Roger Corman Goes to High School

 Each year, as April 5 approaches, I find myself musing about my former boss, B-movie maven Roger Corman. Remarkably, this April 5 Roger will turn 97 years old. Hardly the rocking chair type, he’s still involved in grinding out low-budget movies, with the help of wife Julie and a small staff. You won’t find my name on his Wikipedia page (in the wake of my Corman biography he’s had staffers purge me from the site). But I’d like to think that my Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking and its updated version, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, have helped put into context Roger’s significant contributions to Hollywood. I also hope it reveals, despite it all, the affection and admiration I feel toward the man who inducted me into the film industry.

 This year, my thoughts about Roger’s accomplishments are blended with my response to a non-Corman film I finally got around to seeing. The Jack Black vehicle, School of Rock, was released in 2003. Black plays a slacker who finagles his way into a substitute teaching gig at a tony local prep school. With zero ability to instruct his charges in academic subjects, he manages to form the little nerds and kiss-ups who populate his classroom into a rock band good enough to score in a local competition. It’s all charmingly amiable: even the stuffy principal (Joan Cusack), who frets a great deal about threats to the school’s academic reputation, is eventually on board.

This feel-good flick, in which the status quo is attacked with no permanent harm done, immediately reminded me of a Corman-produced gem from 1979, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. This too is a lively film about students resisting the rules of a conventional educational institution. The leading characters are teenagers, led by the irrepressibly bouncy Riff Randell (P.J. Soles), who considers herself the #1 fan of the punk group known as The Ramones. Once again the students rebel against a behind-the-times faculty, here led by the tyrannical, unbendable principal Evelyn Togar (Mary Woronov) and some arrogant classroom types who will stop at nothing to ban rock ‘n’ roll from the campus. In this world, there are no cool grown-ups of the Jack Black variety. And the ending is hardly one that shows friendly reconciliation of the opposing points of view. Instead, we watch the students actually blow up their school. It’s a triumph of a very different sort than that of School of Rock. Though Rock ‘N’ Roll High School has the exuberance of a Fifties teen film, its ending promotes  a jubilant anarchy.

 I’ve had long conversations about Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with both director Allan Arkush and original screenwriter Joseph McBride. Joe praises Allan, a passionate pop music fan, for spearheading this film, back in the days when Roger encouraged young talents to take the lead on upcoming projects. He confirms the report that Roger sought to score the film to a different beat and call it Disco High,, but that Allan would not be swayed.. He also told me that the  building that dramatically exploded was Mt. Carmel High School in Watts, a Catholic school that had been condemned because of earthquake safety issues. Corman’s minions rented the building for $1000 from the local priest, not telling him of their plans to blow it up. “This was typical Roger.,” said Joe. At first Allan assumed they’d use a miniature. “And Roger said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s too expensive to build the miniature. You’re going to have to blow up a real school.’”

 Happy birthday, Roger. Here’s to many more things that go boom!