Remembering Roger Corman (who made me an author and a screenwriting maven)

The death of filmmaker Roger Corman at age 98 means that his life and career are now being subjected to serious reappraisal. Critics and film historians are busily weighing his contributions to the industry, focusing on his production smarts, his mentoring of many of Hollywood’s finest, and his achievements as a maverick indie director. How can I add to this outpouring of affection for a man who has played such a large role in my own professional life?

 I’ve decided to start with a slightly edited version of two personal memories that kick off my first book. It’s an independent biography now called (in its 3^rd edition) Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers. Here goes! 

 I first laid eyes on Roger Corman in 1973, when he interviewed me for a job as his assistant at New World Pictures. He’d gotten my name through the Phi Beta Kappa chapter of UCLA, where I was finishing up a doctorate in English. It was typical of Roger to seek out someone with lofty academic credentials: he loved to shore up his credibility by hiring underlings with fancy degrees and titles.

 On that first morning, I was impressed (as everyone always was) by Corman’s handsome face, deep voice, and good-humored manner. We had a serious talk about motion picture aesthetics, and he told me that one condition of my employment would be a promise to read and discuss with him Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960). Of course I complied, wondering how this ponderous tome would shed light on the making of Corman’s cinematic staples: monster movies and biker flicks. I’m still wondering. He never mentioned Kracauer again.

Several jobs later, I was persuaded by Roger to become the story editor at Concorde-New Horizons, the new company he had founded in 1983. My duties included overseeing writers, consulting with young directors, and earning the occasional script credit on horror films and thrillers that needed emergency fixes. Life was hardly dull. One April afternoon in 1994, Corman called me into his office. There, dwarfed by huge paintings that had been done on the cheap by a grad student imitating Ellsworth Kelly, we had what turned out to be another pivotal conversation.

 Roger told me his fears for his company’s financial health. (This was nothing new; he had these concerns every week or two.) Then he brought up the plight of a close friend of mine. As an early Corman employee, she  had taught me a great deal when I first came on board. Later, she’d moved into more lucrative positions with more prestigious film companies. But she’d hit on hard times, and was now desperate for work. It was a nice gesture on Corman’s part to make a place for her on his staff. It was not so nice, however, to give her my job.

The upshot was that after eight years of loyal service, I was rewarded with two weeks’ notice. All the while Roger insisted that I had been an exemplary employee. He told me to write myself a glowing recommendation (“Don’t be modest,” he said), and promised to sign it.  (And did.) I later discovered that in typically shrewd Corman fashion, he’d hired my old friend on a cut-rate basis. Which meant that while lending a hand to someone in need, he was actually saving the difference between her salary and my own. So his altruism, though undoubtedly genuine, was also to his material benefit. But such is Roger Corman: truly, the buck stops with him, in more ways than one.

 Does the above imply bitterness on my part? A bit. But my book also conveys the moments when Roger could be gracious, even unexpectedly generous. Yes, he was notoriously cheap, but as he told one of my Corman colleagues who had just been handed his very first directing gig, “I get the money, you get the career.” In my case, this has meant the launch of a new life as a book author, an ongoing gig teaching screenwriting through UCLA Extension, and some great stories to share. Thanks, Roger.

The original cover and title of my first published book

 

Dancing at the Drive-In: The Joys of Dance Camera West

Yes, I worked on this drive-in classic

 When I worked at New World Pictures, we all knew that drive-ins were the key to our B-movie success. One of my many duties was to keep track of the distribution of films like Night Call Nurses (“It’s Always Harder at Night”) and Caged Heat. In that pre-computer age, I had to record in a ledger how many times our films had played in such outposts of American culture as the Dogwood Drive-In in Palestine, Texas and the Yazoo Drive-In in Yazoo City, Mississippi. But even then, drive-ins were going away, victims of the high price of real estate and the ongoing spread of the suburbs.

 Who knew back then that one day, under pandemic conditions, a drive-in might be the only way to leave home and see a movie on a giant screen? It used to be easy, if you lived in West L.A., to watch any sort of film that interested you – art house, blockbuster, genre flick, classic – from the comfort of a multiplex theatre seat. Now, though, you need to drive a long distance to search out the few drive-in theatres in the area, including the Vineland Drive-In in the City of Industry and the seventy-year-old Mission Tiki Drive-In in Montclair, where you can watch a movie while sitting (how Southern California!) behind the wheel of your car. Other venues are trying their best to get into the act, showing movies on roof-tops and in parking lots. Which is how I came to see two nights of something called Dance Camera West, under the auspices of Santa Monica’s Broad Stage.   

 Dance Camera West is an organization promoting dance on cinema, by way of an annual festival of short films from all over the world. What I saw at the drive-in screening, in the parking lot of a satellite campus of Santa Monica College, was a Best of the Fest selection of 16 short pieces (eight each night). It was not, to be honest, the full drive-in experience. No popcorn for sale; no concessions shack; and -- as far as I could tell – no one was making out in the back seat of a souped-up car. We all watched quietly behind our windshields, signaling our enthusiasm at the end of each piece by honking our horns.

 And what were the films like? They were a well-assorted bunch: some funny, some tragic; a few ponderously “meaningful”; most joyous in their affection for bodies in motion. Though all contained dance of some sort, the spotlight was really on the film director, whose imagination and daring showed off the dancers from new angles and in surprising contexts. Several of my very favorites (one from Portugal, one from Australia, one made in Moab, Utah) filmed the dancers in exotic outdoor settings – leaping on desert bluffs, undulating on the shore of a great sea, suspended from the walls of monolithic modern buildings. (Cameras mounted on drones allowed for an otherworldly perspective, which in the Australian film made the dancers look like giant insects surging across the landscape) A few films made a direct comment on our current safer-at-home predicament: one German-based director enlisted a handful of dancers who managed to photograph themselves all cavorting to the same tune from their individual bedrooms and kitchens. A somewhat traditional-looking Argentine film, featuring paired tango dancers gliding gracefully across the floor of a glass-walled studio, broke free of its location at the close to show one participant leaving the gathering, climbing onto a bus, and heading back home to her everyday life.  

 Afterwards, did these movies make me feel like dancing? Yes indeed.   

 

New World’s Poster Girls: Hot Flesh, Cold Steel

So—if you shell out the big bucks, you too can now have a Big Bad Mama poster of your very own. I would never have thought, when I went to work for Roger Corman, that the wall decorations I used to see daily would someday be prized as collector’s items.

Picture me, newly sprung from a UCLA PhD program, coming to work at New World Pictures in 1973. The wall art, for a sheltered soul like me, was mesmerizing. Like, for instance, the poster for The Young Nurses, which featured the photographed heads and upper torsos of four alluring young women, apparently bare but grouped so that nothing too indecent was visible. Near each figure was a suggestive quote: “In this hospital the patients come first!” “Doctor, I thought you were only going to give me an injection!” A poster on another wall proclaimed that “it’s always harder at night for the Night Call Nurses.” But all this was tame compared to the lurid images and breathless prose to be found on New World’s women-in-prison posters. Surrounding a skillfully erotic painting of buxom babes writhing in their shackles would be several lines of screaming text: WOMEN SO HOT WITH DESIRE THEY MELT THE CHAINS THAT ENSLAVE THEM! . . . MEN WHO ARE ONLY HALF MEN AND WOMEN WHO ARE MORE THAN ALL WOMAN!

Marketing was not part of my job description, but at New World Pictures you ended up doing it all. So I played a modest role in hyping films like Cockfighter, Death Race 2000, and Jonathan Demme’s directorial debut, Caged Heat (WHITE HOT DESIRES MELTING COLD PRISON STEEL!). No matter what the film’s actual subject, the posters favored cars, guns, and skin. Ideally, as in the case of the poster for female blaxploitation flick TNT Jackson, the three came together in an image that was brassy and bodacious, with a strong appeal to the male of the species.

New World’s posters were so over-the-top that when I learned we were going to be distributing Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, my first concern was that an in-house marketing campaign would undercut the dignity of this magnificent movie. But Frank Moreno, Roger’s head of sales and a man prescient enough to realize that we could reap hard American cash from a Swedish art film, soon put my mind at ease. As he’d promised, Cries and Whispers was treated with loving respect: a professional ad agency came aboard to design a poster that was both highly dramatic and a model of good taste.

No discussion of New World posters is complete without mention of the works that graced Roger’s own office walls. In his personal lair you would find large and rather battered placards given to him by a French producer after the 1968 student revolts in Paris. They were emblazoned with revolutionary slogans like «Salaires Légères, Chars Lourds» (“Light Salaries, Heavy Tanks”) and «Le Patron a Besoin de Toi, Tu n’as pas Besoin de Lui» (“The Boss Needs You, You Don’t Need the Boss”). These sentiments may have been fitting when Corman took on the Establishment with The Wild Angels back in 1966. But they always seemed to me oddly out of place as décor for a rising film producer known for his skinflint ways.

(This post is dedicated to Susan Henry, who egged me on, and to Brian Bankston, who gives his own loving spin to a discussion of poster art on his Cool Ass Cinema site. Part 2 surveys Roger Corman’s monster movie period, and Part 3 includes his Poe films. Brian promises that there’s much more to come.)

When Disaster Strikes

Far be it from me to say anything bad about Japan. Years ago, I was a Junior Year Abroad student in Tokyo, and I was one of fifty-six Japanese-speaking guides who staffed the U.S. Pavilion at Osaka’s Expo 70. During that period, and on more recent visits, I have enjoyed the hospitality of many wonderful people. I feel deeply for them now. What’s going on in Japan at the moment—earthquake, tidal wave, nuclear meltdown—is nothing short of tragic.

Still, a perverse part of me can’t help making the Roger Corman connection. Chris Koetting’s Mind Warp!, a helpful new history of Corman’s New World Pictures, has reminded me of the gory details. Back in 1973 Sakyo Komatsu published Nippon Chinbotsu, which translates as “Japan Sinks.” Komatsu’s novel posited a series of killer earthquakes and volcanoes that end with the submerging of the Japanese island chain. The book was hugely popular among Japanese readers, and the film version turned out to be a blockbuster, raking in $7 million at the Japanese box office. It also made a splash at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, which is where Roger Corman came into the picture.

Having bought the North American distribution rights, Corman chopped the film from 143 minutes to a brisk 82. He also had his minions shoot new footage featuring actor Lorne Greene (fresh from playing Pa Cartwright on Bonanza) as a UN ambassador, so that the revamped Nippon Chinbotsu could boast an American star. The final touch was a new title. Roger’s market research in those days involved sending young staffers to a local high school at lunch time. Their job was to dodge administrators while quizzing students on which of several titles would draw them into a theater. Experienced Cormanites quickly realized they needn’t bother taking a poll: it was easy enough to make up desirable results. As Allan Arkush (later to win an Emmy for directing TV’s The Temptations) put it to me, “Are you going to go see Tidal Wave or Submersion of Japan? It’s not a contest.”

That’s how the Corman film Tidal Wave was born. Its special effects were notoriously bad, and scenes of devastation were obvious faked. But in later years Roger—who loves “ripped from the headlines” stories—was fond of sending crews to actual disaster areas. While I was at Concorde-New Horizons, the Loma Prieta earthquake shook Northern California, and Roger quickly dispatched a camera team to film the ruined freeway and other rubble. Then the trick was to write a movie that could exploit the publicity value of the footage. We ended up with a woman-in-distress thriller called Quake. I suspect even now Roger is pondering how to get a crew to Northern Japan, so that he can announce he’s making Tsunami.

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.