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. 

Death Race 2000: Driving a Hard Bargain

I’m proud that my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers (now –- at last! –- available as an ebook) has loyal fans. One of them, Jerry Lentz, just referred me to a recent Roger Corman interview on PBS. Here, as always, my former boss comes off as genial, articulate, and modest. When discussing Death Race 2000, though, he casually enlarges his own role and slights the contributions of others. As Roger’s assistant story editor at New World Pictures, I was involved from the beginning. So it seems high time to set the record straight.

Roger tells host Ernie Manouse that Death Race 2000 started with a short story by Ib Melchior. In Roger’s telling, “The Racer” is about “car racing in the future, in which the drivers try to knock each other off the track.” Disappointed with the initial script, he personally added a new wrinkle: the film would chronicle a cross-country road race, with drivers accumulating points for every pedestrian they ran down along the way. The goal was a serious action flick, until Roger realized, “Y’know, this idea is so audacious, it’s got to be done with humor.” Out of this change of heart came a cult classic.

Sorry, Roger . . . that’s not how it happened. In the beginning, there was indeed the Ib Melchior story. It contained the germ of the idea fans remember today: that drivers win the race by “scoring” pedestrians. This was hardly a Corman brainstorm, nor was it the product of Melchior’s fertile imagination. Most of us who were kids on 1950s schoolyards -- far too young to have experienced real tragedy in our own lives -- played the naughty little game of assigning points to various traffic victims. (A pregnant nun on roller skates was worth at least 15 points.) Anyway, although Melchior’s story contained that one morbid element, it was also pat and sentimental. The leading character, having just run down (ugh) a pretty school teacher and her young charges, sees the error of his ways and decides to covertly change the system.

What we took from Melchior’s story was its gruesome idea but not its sentimental approach. Still, our first screenwriter didn’t seem to get the picture. Science fiction author A.E. Van Vogt couldn’t buy the idea of a driver deliberately hitting pedestrians. So he established that all drivers were being brainwashed by futuristic devices hidden in their dashboards. Van Vogt was quickly replaced by the sardonic Robert Thom, who’d written Wild in the Streets and could never be accused of soft-heartedness. Thom had the right spirit, but when he wrote an opening scene that went on for 20 (handwritten!) pages and showed a stadium packed with nude people making love, it seemed time to look elsewhere.

Roger eventually turned to an old crony, Chuck Griffith, creator of Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood. But the film’s most inspired comedic touches came from director Paul Bartel. The laughter at early preview screenings infuriated Roger, because he wanted a straight-ahead futuristic action film, like United Artists’ Rollerball. Joe Dante, who worked in the editing room, laments Corman’s decree that new scenes of gore be added to a movie that was “a real pop art masterpiece before Roger got to it.”

Roger’s not a liar, exactly. He’s 86, his memory is selective, and he’s great at telling stories that burnish his own legend. He used to credit me with thinking up the film’s twist ending. Now that I’ve written his biography, though, my contribution too has been erased from his memory banks. Sad, but predictable.

New World Pictures: Let's Do the Mind Warp Again!

Someone in England must really love Roger Corman. On a tip from Brian Bankston of coolasscinema.com, I stumbled onto a recent book, published in Great Britain, entitled Mind Warp!: The Fantastic True Story of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Since I’m a proud New World alumna, I had to check this out.

Ah, the memories! Though author Christopher Koetting hasn’t spoken directly to Corman and his graduates, he has done a solid job of compiling quotes and telling details from every published book and article about the maestro’s New World days, which span the period 1970 to 1983. I’m gratified, of course, that he seems to have found my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers particularly useful. It’s always nice to feel you’ve contributed to someone else’s scholarship, especially when you’re graciously acknowledged in print. No, I don’t know Christopher Koetting from Adam (Sandler), but he’s obviously a man of good taste!

Though, certainly, good taste was never the point at New World Pictures. The place was lovingly satirized by my irrepressible chums Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, and Jon Davison as Miracle Pictures: “If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle.” Their film spoof containing that hoary joke was entitled Hollywood Boulevard; in typical New World fashion it flaunted the tagline “The street where starlets are made.” When Joe, Jon, and Allan shot Hollywood Boulevard (in nine days, then padded it out with lots of New World stock footage), their highest goal was to photograph themselves beneath the marquee that advertised the movie. Today, to their surprise, they can all look back on significant Hollywood careers.

I myself didn’t work on Hollywood Boulevard, but I plead guilty to collaborating on a lurid women-in-prison film as well as several of the infamous Corman nurse movies (“Keep abreast of the medical world with the Candy Stripe Nurses”) And—in perhaps the highlight of my New World career—I came up with the twist that ended Death Race 2000.

I also rounded up the designers of those goofy Death Race cars, helped think of creative ways to run people over, and met Sylvester Stallone, dressed in ominous black for his audition as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. It fascinates me that when Death Race was remade in 2008 as a big-budget Jason Statham action flick, the most perverse idea in the original—that drivers scored points by mowing down pedestrians—was nowhere to be seen. No one can claim that we live in a tasteful age, but the merry mayhem of Death Race 2000 was perhaps a trifle too outrageous for the 21st century.