Z is for Samuel Z. Arkoff, Who Gave Roger Corman’s Early Films a Home

[On this, the last day of the A to Z Challenge, I’d like to thank everyone who visited Movieland. A special tip of the hat to birthday boy Craig Edwards, blogger extraordinaire, who started me on this alphabetical journey. If you’re craving more insider Roger Corman stories, I’m announcing that today’s the start of a five-day sale of my thoroughly updated and unexpurgated “Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers” Kindle ebook. And if you’d like to be notified when the new paperback is available, do drop me a line at beverly@beverlygray.com 

       Cormanically yours, Beverly]

Years ago, someone was telling me she’d seen Roger Corman in person at a film festival. What surprised her the most is that, on stage in a crowded auditorium, Roger kept nonchalantly puffing away on a big cigar. To me, this made no sense. I’ve never seen Roger smoke, and public rudeness of this sort is not his style. It suddenly dawned on me that she had the wrong man. She’d been in the presence of Sam Arkoff, co-founder of American International Pictures.

Like Roger Corman, Sam Arkoff inspired stories, and I’ve heard many. One of the nicest: he was a total family man, who bragged about shutting the door to the business world when he went home to his family each evening. The house he went home to, though, created a few hard feelings. It was an up-to-the-minute ranch house, built by Arkoff and his wife Slim on a Studio City hillside. One evening when the house was new the Arkoffs invited a longtime employee, Charles Clement, and his wife Shirley to come visit. They gave the Clements a full tour, showing off closets full of clothes and many state-of-the-art design features. Then Arkoff let Charles know that his salary was being trimmed. After all, new houses are expensive.

Another great story involving Arkoff was told to me by Barbara Boyle, who became Roger’s attorney and then his CFO before entering the ranks of Hollywood producers. When she graduated from UCLA Law School, the dean in charge of placement was hard-pressed to find a suitable spot for someone who was female and extremely feisty. One day he informed her of a last-minute interview with a motion picture company looking for a labor negotiator. She was in jeans and sandals with long loose hair, and there was no time to change clothes. At the old Chaplin studio, big gates swung open to admit her. In the waiting room sat three beautiful young women, dressed to the nines, whom she assumed were from east coast law schools. She was very impressed that this company was seeking out a female attorney: “I thought, this is real affirmative action!”

Then she was summoned into the presence of a man with a big cigar, an open shirt, and his feet up on his desk. First thing he said: “Take off your jeans.” Barbara recalls, “I completely flipped out. I’m talkative now. You can imagine how I was when I was twenty-four.” When Arkoff got a word in edgewise, he asked, “Do you ever think you’re wrong about anything? I’m actually auditioning for a beach party picture, and you’re supposed to have a bathing suit on. Who are you supposed to see?”

Somehow she ended up with Arkoff’s respect—and a job that introduced her to the motion picture business and Roger Corman. Roger had Sam Arkoff’s respect too, though not always his friendship. No room here to detail their testy relationship over the years, but at a tribute event, Arkoff praised Roger as “a cautious man with a buck—which made him very good for us because we didn’t have many bucks in those days.” Arkoff then added, “But sometimes he was too cheap, even for AIP.”

X is for F.X. Feeney, Maker of Monsters

Roger Corman fans will naturally assume that for the letter X in the A to Z Challenge I would choose Roger’s wonderfully inventive horror film, X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes. Fooled you! Instead, I’m going to write about a filmmaker and film critic to whom I have good reason to be grateful.

My story begins in 1989, when a former Cormanite named Thom Mount approached Roger with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Mount, having won his spurs in Hollywood producing Bull Durham and Tequila Sunrise, offered Roger the big bucks to return to directing, after a twenty-year hiatus. What Mount was proposing was a Roger Cormanized-version of the Frankenstein legend, which would call upon the same creative energies Roger had once put toward his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Mount later told me, “The reason I went after Frankenstein, frankly, is that I  thought this was relatively unexploited at that time, [that it was] classic material that would fit Roger’s directorial style and allow him to make something that was interesting and odd.”  The budget allotted was in the vicinity of $11.5 million, a fortune by Corman’s own standards,  and Mount promised Roger “the best script we can get, the best cast we can get, the best music we can get, and the best advertising campaign we can get.” Roger, then over sixty, was hesitant to get back into directing, but not for long: “They’re going to pay me a million dollars. . . .How can I say no?”

Part of Roger’s obligation was to provide a workable script. Typically, he first asked an unpaid office intern to crank out a draft. Then, rising to the occasion, he solicited screenplays from big-name writers like Wes Craven and Floyd Mutrux. At length he optioned a British novel, Frankenstein Unbound (1973), by Brian Aldiss, which added a time-travel element and some hazy metaphysical musings to Mary Shelley’s familiar story. That’s when F.X. Feeney was brought in to make something filmable out of Aldiss’s book.

Feeney was then the respected film critic of the L.A. Weekly. A CalArts graduate, he was also a creative consultant at the Z Channel, an early pay-TV service that catered to serious cinéastes. Years later he’d co-produce a documentary called Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004), which recounted the channel’s brief and ultimately tragic history. He would also earn a writing credit for helping to resurrect an unfilmed Orson Welles screenplay, The Big Brass Ring (1999). Frankenstein Unbound, though, was his first experience as a professional screenwriter. As Concorde-New Horizons story editor, I attended several meetings with F.X. and Roger, who was deeply involved in the writing process. I honestly didn’t care for the Aldiss novel, and had little faith that moviegoers would like it either. F.X.’s script contributed some vivid scenes (like the encounter between time-traveler Joe Buchanan and nineteenth-century literary superstars Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron). But the finished film, which I’ll talk about some other day, couldn’t overcome various problems, including what Mount feels was Roger’s innate sense of being overmatched by this big-budget extravaganza. I hear Frankenstein Unbound is now considered a cult classic. Personally, I’d rather not watch it again.

After my Corman bio was published, F.X. surprised me with a marvelous review: “Speaking as one who has both worked with Roger Corman and observed Beverly Gray in action during her years at Roger's right hand, I was particularly pleased and impressed by this thorough, independent-minded biography. Gray's sensitive combination of scholarly detachment and firsthand observation have made Roger come alive in all his wily brilliance.” Thanks, F.X.!

 

(By the way, big five-day sale on my updated Roger Corman ebook begins on April 30, and pre-sale is on NOW! Do drop by Amazon Kindle for big savings.)

W is for Jim Wynorski: Thanks for the Mammaries

There’s a wagon-load of Ws in the Roger Corman world.  Think of portly actor Mel Welles (Little Shop of Horrors), rising star-trekker William Shatner (The Intruder), and Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler (pseudonymously shooting Stakeout on Dope Street). In my day, there was Concorde studio chief Jonathan Winfrey, and of course Don “The Dragon” Wilson.

But none of them compares to the one and only Jim Wynorski. Elsewhere during this A to Z Challenge there have been tributes to Jim, explaining how he won Roger Corman’s heart through a trailer selling the “fact” that the movie Screamers (actually a tepid Italian import) would feature a man turned inside out. Instead of going back over that well-trod territory, I’ll concentrate here on my own experiences with Jim, in the era when I was Roger’s story editor. Jim was a writer-director, and also Concorde’s resident bad boy, one who often cast scantily-clad lovelies by thumbing through the pages of his little black book.

Jim Wynorski -- tall, well-stuffed, and shaggy – is a large teddy-bear of a man, with the tastes of a perennial adolescent. He’s still fourteen years old at heart, which explains how he can make soft-core porn, monster movies, and PG-rated kiddie fare with perfect conviction. Take the case of Munchie, not to be confused with 1987’s far more hectic Munchies. Munchie (1992), shot during Corman’s brief detour into family films, is a gentle comedy about a supernatural critter (voiced by Dom DeLuise) who helps a lonely young boy find happiness. Still, Jim being Jim, it is stocked with gorgeous women. Gage Dobson’s single-parent mom is played by the voluptuous Loni Anderson, and the role of his sympathetic teacher went to a former Wynorski squeeze, Monique Gabriel. When it came time to cast the cute youngster who catches Gage’s eye, Jim found someone he considered suitable eye-candy for the prepubescents out there. Her name: Jennifer Love Hewitt. She was innocence personified, but her smile, in those long-ago days, lit up the set.

That was the era when TV actor Andrew Stevens (best known for Dallas and for being the ex-husband of one of Charlie’s Angels, Kate Jackson) was moving into producing and directing. Along the way, he played a number of roles for Roger Corman, both heroic leads and comic parts like that of the pompous suitor in Munchie. I’ll write more about Andrew some other day, but I’ll focus here on his instant connection with Jim Wynorski, with whom he collaborated on several Concorde projects. I’m thinking specifically of Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction, directed by Jim and produced (under Roger’s auspices) by Andrew, at the same time that he played the macho but vulnerable victim of Claire Archer’s sexual wiles. Jim and Andrew look absolutely nothing alike. Andrew back then was still leading-man handsome, while Jim reminded me of an overgrown satyr. (Jim occasionally showed up with his hair and beard dyed blond, which certainly added to that impression). Still, their boyish shenanigans in my office were right in sync, and I took to calling them “twins separated at birth.” Ah, those were the days!

Nor did Jim and Roger Corman seem to be birds of a feather. After all, Roger resembles nothing so much as a hip minister or a college professor, one who’d theoretically look down on Jim’s adolescent style. But they share the same aesthetic -- what Jim calls “a big chase and a big chest.” Joe Dante probably said it best: “Jim Wynorski is the side of Roger that he may have inside, but he never lets anybody see.”   

U is for UCLA, Springboard for Future Cormanites

I’ve told the story often: how I came to work for Roger Corman at New World Pictures. I was finishing my doctorate on The Self-Conscious Artist in Contemporary American Literature when a professor-friend called with some surprising news. As chapter president of Phi Beta Kappa, he’d just received a phone call from a moviemaker named Roger Corman (who?), who was looking for a bright young assistant. Since, while working on my dissertation, I was also writing regular movie reviews for the UCLA Daily Bruin, I seemed an appropriate choice. But it was my scholarly accomplishments that appealed to Roger, I think. He loved showing off underlings who had earned fancy degrees and titles.

I was hardly the first UCLA alum whom Roger had hired. From the film school he’d plucked Monte Hellman, then Francis Ford Coppola, and still later such behind-the-scenes wizards as Clark Henderson and Steve Barnett. Other assistants before me had also come from the Westwood campus, which was located not far from Roger’s own headquarters. In 1964, he interviewed a smart and attractive brunette named Julie Halloran who held a bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA. She didn’t get the job being offered, because another candidate was Stephanie Rothman, who had earned a master’s degree from the USC Film School and an award from the Directors Guild of America for directing a student film. But Roger asked Julie for a date, and six years later they were married.

 As Roger’s own star rose, he looked further afield for assistants. When hiring technical personnel (like editors and department heads) to staff the Corman studio, he could have his pick of eager film school grads from USC, UCLA, and NYU. But in the Corman offices, he seemed to value young people with more intellectual backgrounds. For a while it pleased him to look to his own alma mater, Stanford University, for assistants like Gale Anne Hurd, Virginia Nugent, and Rob Kerchner, who could evolve into future producers, even though they didn’t arrive with much in the way of hands-on filmmaking experience. In my own Concorde-New Horizons years, many of my colleagues hailed from the Ivy League, like Anna Roth (Columbia), Mike Elliott (Cornell), Rodman Flender (Harvard), and Sally Mattison (Yale),

Beginning in 1974, a UCLA law school graduate named Barbara Boyle worked closely with Roger, first as his staff attorney and later as his head of business affairs. After a successful producing career, Barbara accepted the chairmanship of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film

and Television, a post she still holds. In 2004, an article in the trades trumpeted Roger’s pledge to award production funding -- to the tune of $100,000 -- to one or more UCLA film students. The plan was that Roger would choose the feature-length projects to be funded, then would donate one-third of each film’s profits to the school. As with similar much-ballyhooed agreements made by Roger with other academic institutions, this one never got off the ground.

I suspect something of the same will hold true for a project I just learned about, involving a San Francisco college’s advanced film students remaking Corman’s Munchies on the cheap. (In the ad I saw, participants are being asked to work without salary, receiving only screen credit “and the added resume builder of working with Roger.”)  Yes, Roger believes in college students, but never quite enough to fork over actual money.  

S is for Cirio Santiago, No Better Than He Had to Be

One of Roger Corman’s last films for American International Pictures was something called Gas-s-s-s! So you can see that Roger definitely likes the letter S. In thinking back through the cast of characters of the Roger Corman world for the A to Z Challenge, I came up with plenty of S names: like actor William Shatner, director Katt Shea, and the marvelous poster artist John Solie. Then there’s Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest directors to have emerged from the Corman stable. Not to mention Alex Stapleton, whose recent Corman documentary I am happy to say was inspired by my book, Roger Corman:Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers.

But I’ll go with none of the above. Not when Cirio Santiago is waiting to get his due. Cirio hailed from Manila, where he followed in the footsteps of his filmmaker father, who had founded Premiere Productions in 1946. It was not long before Cirio had created his own film empire, specializing in English-language action films shot in the Philippines. Of course  Roger Corman soon got wind of Cirio’s talent for making do with little, and soon Cirio was producing (and sometimes directing) New World women-in-prison and blaxploitation flicks. Like The Big Bird Cage! And Fly Me! And who can forget TNT Jackson?  As tastes changed, Cirio’s projects did too, encompassing Mad-Max-type apocalyptic sagas and a whole raft of war dramas in which the Philippines stood in for Vietnam. (I have a screenplay credit on one of the latter, Beyond the Call of Duty.) The Roger and Cirio connection ebbed and flowed, but at one time, when animated films were all the rage, there was even talk of setting up an animation studio in Manila under Cirio’s auspices.

When Cirio visited the Corman headquarters, we were always happy to see him. He was an affable fellow, quick with a joke, and he sometimes brought little gifts for the office staff. But I’m glad I never worked on a Cirio set. As a director he got bored easily, and would sometimes walk off mid-scene in order to go play golf. More seriously, he had a cavalier attitude toward danger. He had easy access to the Philippine Army for battle scenes, and real weapons (modified to shoot blanks) were used with casual enthusiasm. Clark Henderson, who was there, remembers how “they would fire guns up in the air to make the crickets stop.  Guns all over the place, everywhere you went.”

Though the Filipino stuntmen were fearless, they couldn’t be used to double tall American actors, which is why Corman stalwart Rick Dean shattered his collarbone on a Cirio set, after riding a motorcycle through fire and then jumping fifteen feet in the air. Still, Rick called Cirio “a great man,” noting with approval his treatment of actors who think too highly of themselves. One leading man kept demanding retakes of a scene because he wasn’t satisfied.  Cirio reshot the scene multiple times, “but there was no film in the camera.  Cirio was just sittin’ there smiling and laughing hysterically.”

Cirio survived various changes of political leadership in the Philippines with grace. We worried about him when President Marcos was ousted, but he popped up next as the Minister of Film in the new Aquino government. He seemed unsinkable—until lung cancer got him in 2008. Here’s Jim Wynorski’s off-the-cuff tribute: “I loved Cirio personally.  But I never saw a Cirio film I could actually watch.”