It saddens me to report that Frances Doel is no longer with
us. Frances, the right-hand woman of Roger Corman for many a decade, passed
away last week at age 83. Late in life she had moved from Hollywood to Lexington,
Kentucky to be tended by family members who loved her dearly. Honestly, she was
dearly loved by everyone who knew her.
Roger Corman met Frances at Oxford, where she was completing
a degree in literature. Always a shrewd judge of character, he concluded she
was smart enough and agreeable enough to make a good assistant. And so she
was—learning from scratch pretty much every job involving a movie set or a
production office. Her obituary notes that she ghost-wrote the first draft of
many a Corman classic, and named among her official writing credits 1974’s Big
Bad Mama, starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt. I was there, and I’m happy to share how this
first Frances Doel screen credit came to be.
Starting work as Roger’s new assistant in 1973, I
immediately gravitated toward the New World Pictures story department, which
was Frances. Roger wanted a seriocomic rural crime thriller à la Bonnie and Clyde.
Back then, he was obligated to use WGA writers, and it was a lot cheaper to
hire a union writer for a re-write than for an original script. That’s why he
gave Frances an entire weekend to crank out a workable first draft. Of course
she came through with flying colors, devising a story about a poor but feisty
mother and her two nubile daughters who take up robbery in Depression-era
Texas. She slapped a fake name on the draft, and we hired a veteran
screenwriter to take over.
William Norton, a very nice guy, seemed to enjoy story
meetings with Frances and me. As we worked our way through characterizations
and plot points, Bill started wondering aloud about the author of the original draft. He went so far as to ask
if this “man” could come in and discuss some story questions he had. At which
point, Frances and I began to giggle. Eventually we couldn’t hide the fact that
Frances herself was the screenwriter in question. A true gentleman, Bill
insisted that she share script credit with him. It was the start of her string
of Corman writing credits, which ultimately included such low-budget classics
as Crazy Mama and Sharktopus.
Did Frances get paid extra for her weekend labors? She
couldn’t recall exactly, but suspected that Big
Bad Mama earned her about $100. Over the years, her earnings increased,
netting her $5000 each for quickie creature-features like Dinocroc. But she never entirely earned Roger’s full respect. As she
told me in 2011, soon after her retirement, “Roger got very fed up with me,”
because he didn’t feel she was writing fast enough. Ten script pages a day
seemed to him a reasonable amount, even though she was putting in this work
solely on evenings and weekends.
Frances stayed with Roger in various capacities for decades,
earning the genuine praise of such celebrated Corman alumni as John Sayles and
Ron Howard. But the time came when she got a better offer, moving on to Disney,
and then ultimately joining with Corman alum Jon Davison to produce hits like Starship
Troopers. Eventually she hit on hard times, and Roger—in a burst of
generosity—gave her my job as Concorde-New Horizons story editor. It
hurt, but I couldn’t blame Frances. She was too gracious and too special for
that.
And I could never have written my Roger Corman bio without
her.
Wish I had met her! The stories she could've told. I'll have to revisit BIG BAD MAMA. I still have a letter from Frances around here somewhere....
ReplyDeleteShe was the nicest of people, but very modest about her own considerable accomplishments. Many thanks for writing, Eric! What did you two correspond about, if I may ask?
ReplyDelete