Y is for the Youth Market, Where Roger Corman Found his Audience

It’s funny how the letter Y has offered me only slim pickings, when it comes to the Wonderful World of Roger Corman. I can’t think of any colorful Corman alumni, or ageing stars, or slightly slimy overseas entrepreneurs whose names start with today’s letter. So I’ll talk about a word that has always been an important part of the Roger Corman lexicon: YOUNG. 

Look back at Roger’s early film output, and you’ll see The Young Racers. In my New World days, over my desk was a poster of one of Julie Corman’s first productions, The Young Nurses. This was the usual slick combo of comedy, action, and hospital cuties who looked attractive both in and out of uniform. I scan the cast list now and see some distinguished veterans of the acting profession, including Allan Arbus, Nan Martin, Dick Miller, even the celebrated indie director Sam Fuller (The Big Red One), who enjoyed taking an acting role now and again. I’m told this was also the very last film of Mantan Moreland, the black comic actor who survived literally hundreds of movie roles as scaredy-cat butlers and Pullman porters and shoeshine boys. But the point of The Young Nurses, of course, was to appeal to youthful moviegoers much more interested in hot chicks than in cinema history. Those stories of Quentin Tarantino sneaking out of his mother’s house at night to go see New World movies? He was the ideal Corman audience.

Roger, when I first met him in 1973, was in his mid-forties. So he was no youngster, even though he was newly married and not yet a father. But he had forged his career, starting in the mid-fifties, when he was not long out of college. At that time it didn’t make sense to him that the studios were casting as romantic leads actors nearly twice his own age. Look at Audrey Hepburn’s co-stars at the beginning of her screen career. In 1953’s Roman Holiday, she was a pixie-ish twenty-four, but she played opposite Gregory Peck, who was thirty-seven. The following year, she starred as Sabrina, who had to choose between William Holden (thirty-six) and Humphrey Bogart (fifty-five). One year later, in Funny Face, she romanced Fred Astaire (fifty-eight). And in each case the unfolding romance had something to do with wealthy people and picturesque European capitals. I’m choosing examples from the field of romantic comedy, which happens to be a favorite of mine. But in action films too the stars were getting long in the tooth.   

Roger’s gut feelings about the burgeoning power of the youth market were shared by the owners of American International Pictures, Jim Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff.  AIP was formed to take full-advantage of the so-called Consent Decree, a Supreme Court anti-trust ruling that upended the major studios’ tactic of booking only their own films into motion picture theatre chains they controlled. Suddenly there were movie houses – particularly drive-ins – that needed product. AIP was happy to supply it, figuring that young post-war kids with money in their jeans would like spending their cash on flicks that featured monsters and girls in bikinis.

It worked. Soon AIP and other small independent film companies were grinding out genre films – horror, sci-fi, beach party romps -- with youthful casts. (Exactly the kind of movies that Bill Dever’s lively B-Movie Nation site salutes today.) Ten years later, as American kids became bolder, the movies took on a harder edge, featuring bikers and the drug scene and social rebellion. Like Roger Corman’s seminal The Wild Angels and The Trip. And Dick Clark’s Psych-Out, featuring a long-haired Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. And Sam Katzman’s cheesy Riot on Sunset Strip. Yup, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  

V is for Jan-Michael Vincent, Going to Seed on Roger Corman’s Dime

If you’re thinking about the Roger Corman world, the letter V could stand for Virginia Nugent. Ginny, one of the nicest and most capable assistants I remember from Concorde-New Horizons, parlayed her Corman experience into a series of studio line-producer jobs, then was named Vice-President of  West Coast Production at HBO. I also want to salute the feisty Pamm Vlastas, a Corman distribution ace who eventually moved out on her own.

But instead I’m going to talk about Jan-Michael Vincent. If you look at Vincent’s IMDB page, you’ll see a photo of a Golden Boy, a shirtless hunk who starred in Seventies films like the surfing flick, Big Wednesday. I paid little heed to him until 1992, when he was sent to the Philippines to star in a Vietnam picture I had a hand in writing. In that era, with America’s involvement in Vietnam long over, we at Concorde took advantage of warfare’s dramatic possibilities to produce a whole slew of battlefield epics. Fortunately, some of our writers -- like Tom Cleaver -- had actually done combat in ‘Nam, once upon a time. The rest of us just faked it as best we could: there was hardly an opportunity for detailed research. And in a Concorde movie, realism didn’t much matter, as long as the script had plenty of blood and guts and derring-do.

Here’s the official Concorde description of Beyond the Call of Duty, as posted on IMDB: “While leading a maverick band of warriors behind enemy lines, a U.S. Army Commander is forced to lead a beautiful American journalist through the treacherous Mekong River Delta aboard a high speed gun boat while being pursued by a cunning Vietnamese enemy.” The cunning Vietnamese enemy forces were  of course portrayed by devil-may-care Philippine stuntmen, who specialized in remarkable flips and somersaults when hit with prop bullets. And the tough but tender U.S. Army Commander was played by Jan-Michael Vincent, who was in a downward career spiral but still had enough of a name to be useful for Roger Corman purposes.

Director Cirio Santiago had seen a lot of shenanigans on his sets, but Vincent apparently took the cake. His drinking was a constant problem for cast and crew. For one particular scene, his feet were so swollen that he couldn’t pull on his boots, so he was photographed from the knees up to mask the fact he was barefoot. His situation on our film wasn’t unique. When Clark and Isabel Henderson were working on a non-Corman picture in the Philippines, they remember something of the same. In medium shots there’d be two guys out of camera range holding up Vincent, who was simply too drunk to stand. Said Henderson, “I’ve never seen a guy so totally bombed and out of it in my life.” 

Such is life in a low-budget company. Your cast is usually filled with newbies (not to mention, if you’re shooting abroad, foreign nationals with shaky English skills), but there’s often a role for a headliner who used to be something of a box-office draw, ‘way back when. And many of those veterans are much the worse for wear. It’s sadly ironic how he-man looks and acting talent don’t last, while Roger Corman goes on and on.

T is for Talia Shire, Who Dated Roger ‘Way Back When

Back when the world was young (okay, it was 1968) a young actress named Talia Coppola played the “1^st girlfriend” in The Wild Racers, a low-budget race car drama directed by Roger Corman’s veteran art director, Daniel Haller. The film starred familiar B-movie names -- Fabian, Mimsy Farmer, Dick Miller – and its plot, as well as its title, sounded a lot like The Young Racers. When Roger Corman had directed and produced that earlier Grand Prix flick in Europe in 1963, his assistant Francis Ford Coppola had gone along as a very novice sound man. Talia of course is Francis’s little sister, and in 1972 her role as The Godfather’s Connie Corleone Rizzi would make her a bankable Hollywood star. But in 1968 she, like brother Francis, was just getting started.

In 1969, three years before The Godfather, Talia was directed by Roger Corman himself in the film that acrimoniously ended his long relationship with American International Pictures. It was an oddity called Gas-s-s-s! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It, and it reflected Roger’s countercultural impulses in that turbulent era. The premise of Gas-s-s-s! is that a mysterious air-borne poison has killed off everyone in the United States over the age of twenty-five. Corman’s youthful characters form into family units and begin a strange odyssey through the American Southwest. Though the cast included, along with Talia, such rising stars as Ben Vereen, Cindy Williams, and Bud Cort, no one’s career was much advanced by this box office flop.

Around the time she was appearing in Gas-s-s-s!, Talia worked behind the scenes in other Corman films, and dated Roger briefly. She was one of many bright young women over the years who have benefitted from on-the-job training in a Corman company. As she told People magazine in 1980, Roger’s assistants typically begin by answering the telephone, and two weeks later progress to reading scripts and scouting for locations: “It beats hell out of going to the Yale School of Drama.”

Though I’m sure Talia did well in the role of what Roger has always liked to call his “ace assistant,” her success in the Godfather films, and as Adrian in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky franchise, ensured that she would have no further need to sit behind a desk in a Corman office. Ironically, it was in a Corman office that I met her. Circa 1994, she’d approached  Roger with a screenplay for an erotic thriller called One Night Stand. Her plan was to make this her directing debut, and so we spent many hours beefing up the script. Alida Camp, the film’s producer, later told me that Roger had always thought highly of Shire. For that reason, said Camp, “he was willing to let her have a lot of freedom. And he put more money into her movie also. Well, it ended up being more money than he wanted to put in.” The upshot was that Roger abruptly slashed several hundred thousand dollars from the budget, but Shire refused to believe he was serious. She ended up owing him money, and the once-cordial relationship soured.

Sadly, during the script development phase of One Night Stand, Talia’s husband Jack Schwartzman passed away, following a long illness. The couple had two sons together, and both of them have followed their mother into the acting profession. Jason Schwartzman, a favorite of Wes Anderson, has enlivened everything from Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom. So the Coppola dynasty continues.   

Q is for Quentin Tarantino, Roger Corman’s #1 Fan

Those of us who write about movies for the A to Z Challenge have got to be grateful to Quentin Tarantino. He fits snugly into today’s “Q” spot, in the same way that he fits snugly into the Roger  Corman world. Not that Tarantino was ever on Roger’s payroll. But he illustrates what can happen when a dedicated Corman fan decides to make B-movies with A-budgets.

When Tarantino was a lad, he’d sneak out of his mother’s house in suburban Torrance, California and head for the seedy Carson Twin Cinema, where he could watch late-night double bills of New World nurse movies and women-in-prison flicks. As a budding exploitation-film  connoisseur, he developed a special preference for Jonathan Kaplan’s Night  Call Nurses, which he has described as “a classic mix of sex, nudity, and political consciousness.” (His fondness for statuesque woman-warrior Pam Grier led him to star her, years later, in Jackie Brown.)

After dropping out of high school, Tarantino wound up with a job at a video store in a South  Bay shopping mall. There he was befriended by a friend of mine, herself a movie buff with a job in the same mall. Since he always seemed hungry, she took him home and fed him pizza. But they didn’t get too close: for one thing, it didn’t seem that he bathed very often.

Tarantino exemplifies one of the upstart filmmakers who moved on to fame and fortune by going the film festival route, rather than toiling in Roger Corman’s vineyards. He made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival with his first effort, the brutal but extremely creative Reservoir Dogs (1992), and the rest is movie history. It’s worth noting that, although he dedicated his film to Roger Corman along with such cinema icons as Chow Yun Fat and Jean-Luc Godard, Tarantino never approached Roger when trying to raise financing. Instead he turned to early Corman protégé Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop), who proved invaluable in showing him where the money could be found. In 1996, a Variety reporter asked Roger Corman, “If a Quentin Tarantino came to you with the script of Reservoir Dogs, and asked you for a million dollars to make it, what would you say?” Corman’s reply: “I’d say I’ll give you $750,000 and you’ll do the film.” Maybe that’s why Tarantino kept his distance.

But he’s never lost his appreciation for Roger’s output. At the 2009 ceremony at which Roger was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an honorary Oscar, Tarantino made a lively speech, summing up the Corman legacy. He ended with a flourish: “Roger, for everything that you have done for cinema, the Academy thanks you, Hollywood thanks you, independent filmmaking thanks you, but most importantly -- for all the wild, weird, cool, crazy moments you’ve put on the drive-in screens -- the movie-lovers of the planet Earth thank you!”

Spoken like a #1 fan.  (I wonder if he’s seen Misery.)

I is for Isabel and Clark Henderson, Who Saw Roger Corman at His Best (and His Worst)

I must admit that I is not an easy letter when you’re in the throes of an A to Z Challenge. It’s not simple to think of  Roger Corman people whose names begin with the ninth letter of the alphabet. One exception is Ib Melchior, whose short story, “The Racer,” was the basis for the New World cult classic, Death Race 2000. To hear Roger tell it these days, he himself came up with the wild idea of the futuristic cross-country road race in which drivers score points by running down pedestrians. Sorry, Roger – that detail was at the heart of Melchior’s story. True, “The Racer” is stilted and ultimately sentimental. It is not nearly so memorable as the darkly funny film scripted by Chuck Griffith and brilliantly directed by Paul Bartel. But to give credit where credit’s due, Melchior’s outrageous idea started the whole thing.

Here’s what I really want to talk about: two behind-the-scenes people who owe much to Roger Corman. In 1980 Clark Henderson, a UCLA film student with some short films to his credit, was approached by a Corman minion who offered a job interview. Two days later, Clark was a production assistant in charge of craft service, which means he provided the bagels and other tasty treats arrayed on the snack table during the filming of Battle Beyond the Stars. Because he was around during the rare off-days at Corman's Venice, California studio, he saw something out of the ordinary: Roger walking the film’s fledgling director through his paces, blocking out the shots for the next day of shooting. Normally, Roger didn’t interfere with the work of his young directors. He was generally adept at figuring out who was ready to shoot a film that would come in on time and on budget. But in the case of Battle Beyond the Stars, which because of its special effects requirements posed huge logistical challenges, Roger miscalculated. Which is why he was gently, graciously, coming to the rescue of a young man who was in ‘way over his head.

Clark, with his solid grasp of technical filmmaking, soon rose through the ranks at New World. Ultimately Roger sent him to oversee a raft of action films being shot in the Philippines, many of them directed by the irrepressible Cirio Santiago. Cirio’s associate producer was a smart cookie named Isabel. Soon she and Clark were an item. After Clark returned to the U.S., Roger played cupid by signing the documents that helped Isabel enter the country. He found her a job in his accounting department, but eventually the two were told that they’d better get married, or else Roger’s company might be in trouble with immigration authorities. (Clark notes that Roger quickly adored Isabel: “She was like the accounting maven.  She’d always catch people in fraudulent shit, and he loved her for that.”)

The Hendersons don’t sugarcoat their memories of working for Roger. Both recall that when things got tough on the set he could be paranoid (“What kind of stupid idea is this?  This is sabotage! They’re trying to get me!”), and subject to temper tantrums. They’ve seen him throw things – even throw punches – and have shaken their heads at his bursts of rampant homophobia. But all that was a long time ago. Both Isabel and Clark, now a vice-president of Technicolor Creative Services in New York City, agree that Roger Corman has changed their lives for the better.