspire Roger. The Los Angeles riots of 1992, sparked by the beating of Rodney King, led him to propose another “ripped from the headlines” film, to be called (prophetically, I now realize) Night of a Thousand Fires. He quickly gathered three eager young screenwriters (at least one of them brand-new to L.A.) to create a hard-hitting story that would take in the disparate perspectives of Black rioters, Korean shop-keepers, and the entrenched white hierarchy. With great fanfare, he held a press conference to announce the project. But then, in typical Roger fashion. he quickly lost interest . . . because he realized that with Spielberg shooting a cinematic version of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park it was high time for a quickie dinosaur movie, one that would beat Spielberg’s film into theatres.  And so 1993’s Carnosaur was born.