The Fire Next Time: Roger Corman and Disaster Movies

I haven’t wanted to write about the terrible conflagrations in my part of the world because it just makes me too sad. Life in West Los Angeles right now seems, in bizarre and tragic ways, to be mirroring the climactic Burning of Los Angeles as depicted in The Day of the Locust. (This 1939 novella was made into a 1975 John Schlesinger film, but for me its on-screen finale doesn’t match in any way the power of Nathanael West’s original prose.)

 I’m lucky, at least, to be in a Santa Monica neighborhood that’s currently not being threatened, though of course anything’s possible. But friends (some of them elderly) have lost everything, and the heartbreak around here is overwhelming. Still, with stiff upper lip I’m turning away from the tragedy here to write about my late boss, low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman, and how he tried to turn disasters to his advantage.

 While I was Roger’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons, in 1989,  there was a major earthquake in the vicinity of San Francisco. It’s almost impossible to photograph an earthquake, since (believe me!) quakes happen without warning, so capturing the actual shaking on film wasn’t a consideration. Still, Roger dispatched a small film crew, which came back to L.A. with some unimpressive footage of cracks and rubble. Then there was the matter of a script. At first Roger got caught up with the issue of shoddy infrastructure, and wanted to make the villain of his piece a bureaucrat beholden to private interests who ignored safety protocols when issuing building permits. For this (with my encouragement) he hired a very good writer of prose fiction, Madison Smartt Bell, in hopes that he would become the next John Sayles, a man who could graduate from page to screen.

  Unfortunately Roger’s concept was too thorny for what was intended as an action flick larded with sex and violence. So the thoroughly-baffled Madison was canned, and Quake was ultimately written in-house by my colleague Rob Kerchner, along with Concorde regular Mark Evan Schwartz. Someone (probably Rob) had the good idea of using the post-quake chaos as a backdrop for a variation on a popular John Fowles novel called The Collector. In 1965 it had become a film starring Terence Stamp as a warped young man who abducts a beautiful woman (Samantha Eggar) and keeps her as a specimen for his “collection.” Our film, directed by Louis Morneau, starred Steve Railsback as a warped young man who abducts a young woman in the aftermath of the so-called Loma Prieta quake.  And what about that rubble footage that Roger had sent his minions to shoot? Quake (aka Aftershock)  was advertised as capturing the actual earthquake on film for the audience’s viewing pleasure.

 It didn’t always take a natural disaster to inspire Roger. The Los Angeles riots of 1992, sparked by the beating of Rodney King, led him to propose another “ripped from the headlines” film, to be called (prophetically, I now realize) Night of a Thousand Fires. He quickly gathered three eager young screenwriters (at least one of them brand-new to L.A.) to create a hard-hitting story that would take in the disparate perspectives of Black rioters, Korean shop-keepers, and the entrenched white hierarchy. With great fanfare, he held a press conference to announce the project. But then, in typical Roger fashion. he quickly lost interest . . . because he realized that with Spielberg shooting a cinematic version of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park it was high time for a quickie dinosaur movie, one that would beat Spielberg’s film into theatres.  And so 1993’s Carnosaur was born. 

 

"Midnight Cowboy”: Some Sweetness Amid the Rot of the Big Apple

Once upon a time, Glenn Frankel was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Middle East. Then, seeking out a slightly quieter life, he began writing books about Hollywood classics. It’s easy to see that he was a fan of movie westerns in his youth. His first Hollywood book, The Searchers: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, explored in depth the John Ford drama that was perhaps John Wayne’s finest hour. He followed up with High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. His latest take on celluloid cowboys is a wee bit different. This year he has brought forth Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art,Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic. In this Oscar-winning 1969 drama, the “cowboy” is something of a phony, and he soon leaves his home on the range for a scruffy life on the mean streets of New York City. That’s where he plans to earn his keep as a male hustler, servicing sex-starved big city housewives. Except that things don’t exactly go as planned.

 Frankel’s intensive research unearths the contradictions that went into the making of this landmark film. At its core – working against the sleaziness of urban life in the late Sixties – is the unlikely friendship of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. Joe, played by apple-cheeked newcomer Jon Voigt, is naïve and unlucky, proud of his sexual prowess but repeatedly victimized by savvy New Yorkers of all persuasions. Ratso (Dustin Hoffman, coming off a very different role in The Graduate), is a down-and-out street bum from the Bronx. In a film wherein sex has nothing to do with love, the two discover a non-physical bond that is fragile but real. Emphatically, this is not intended as a film about a gay relationship. But the author of the novel on which the film is based, James Leo Herlihy, was a young closeted male. And its director, John Schlesinger, was a Londoner who played down his own homosexuality while beginning to make his mark as one of the rising British neo-realist directors of the era, along with Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Karel Reisz.

 Frankel devotes time and care to the place of this film within the annals of gay cinema. He decodes Joe Buck’s prized cowboy get-up, explaining why his John-Wayne-style hyper-masculinity proves so irresistible to the sad gay men he unwittingly attracts. He also delves into gay viewers’ response to Midnight Cowboy, comparing it tellingly to Schlesinger’s next film, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which deals forthrightly with a bisexual man in the center of a love triangle that shows characters of both genders aching for love.

 But Frankel is also terrific at dredging up production stories.. He explodes the legend that the car that almost hits Ratso on a busy New York street (leading to Hoffman’s “I’m walking here!” ad lib) was pure serendipity. And he explains the film’s famous X-rating as having been imposed not by a prudish MPAA ratings board but by the studio, United Artists, that made it. Who knew?

 Midnight Cowboy -- convincingly acted, beautifully shot—is an easy film to admire. But perhaps it’s less easy to love. I’ve heard someone say, after watching, “It made me feel unclean.” A similar reaction came from Mike Nichols, shocked to learn his protégé Dustin Hoffman coveted the Ratso role. Nichols allegedly griped, “I made you a star, and you’re going to throw it all away? You’re a leading man and now you’re going to play this? The Graduate was so clean, and this is so dirty.”