Life as an Obscure Hobo in “A Bucket of Blood”

In Roger Corman’s birthday week, it seems right to focus on the master, now 95, and some of his most memorable achievements. Like the horror comedies written by the irrepressible Chuck Griffith and ground out by Roger in a few days on impossibly low budgets. A few weeks ago I was interviewed at length by a scholarly type with the wonderfully biblical name of Adam Abraham, who’s writing a book on the history of  The Little Shop of Horrors. His fascination with the film began when he encountered Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s masterful transfiguration of the 72-minute black-&-white flick into a sparkling stage musical that began Off-Broadway and is doubtless playing somewhere in the world at this very moment. (Eventually, of course, it became a splashy full-color all-star 1986 movie musical that lacked the original’s mordant charm. And now there’s talk of a remake.)

 Adam is convinced that the original Little Shop remains in the public imagination today mostly because of the transformative skill of Ashman and Menken’s work. I’m not so sure. Clearly the stage musical brought new fans to the 1960 Corman flick. My Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers traces how Roger – cashing in on the play’s success -- eventually made a nice bundle off a three-day production he had not even bothered to copyright. Still, Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph, Mel Welles, and company are still fondly remembered by B-movie aficionados everywhere.

 Still, I believe that Roger and Chuck’s earlier effort, 1959’s A Bucket of Blood, is the better, smarter black comedy.  If you like morbid satire, this film’s for you. Running a tight 66 minutes, it boldly pokes fun at the high seriousness of beatnik culture, in which bearded and beret-wearing hipsters sit around in coffee houses pontificating on the meaning of life. Its hero, of sorts, is the coffee-house busboy, a young loser who wants so badly to be admired for his artistic talent that he eventually resorts to mayhem. This poor shnook, a would-be sculptor named Walter Paisley, is played by the always memorable Dick Miller with such intensity that the film isn’t easy to dismiss – like Little Shop -- as outrageous fun. No wacky man-eating plant here, just a deeply flawed character making the wrong choices and (almost) finding himself rewarded for getting away with murder. (Dick was originally offered by Roger the lead role in Little Shop, but turned it down because he didn’t want to be typecast as a schlemiel; he appears instead as a flower-shop patron, the petal-munching Burson Fouch.) 

 Even in its own day, A Bucket of Blood seemed darker, more real, and less laughably goofy than Little Shop. That, I suspect, is why Howard Ashman, who had grown up with Corman’s horror comedies, turned to Little Shop as material for his first really big outing as a theatre lyricist, librettist, and director. Still, A Bucket of Blood has also had a bit of an afterlife. In 1996, as part of a TV outing called Roger Corman Presents, Anthony Michael Hall starred in an updated version that found a place for lots more blood and nudity, as well as cameos by such comic favorites as Will Farrell. In 2009 an enterprising Chicago team hoping to be the next Ashman and Menken launched Bucket of Blood: The Original Beatnik Musical. (Nothing seems to remain of it but a nifty website, which includes lively recordings of some of the score.) And for the rest of Dick Miller’s life, he was cast by famous Corman alumni as characters affectionately named Walter Paisley. Even, ultimately, Rabbi Walter Paisley.

 

 

 

In Memoriam: After the Parade Passes By

As that exasperating year 2019 wanes, it feels appropriate to look back on the famous movieland folks we’ve lost. TCM has put together a short  but poignant video segment reminding us of some of the indelible faces and voices who now remain only in our movies and our dreams. I’ve written my own Beverly in Movieland tributes to some of these great performers: Doris Day,  Peter Fonda, Valerie Harper, Albert Finney, Bibi Andersson, Machiko Kyo. And I’ve lamented the loss of outstanding filmmakers like John Singleton, D..A. Pennebaker, Franco Zeffirelli, and Stanley Donen. In the field of music (for the screen as well as for the stage and the concert hall) there have been several indelible passings: André Previn, Michel LeGrand, and Broadway’s Jerry Herman, the exuberant composer of Hello, Dolly and Funny Girl.

Of course deaths don’t stop when the memorial video is posted online. Jerry Herman, who died last Thursday at the age of 88, didn’t make the final cut. A recent edition of The Hollywood Reporter also lists a few passings that TCM overlooked. One was D.C. Fontana, the very first female writer on Star Trek. (In an era less politically correct than our own, women writers found it smart to conceal their gender by turning their given names into male-sounding initials.) Another was Carroll Spinney, the gentle, spritely puppeteer who impersonated Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch and wore the feathers of Big Bird for nearly half a-century. I was particularly moved when Karen Pendleton passed on in October at the age of 73. Pendleton, one of the original Mouseketeers, was a regular on The Mickey Mouse Club for its entire nine-year run.  Though several of the Mouseketeers led tawdry adult lives, Pendleton was a major exception. After the show ended, she devoted herself to her education. When a 1983 car accident that damaged her spinal cord left her paralyzed from the waist down, she went back to college, earning a master’s degree in psychology. Putting her academic training to work, she served as a counselor at a shelter for abused women, while supporting the rights of the disabled by joining the board of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped. A life well lived, indeed.

I was sorry to read about the loss of masterful actors like Ron Leibman (so moving in Norma Rae) and Moonstruck’s Danny Aiello. And I shook my head ruefully at the passing of Jan-Michael Vincent, a talented action hero but one who cut his career short because of his personal weaknesses. (In later years he was reduced to appearing in Roger Corman war epics, like my own Beyond the Call of Duty, flying off to Manila to star in quickie flicks undermined by his drinking habits.)

But of courses the deaths that most moved me were those of celebrities with whom I’ve personally interacted. It seems like yesterday that I, as a writer of profiles for Performing Arts magazine, was welcomed at the home of the versatile character actor René Auberjonois, who lit up stage and screen with his eccentric portrayals. I will always think fondly of the late Dick Miller, my buddy in my New World Pictures days and years later a valuable source of information when I was researching my Corman biography. How wonderful that Dick          inspired both the loyalty of some of Hollywood’s finest directors and an affectionate 2014 documentary (That Guy Dick Miller) summing up his long career  And then there is good-guy Robert Forster, whose resonant baritone is—and always will be—on my answering machine. Hail and farewell. .

Dick Miller: A Little Man Who Made it Big

Yesterday I woke up to the sad news that Dick Miller had left this world. Dick—pugnacious but lovable—had reached the ripe old age of 90, but was appearing in B-movies right up to the end. Dick, of course, got his start with Roger Corman, back in the heyday of American International Pictures. His first Corman film was Apache Woman, in which the budget was so low that he was hired to play both a cowboy and an Indian. (As a member of the posse tracking the Indian, he almost killed himself off in the final reel.)  Later he played a jive-spouting vacuum cleaner salesman in Not of This Earth (1957) and a good-guy astronaut in War of the Satellites (1958) before taking on the leading role of would-be artist Walter Paisley in Corman’s ghoulishly hilarious A Bucket of Blood.

I knew none of this when I went to work at Corman’s New World Pictures in 1973. I only knew that this very short, very feisty fellow emblazoned with sailor tattoos was often seen wandering through our office suite, kibitzing with everyone who came his way. He and I hit it off immediately, and he gave me a signed  headshot I tacked up on my office wall. Referring to the location week we’d  both spent in a small California town shooting Big Bad Mama (he played a comically inept lawman), he joked about nibbling on my ear and asking me the all-important question, “What’s for lunch?”

Though Roger had started Dick on his acting career, they didn’t always get along. When Roger decided to make Kurosawa’s classic Yojimbo into a kung fu movie called TNT Jackson, he hired Dick to play a friendly bartender and also to write the screenplay. Accounts differ as to what happened next. Dick felt that one too many free rewrites had been demanded of him; the office scuttlebutt was that Dick incurred disfavor by padding his own role. In any case, there was a shouting match, during which Corman ripped up Dick’s submission. Dick has described for me what happened next: “I finally said, ‘Shove it!’ He got up—without his shoes—and kicked a lamp, and broke it. I heard years later that his biggest bitch was that he had broken the lamp.” Miller’s audacity swiftly won him respect among Hollywood underlings who had been dying to tell their producers to go to hell. But it came at a price: for years afterwards, the two men barely spoke.

Over the decades, Corman alumni have delighted in casting Dick in colorful character parts. For Martin Scorsese, he played a nightclub owner in New York, New York. For James Cameron, he was a pawnshop clerk in The Terminator. When, with Piranha,  Roger turned trailer-cutter Joe Dante into a director, Joe gave Dick the plum role of a crass resort owner whose lake just happens to be stocked with man-eating fish. Dick quickly became Joe’s good-luck charm, appearing in virtually every Dante film, most memorably as the hapless Murray Futterman in Gremlins.

When I started working on the biography that became Roger Corman:Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, Dick was one of the very first people I chose to interview. I knew he’d be both funny and honest—and he was. I last saw him in 2014, at the Hollywood premiere of an affectionate documentary called That Guy Dick Miller. One of its producers was Lainie Miller, Dick’s wife of nearly fifty years. Lainie too is quite a talent: you can see a great deal of her as the well-endowed stripper in The Graduate.

Farewell, Dick, wherever you are!