Where Have All the Corpse Flowers Gone? Remembering "The Little Shop of Horrors"

I’m not convinced that Roger Corman ever saw (or even heard of) a Corpse Flower. But I have. This past Sunday I was lucky enough to catch the rare blooming of Amorphophallus titanium at the Huntington, that being a marvelous rare book library and botanical garden in San Marino, California. In case you’re interested, the so-called Corpse Flower is actually the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence. Its bloom can grow over twelve feet in height and can open to a width of four feet across. It’s a tropical plant that comes originally from Sumatra; its gruesome name refers to the stench it gives off when in flower, similar (it is said) to the smell of a rotting corpse. In the wild, insects attracted to this pungent scent arrive in time to pollinate the flower during its short blooming period, which may last a mere 24 hours. Lucky me, that I arrived just in time to see (and smell) this stinky marvel of the natural world.

 The one I saw blooming in the Huntington’s Conservatory has been nicknamed Odorysseus, not Audrey Junior. And I’m happy to report that no one was swallowed up by the gaping purple petals while I was around. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about the giant carnivorous plant immortalized by director Roger Corman and his inimitable screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, back in 1960, when they discovered that they could have a full weekend to make use of a standing set that was about to be torn down. Their horror comedy, The Little Shop of Horrors, soon attracted millions of fans (most of them young and ready for anything) to drive-ins and low-rent movie houses, and soon became a late-night staple on the brand-new medium of television. Not all the actors in Little Shop went on to fame and fortune, but the name Jack Nicholson should ring a bell. (No, despite what I sometimes see in print, Nicholson did NOT have the leading role of hapless flower-shop underling Seymour Krelboined, but his tiny part as a masochist in a dentist’s chair is hard to forget.)

 Two young fans of Corman’s 72-minute film turned out to have real musical talent. In 1982, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman launched an off-Broadway musical adaptation so infectious that it soon moved to Broadway and London’s West End. (It also became hugely popular in high schools and community theatres throughout the world; I’d be surprised to hear that there’s no production of it going on somewhere at this very moment.) In 1986, Hollywood got into the act, with Frank Oz of Muppet fame directing an elaborate big-budget version boasting Rick Moranis in the leading role, Steve Martin, John Candy, and Bill Murray in featured parts, and an ending that softened the grotesque outcome of the original.

 In my years as Roger Corman’s story editor, I had no immediate connection with the Little Shop film. Nor with the child-friendly 1991 animated TV series whose gore was toned down for the younger set. But in the early 1990s Roger toyed with the idea of launching a Little Shop sitcom: writers were hired and I remember some meetings at Fox studios with rather thick-headed young execs before we all gave up. I also remember the frustration of Chuck Griffith and others regarding the debut of the stage musical: because Roger had assured the producers that all the members of the original cast and crew were dead, none of them was invited to the show’s world premiere. Roger’s baseless assertion, I can’t help thinking, was an act as ghoulish as anything a Corpse Flower could claim.

 

                                          Odorysseus at the Huntington, 7/12/26

In Praise of Women of a Certain Age: “Shirley Valentine” and “Something’s Gotta Give”

No spring chicken myself, I understand the appeal of those films in which ageing women go to extraordinary lengths to retain their youthful beauty. Way back in 1936, the opening scene of The Women was a fancy-schmancy health spa in which society matrons valiantly fought off wrinkles and turkey necks, at enormous expense.  In 1959, under the tutelage of Roger Corman, director Jack Hill went the horror route, using a Leo Gordon script. Their focus was on a female cosmetics executive so worried about preserving her beauty that she broke into a scientist’s lab and stole an experimental serum, made from the royal jelly of queen wasps, that promised to reverse the ageing process. (Naturally, it didn’t end well.) 

Just last year, a female writer/director, Coralie Fargeat, created a contemporary film in the same genre. The Substance. It featured a still-ravishing  Demi Moore so determined to look younger that she went through a horrific metamorphosis that ultimately destroyed her life. Age (and its ominous implications in Hollywood) is also at the center of Sunset Boulevard, once a cinematic classic starring Gloria Swanson and now a Broadway hit musical with the gorgeous but not exactly teen-aged Nicole Scherzinger (she’s 47) in the leading role.

 Given all this, it’s a pleasure to come across films in which a mature woman is hailed as a romantic figure, an actual love object. The only sad thing about these heroines is that they’re played by women who’ve recently left us. But oh, what a lovely light they shed on mature romance. Shirley Valentine is a delightful 1989 British film in which a middle-aged Liverpool housewife (the late Pauline Collins) is so taken for granted by her working-class husband and grown kids that she talks to the walls of her house—and directly to the film’s audience—about the good old days when she was filled to the brim with impish fun. By chance she’s invited by a friend who’s won a contest to join her for two weeks in Greece, and to Shirley’s own surprise she decides to go. On a sun-swept shore she revels in a new sense of freedom . . . even to the point of agreeing to a romantic sail with a handsome local who praises her spunk and her beauty The tryst turns out to have its disappointing side, but the upshot is that she discovers in herself a willingness to change the course of her life. Maybe she’ll resurrect her stale marriage, but on her own terms.

 Then there’s Something’s Gotta Give, a lively Nancy Meyers comedy from 2003, in which a sixty-plus-year-old Jack Nicholson plays Harry, a wealthy music exec who thrives on courting pretty women half his age. Through a series of complications involving his latest flame, Marin (Amanda Peet), he ends up having a mild heart attack at the beach cottage of her divorced mother, Erica (the late Diane Keaton), who’s an ultra-successful playwright. The upshot is that, when Marin returns to work in the city, Erica is stuck babysitting the recuperating Harry. At first they are constantly getting on each other’s nerves. But then, to their mutual surprise, they fall hard for one another, reveling in their mutual smarts and maturity.  And yes, their mutual sex drive. Still, Harry’s commitment-phobic, and the adorable Erica finds she has another admirer, the handsome and very young doctor played by Keanu Reeves. Not bad for a fifty-something-year-old who even carries off a very embarrassed but extremely funny nude scene. Nice indeed to think that a woman of Keaton’s years could be so desirable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Very Flexible Diane Keaton

In memory of the late Diane Keaton, I wanted to re-watch one of her films. But which one? Of course I remembered her hilarious teaming with Woody Allen in so many of his early flicks. I can still see the two of them in Sleeper (1973), elaborately pretending to be surgeons charged with cloning an assassinated political leader from his one remaining body part: a nose.  I’m also very partial to Love and Death (1975) and of course Keaton is justly adored for her Oscar-winning title role in the ultimate romantic comedy, Annie Hall (1977).

 In truth I fell for Keaton in her very first film: Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). In this charming ensemble outing, set amid the chaos of a big family wedding, she has the small role of Joan Vecchio, married to the groom’s older brother. Her appearance causes some tension at the festive gathering, because she and husband Richie are seriously thinking of separating. The problem: Joan has discovered that, after several years of wedlock, Richie’s hair no longer smells like raisins.

 Of course Keaton was later to play other wedding scenes, notably in The Godfather, where she was Michael Corleone’s naïve young wife-to-be, meeting the family at the lavish nuptials of Michael’s sister . But as she aged she hardly lost her on-screen sex appeal. In 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, a wealthy playboy (Jack Nicholson) gives up an attractive young woman in order to woo her mother, played by Keaton, who was then almost 60. Still, the course of true love never does run smooth. In a 1996 comedy, The First Wives Club, Keaton (who in real life never married) is one of a trio of reluctant divorcees determined to get revenge on the husbands who dumped them for much younger cuties.

 Though Keaton was known for her flair for comedy, she also played highly dramatic roles. In 1977, the same year in which the world fell in love with her Annie Hall, she starred as a secretly promiscuous schoolteacher who meets a tragic fate in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Four years later, she starred with Warren Beatty in Reds, an Oscar-winning epic saga of the Russian Revolution as seen through the eyes of real-life American activists John Reed and Louise Bryant. But I decided to re-visit Keaton by way of a much smaller drama. Released in 1996, it was called Marvin’s Room. And, like Reds, it earned Keaton an Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actress.

 If Keaton’s Louise Bryant in Reds was heroic, her Bessie in Marvin’s Room is downright saintly. (That’s a new one for me—Diane Keaton as a saint!) In this story of a medical crisis that brings s fractured family together, Meryl Streep is the bitchy Lee, unhappily raising two misfit kids by herself ever since her no-good husband walked out. (One of her sons, a teenaged Leonardo DiCaprio, has just burned her house down.) She’s received word that her younger sister Bessie (Keaton) has been diagnosed with cancer and desperately needs a bone marrow donor. So Lee and the kids reluctantly drive from Ohio to Florida to help out a relative with whom Lee has had no contact for 20 years.

 Keaton’s Bessie, who lost her first love to an accident many years back, has spent decades of her life looking after her bed-ridden father (Hume Cronyn) and her wacky aunt (an unrecognizable Gwen Verdon). Despite the physical challenge she herself is facing, she has a radiant optimism about the days ahead. In service to others, she finds joy, and we believe every word she says. 

 

Good Guys and Bad Guys: Roger Corman’s People

As director Joe Dante once told me about our mutual former boss, Roger Corman,  “The thing about Roger is that you meet him on your way up, and if you’re not lucky you meet him again on your way down.” Joe was talking specifically about Peter Bogdanovich, who got his start with Roger, then later revived his flagging career by co-writing and directing a 1979 Corman release, Saint Jack.

 Though Joe’s comment referenced filmmakers, I think it applies to actors as well. At least, it’s true that name performers who were on a downward slide could often find a juicy role in a cheapie Corman flick.  F. Murray Abraham, who had won an Best Actor Oscar for playing Salieri in  1984’s Amadeus, showed up—to my surprise—as the second lead in Corman’s 1995 gangster thriller, Dillinger and Capone. When we were casting something called Hellfire, a lurid period drama to be shot in Russia, I was astounded that the casting choices for the role of a powerful but fading beauty included an award-winning stage actress known for her serious roles and a once-charming ingenue who had starred in a popular Broadway musical. (Ultimately the role went to a former Corman regular, Beverly Garland, who dated back to his early days.) And for the leading man in a Vietnam War drama, we cast a once-popular TV actor whose career had been derailed by his alcoholism. I  heard that in one key scene, he had to be barefoot, because his feet were so swollen from a recent binge that his military boots no longer fit.

 Yes, Corman’s movies often featured stars whose careers had stalled. But he also, at least in the beginning, had a loyal stock company of aspiring thespians who would do just about any job and play just about any role. The group included Beverly Garland, Mel Welles, and a very young Jack Nicholson, who is still deeply grateful to Roger for giving him a start.  But I have a special affection for Dick Miller, whom I came to know in my New World Pictures days. Dick, a pugnacious little guy who started out aiming to be a writer, played just about any role given to him: an Indian, an astronaut, a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. His crowning performance was as a would-be sculptor who accidentally becomes a murderer (and a celebrity) in 1959’s A Bucket of Blood.  Dick’s brilliant work as a nebbish who just wants recognition led to Roger wanting to cast him the following year as Seymour, the hapless flower shop assistant who nurtures a man-eating plant, in 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors. But Dick, always stubborn, felt the part would be a repeat of his previous performance. That’s why he took the far smaller role of the petal-munching Burson Fouch, and Jonathan Haze finally got his big break.

 When I wrote my Corman biography, I never formally interviewed Haze, and I didn’t meet him until years later. To be honest, I was intimidated by the thought of approaching the star of Little Shop of Horrors. The pathos in Jonathan’s performance was hilarious. But unlike Dick Miller, he never became a favorite of Corman alumni directors like Joe Dante and Martin Scorsese. And there was certainly  no documentary made about his career. (Cf 2014’s That Guy, Dick Miller.) Yet Jonathan, much committed to physical fitness and a healthy lifestyle, outlived Roger and the rest of the gang. He died November 5, at age 95. Rest in peace, Jackie Haze! 

 Farewell, too, to Michael Villella, the blood-thirsty Driller-Killer in the original Corman Slumber Party Massacre. 

 

L.A. Weather and “Chinatown”

As a longtime volunteer with the Santa Monic Public Library system, I’m reading a new best-seller called L.A. Weather, by María Amparo Escandón. It concerns a family with Mexican and Old California roots, ambitiously folding in almost every touchstone 21^st century concern you can think of: sexuality, gender demarcations, surrogate pregnancy, gentrification, religious practices, divorce, and complex family dynamics. (Somehow the question of politics only briefly rears its ugly head). But the key issue that gives the book its title has to do with the complexities of Southern California weather. The book’s central patriarch figure, Oscar, becomes increasingly estranged from his wife and three daughters as he obsesses over climate change and its potential impact on his secret almond grove.

 I appreciate the novel’s insider grasp of L.A. geography, and of the ethnic enclaves it chronicles. A movie based on the book would be an enjoyable tour of Malibu beach houses, east L.A. barrio bungalows, and orchards set deep in the San Fernando Valley. I’ve never done a scientific study, but it’s been pointed out to me that most upbeat screen love stories are set in New York (see, for instance, You’ve Got Mail), while L.A. in the preferred backdrop for dysfunctional futuristic landscapes (Bladerunner, I’m looking at you!)  It seems as though film execs, mostly from the east, come to SoCal to pursue their careers, then score with movies that either romanticize the coast they left behind or turn their new west-coast home into a horror show.

 Escandón’s family saga contains a genuine affection for her adopted hometown, but also seems prophetic in that it worries about a climate crisis that threatens to uproot the Alvarado family’s sense of well-being. What strikes me, to my surprise, is how the novel’s key plot strand is the same one that resonates in the late Robert Towne’s script for Chinatown. This 1974 thriller, brilliantly directed by ultimate outsider Roman Polanski, is set in the L.A. of the 1930s, the era of such famous page and screen detectives as Philip Marlowe. There have been ten or more screen adaptations of Marlowe-related stories, including Humphrey Bogart’s 1946 The Big Sleep and Elliott Gould’s 1973 The Long Goodbye. Marlowe films always focus on moral decay and a private-eye hero who tries desperately (and sometimes messily) to create order out of chaos. But in Chinatown the hero (Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes) is less heroic and the ending is far less tidy than in the Marlowe-related flicks. As a crony memorably tells Gittes after the unthinkable has happened, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” This climactic line threw me when I first saw the film, but of course I’ve come to accept it as a metaphor for all that’s chaotic and obscene about L.A. life. (Really, if you’ve seen this and Bonnie and Clyde, you know that Faye Dunaway should definitely stay out of moving cars when thugs and cops are around.)

 The moral story in Chinatown may be the one that stays with the viewer, but the plot hinges on a still-resonant L.A. topic: the drought. A key character in the film, L.A. water tsar Hollis Mulwray, is loosely based on a legendary L.A. figure, dam-builder William Mulholland. And we clearly see the tension between San Fernando Valley farmers who demand irrigation for their cash crops and City of L.A. residents worried about their source of drinking water. Those issues still remain, exacerbated by climate change, and we who prefer garden living to making our homes in a desert appreciate books and films that point out where we’re going wrong. 

 

Robert Towne and Old Hollywood’s Best Alumni Association

The death of screenwriter Robert Towne on Monday made me lament the passage of time. Towne’s great era was the Seventies, when he wrote such gritty films as The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo, while also making vital (though uncredited) contributions to The Godfather and other hits. Though these were all major studio pictures, I will long associate Towne with his Roger Corman days, when he played the male lead in Corman’s 1960 cheapie, The Last Woman on Earth, while simultaneously pounding out the script on the set. This was filmmaking, Corman style: assemble some ambitious pals and get them to take on as many jobs as possible (for as little money as possible). Eventually, the idea was that they’d find out what they were really good at, and maybe move on to the big bucks. For many would-be Hollywoodites, it worked.

 Here's the opening of Chapter 8 of my independent biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers:  Roger Corman and the Academy Awards are not usually mentioned in the same breath. But on April 8, 1975, many of the big winners had a Corman connection. Best Film and Best Director Oscars went to Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Part II. Best Supporting Actor was Robert De Niro, for his performance in the same gangster epic. Ellen Burstyn was named Best Actress for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, directed by Corman alumnus Martin Scorsese. Other nominees that year: Talia Shire and Diane Ladd, both up for Best Supporting Actress; cinematographer John Alonzo, whose very first film was Bloody Mama; and Jack Nicholson, favored to win Best Actor for his starring role in Chinatown. (The award went instead to Art Carney, for Harry and Tonto, leading Corman to joke that Nicholson’s loss had spoiled his personal sweep.) Robert Towne, who won the year’s Best Original Screenplay honors for his Chinatown script, surveyed the glittering multitudes and said, in the presence of reporter Bill Davidson from the New York Times Magazine, “This joint looks like a meeting of the Roger Corman Alumni Association.”

 For those who aren’t up on Corman’s long career, here’s the lowdown.  Coppola, straight out of UCLA’s film school, went to work as a Corman production assistant, then made his directorial debut, 1963’s Dementia 13, with money left over from Corman’s The Young Racers. In 1970, De Niro had a major role in Corman’s Bloody Mama. Corman produced Scorsese’s second film as a director, 1972’s Boxcar Bertha. Talia Shire and Diane Ladd both acted in early Corman movies, as did Jack Nicholson, who first met Roger (and Robert Towne) in a Jeff Corey acting class, then went on to play in multiple Corman movies including The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Terror, and his 1958 film debut, The Cry-Baby Killer. Nicholson, who remains deeply appreciative of Corman’s role in his career, recalled for Roger’s own memoir working on films whose budgets were so low that the actors all had to share the same script.

 Not everyone who worked for Roger in the early days became famous. But take the case of Dick Miller, who started out as a would-be screenwriter. Roger saw potential in the short, pugnacious Miller, and cast him in leading roles of films like 1959’s A Bucket of Blood. Eventually he became a featured actor (and good-luck charm) in all the films of a later Corman alumnus, Joe Dante. Eventually he starred in That Guy Dick Miller, a 2014 documentary made by one of his fans. I remember Dick well, and I hope the world will remember Robert Towne too.

 

 

The Cat Came Back: “Harry and Tonto”

Hard to believe that Art Carney, best known for playing Ralph Kramden’s blue-collar buddy on TV’s The Honeymooners,  beat out some of Hollywood’s finest for the Best Actor Oscar of 1975. His competition? Jack Nicholson for Chinatown, Al Pacino for The Godfather, Part II, and such also-rans as Dustin Hoffman (playing Lenny Bruce) and Albert Finney (as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express). Roman Polanski’s Chinatown nabbed eleven Oscar nominations that year, though it won only for Robert Towne’s scintillating screenplay. It had the misfortune of being up against Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather sequel, which won five statuettes, including Best Picture, out of a possible eleven. By contrast, Carney’s Harry and Tonto was nominated only for its original screenplay and for Carney’s performance.

 The win for Carney came as a surprise to many, including my former boss Roger Corman, who was reveling in the fact that so many of his B-movie alumni (including Nicholson, Coppola, and Towne) were nominees that year. He was quoted as joking that Nicholson’s loss had spoiled his personal sweep.  It’s certainly possible that Nicholson and Pacino, both playing intensely dramatic roles, cancelled each other out in the voting. But Carney’s victory also indicates the Academy’s affection for the fifty-plus-year-old veteran, despite the rise of a generation of Young Turks.

 As a film, Harry and Tonto isn’t much. Directed and co-written by Paul Mazursky, it’s one of his typically modest offerings (see also Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman, and Moscow on the Hudson) that take up a timely topic and treat it in a low-key manner. In Harry and Tonto, the subject is the plight of the elderly. Harry, a rather dapper retired schoolteacher whose wife died years before, is being thrown out of his New York apartment because the building is being “improved” into a parking lot. With his ginger cat in tow, he is taken in by a son in the suburbs, but is well aware he's disrupting a family already near its breaking point. The bulk of the film is his odyssey first to Chicago (and a daughter with whom he can’t help sparring) and then to Los Angeles (where his youngest son is overtly needy). There are interesting stops along the way, including a visit to a first love now in the throes of dementia, and he connects while on the road with some colorful characters, like the good-hearted fifteen-year-old runaway played by Melanie Mayron. But basically the film is on Carney’s shoulders. By the end of Harry and Tonto, we know him well: his gruffness, his surprising erudition, his quiet live-and-let-live generosity of spirit, his overriding desire not to be beholden to the younger generation.

 It’s not a long movie, but it IS a slow one, and some critics have complained about its pacing. Personally, I admit to getting restless . . .  but it was worth it to see (pleasant surprise!) Harry finally find happiness on his own terms.  I had dreaded watching a film in which the elderly are made to look both creaky and cute, and I’m happy that Harry is portrayed as very much his own man, still smart, and without a shred of self-pity. Stand-outs in a stellar cast include Ellen Burstyn as Harry’s daughter (she won her own Oscar in 1975 for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and Larry Hagman as his younger son. I particularly liked Chief Dan George, as a philosophical Native American whom Harry meets in jail.

 And then there’s Tonto the cat, who fittingly won the Patsy Award as the year’s best animal actor.