Losing the Invaluable Frances Doel

 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.   

Bruce Logan: On the Beach and On the Moon

I first met Bruce Logan when he was getting married. Well, sort of. Back in 1974 I was serving as production secretary on the Roger Corman gangster romp, Big Bad Mama, which starred the odd triangle of Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt. (Yes, there were some wild and crazy sex scenes.) Part of my job was to keep track of cast and crew. So I knew it was a very big deal that Bruce Logan was our director of photography. After all, he had been a young visual effects whiz, working directly with Stanley Kubrick and SFX master Douglas Trumbull on 2001: A Space Odyssey. A self-taught animator, he began work on 2001 in 1965, at age 19,  and stayed with the project through the film’s release in 1968. That same year, he left his native England, coming to California to collaborate with Trumbull on Antonioni’s apocalyptic Zabriskie Point (1970).

 Given his classy resumé, we were all impressed that Bruce Logan was willing to work on low-budget Roger Corman fare. But there he was, fitting in nicely with our misfit crew. The last day of our three-week Big Bad Mama shoot, we threw ourselves a wrap party on the site of our final location, Malibu’s Paradise Cove. To add to the fun, we staged on the sand a mock wedding for Bruce and his girlfriend, who were apparently planning to get hitched for real in the near future. A veteran actor, Royal Dano, had played a scoundrel of a minister in the film: he was persuaded to put on his clerical robes and conduct the ceremony with great theatrical flourish. If memory serves, most of the ad hoc wedding party ended up splashing in the waves. And a good time was had by all.

 I didn’t think much about Bruce over the years, until filmmaker friends invited me to a gathering at which he was being given a lifetime achievement award. This was around 2009, and his filmography had swelled to include providing visual and optical effects for the first Star Wars film (1977) and cinematography for the ambitious sci-fi epic, Tron (1982), in which a computer hacker is abducted into a digital world. I was then working on a book that took readers back to the film year 1967, and I had a hunch that Bruce would have some opinions about that era in which both he and I were youthful film enthusiasts.  He graciously invited me to his Pacific Palisades home for what turned out to be a long, fascinating chat. He was an imposing figure: tall, with white hair and beard. His clothing was conservative, except for a beaded necklace and that heavy silver skull bracelet on his left wrist. Underneath it all, I suspect, Bruce Logan would forever be a bit of a hippie, though he no longer had the long flowing locks of his 2001 days.

 Our conversation was wide-ranging. Of course we discussed Kubrick’s prescience in making 2001, which features convincing-looking computer screens and read-outs decades before desktop computers actually existed. With the advent of the U.S. space program, new data was coming in about the lunar surface, at the very same time that Kubrick and company were deciding what their moon’s back side should look like. They thought of altering their concept to match the science, then decided that, frankly speaking, “the moon looks kind of boring.” Ultimately, they stuck by their own artistic vision, one that would prove inspiring to countless Baby Boomers.

 Bruce Logan died on April 10, 2025. I wish we could have had another long, fruitful chat.

 

 

Undressing “Dressed to Kill”

Here there be spoilers.

  Watching Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, a popular erotic thriller from 1980, I found myself remembering my Roger Corman years. Why? First, because the executive producer on Dressed to Kill was Samuel Z. Arkoff, who with James Nicholson had led American International Pictures, the company that taught Corman how to make movies fast and cheap for the drive-in market. Secondly, one of the big-name stars of Dressed to Kill is the drop-dead gorgeous Angie Dickinson, as a wife and mother eager for sexual kicks and kinks. When I worked for Corman’s New World Pictures in 1974, Angie starred in the sexy Big Bad Mama, showing off a beautifully toned body and a good-natured willingness to bare it on-set. (I suspect the franker version of Dressed to Kill that I just watched on video employs a body double for the scene in which Angie’s character graphically masturbates in the shower. Who could blame her for backing away from that sort of intimate reveal? But I still give her props for her willingness to approach material that is frankly erotic.) 

 The third reason that Dressed to Kill makes me think of my Corman days is that, in the wake of Fatal Attraction (1987), we at Concorde-New Horizons became enamored with the idea of producing our own erotic thrillers. Our Body Chemistry (1990), featuring a female medical researcher with perverse sexual proclivities, soon followed. But we also borrowed from De Palma’s work a title and some of his film’s more prurient kinks. The result: 1987’s Stripped to Kill, directed (and co-written) by a feisty young woman named Katt Shea. The official description tells the tale: “When Detective Cody Sheehan discovers the body of a stripper from the Rock Bottom dance club, she wants the case. But the only way Cody can get the assignment is to go undercover—uncovered—at the club.”

 Strippers and killers turned out to be such a lucrative combination that we went on to make Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls, as well as Dance of the Damned (a not-so-brief encounter between a vampire and a stripper). We also shot Midnight Tease (in which I have a minor role), before hanging up our g-strings for good.

 There are, I hasten to add, no strippers in Dressed to Kill. But aside from Dickinson’s hot-to-trot housewife, the film features De Palma’s brand-new spouse, Nancy Allen, as a prostitute who helps track down her killer. And then there’s the tall, mysterious blonde who seems to have lethal intentions toward both women. Who is this blonde when she’s at home? Let’s say Bobbi, and leave it at that.

 Without trying to blurt out the film’s secrets, I’ll simply assert that Dressed to Kill would not be made today, at least not in its current form. Many have accused it, in the words of the ever-smart Wikipedia, of perpetuating the myth that trans people are sexual predators caught in the grip of mental illness. Writing in The Guardian in 2020,  critic Scott Tobias referred to De Palma's grasp of trans issues as "disconcertingly retrograde . . . There's no getting around the ugly association of gender transition with violence, other than to say that it feels thoroughly aestheticized. ”

 De Palma admits that times have changed. He still insists, though, that the film has long been a favorite of the gay community, partly for the aesthetic flamboyance of its cinematography and the high pitch of its emotions. You’ll find Stripped to Kill full of all of that as well. At Corman’s we learned to be terrific copycats.