“The Accused”: Alumni from the Roger Corman School of Directing

One of the late Roger Corman’s many claims to fame is his knack for sniffing out talented future directors. Some of his most notable discoveries—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich—entered Cormanville long before I did. But when I joined the staff of Corman’s New World Pictures in 1973 I met some eager young chaps who’d do just about anything for a chance to direct a low-budget genre flick. In those days Joe Dante (who’d go on to make such pop culture landmarks as Gremlins) was Roger’s trailer cutter, a quiet fellow who hardly seemed capable of commandeering a film set. And wandering the corridors of New World Pictures you’d find many a scruffy wannabe, each of them hoping for his big break.

 I especially remember Jonathan Demme, a shaggy-haired writer-type who favored brown-and-white saddle oxfords and would cruise the halls with his very tall wife in tow. (In later years he’d shed the wife and adopt a more blow-dried look.) When I first met him, he was just back from the Philippines, where he’d directed for Roger a classic women-in-prison opus, Caged Heat. Later he moved on to much better opportunities at much bigger companies, eventually winning an Oscar for directing a 1991 blockbuster, The Silence of the Lambs. I also fondly remember Paul Bartel, a wildly eccentric sometimes-actor whose 1975 directing debut for Roger, Death Race 2000, led to such indie triumphs as the hilariously gruesome Eating Raoul (1982). And then there was Jonathan Kaplan, who graduated from sexy Corman nurse movies (Night Call Nurses) to action flicks (White Line Fever, 1975).

 Kaplan’s career hit the skids after years of being offered only the same kind of projects he’d already mastered, what he described as "boy meets truck, boy gets truck, boy loses truck and boy gets truck again." But in 1988 he bounced back with a powerful drama that helped Jodie Foster win her first Oscar. The movie was The Accused, a moderately-budgeted legal thriller. The top-billed star was Kelly McGillis, who had recently grabbed attention as the beautiful Amish widow in Witness, and followed that up by  playing Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in Top Gun. In The Accused, McGillis  was a hard-driving district attorney determined to prosecute the young men who joined in the gang assault on her client, a small-town waitress. It was by no means a given that Foster would take on the role of the rape victim. Due to the film’s graphic nature, the part of Sarah Tobias was turned down by a number of rising actresses. Foster at this point had largely backed away from acting, focusing on her studies at Yale, and there were some who felt she lacked the blatant sexuality the role demanded.

 When I watched The Accused, I didn’t know quite what to expect. The film starts just after the hideous doings in the back room of a scruffy bar. Foster’s Sarah escapes from her tormentors and ends up at a local clinic, shell-shocked. It’s the opposite of the spunky performances we usually associate with Foster. But gradually, as the legal proceedings move forward, we watch her character regain her sense of self—her cockiness, her anger. The rape sequence itself is held until near the end –-as a flashback mirroring goings-on in the courtroom—and it’s clear to see what’s triggered it: Sarah boldly flaunts her sexuality, until the moment when she discovers it’s too late to say “No.” The whole grotesque business, with looky-loos egging on the perpetrators, is hard to forget. Score another triumph for a Roger Corman director-in-the-making.