Well, now that summer’s almost here, it’s time for some
drive-in movies. Of course, flicks you watch from your car are pretty much a
thing of the past. But B-movie maven Roger Corman has just launched his very
own YouTube subscription channel, which has been aptly dubbed “Corman’s
Drive-In.” For a mere $3.99 per month,
subscribers can enjoy old movies culled from the Corman archives. First up is a
rarity, 1958’s The Cry Baby Killer,
in which Jack Nicholson made his screen debut. It will be followed by a Corman
classic, the original Little Shop of
Horrors.
Little Shop, of course, is the two-day
wonder that was cranked out by Roger to take advantage of sets left standing when
another production wrapped. Chuck Griffith dashed off the story of a dimwitted
flower-shop assistant who breeds a plant that thrives on human blood. The young
Jack Nicholson joined forces with Corman regulars Jonathan Haze, Dick Miller,
and Mel Welles in this gruesome but hilarious farce. The budget totaled about
$27,500, and the film’s threadbare look became part of the fun.
Typically,
Roger didn’t get around to copyrighting his quickie movie. But when Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s musical version of Little Shop became an off-Broadway hit
in 1982, he discovered that his earlier laxness was now costing him money.
Television stations were frequently airing his 1960 film, and people were even
circulating pirated home video versions. In order to sell his own authorized
videos, Roger needed to locate the master print. But given the chaotic state of
record-keeping at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, no one had any idea where it was. It fell
to a young staff editor named Steve Barnett to track down the elusive
print.
As
usual, Roger had never bothered to make what’s called an “interpositive” as a
backup in case of damage. Steve has detailed for me how he located the original
Little Shop cut negative at a film lab’s
storage facility. The optical soundtrack was also there, but not the
“three-stripe,” the magnetic tape of the dialogue, music, and effects
soundtracks. An optical soundtrack is celluloid, and can be extremely fragile
when it’s old. Steve remembers that “I was deathly afraid to put
the soundtrack into the printer, for fear it would crumble and we would lose it
forever.”
Fortunately,
Roger’s brother Gene suggested that the magnetic tape of the film might be in
the vault at a local sound lab, possibly stored under another name. So Steve’s
sleuthing continued: “Down there in the basement of Ryder Sound in Hollywood,
dusting off all these old boxes, we found this one stack that said, ‘Passionate
People Eater’—barely visible. The ink was on masking tape and it was
evaporating. So we almost didn’t know what it was.” It was, in fact, the object
of Steve’s search, labeled with the film’s working title. After his eureka
moment, he quickly went to work making copies of Little Shop’s various elements: “I wanted as much protection for it
as I could get, as much for Roger’s own good as for what I felt was this
amazing piece of film history. I was just thrilled to be able to protect
something that I’d watched as a kid on television. And so if you buy the
authorized video now, it’s this pristine, beautiful copy. I don’t think Roger
knew I went as far as a fine-grain interpositive and an internegative—but he
knows now, so there you go.”
Sounds
like Corman’s Drive-In owes Steve
Barnett a big debt of gratitude. And a generous reward — but that’s hardly
Roger’s style.
