D is for Jon Davison, Marketing Maven

Seems as though the initials JD have been auspicious for Roger Corman. I’m not only talking, of course, about the juvenile delinquent types who peopled some of his early works, like 1957’s Teenage Doll. During my New World Pictures years, I can count three JDs around the office, all of whom would go on to have an impact on the film industry. Jonathan Demme was not on staff, but he’d wander through our hallways in his trademark brown and white saddle shoes. He’d just directed his very first film, a women-in-prison flick called Caged Heat (1974), and big things were expected of him. Joe Dante, editor and trailer cutter, hung out in the editing room with his pal Allan Arkush. No one would have guessed that the quiet and unassuming Joe would one day be the director of big studio features like Gremlins and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Jon Davison (not to be confused with the wholesome, be-dimpled singer John Davidson) was never, as far as I know, an aspiring director. When I worked at New World, Jon was the head of marketing, responsible for dreaming up lurid pressbooks and outrageous publicity campaigns. A New Jersey boy and a former film student of Martin Scorsese at NYU, Jon had headed west for the simple reason that Roger Corman was his idol. As he put it to me years later, Roger “made better cheap movies than anybody else did.”

A pal of Allan Arkush and Joe Dante (whom he lured to join him at New World by putting Dante’s name in the credits of a movie he’d never worked on), Jon was instrumental in the project that helped get Allan and Joe their first directing credits. In 1976, the trio approached Corman with the idea of making their own first film, which they promised would be New World’s cheapest picture ever. The idea was to borrow footage from past New World releases, shoot some new material, and assemble it all into a wacky story about a bottom-of-the-barrel movie company named Miracle Pictures (“If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle!”). Jon produced, and Joe and Allan were allowed out of the editing room long enough to take turns directing the satiric feature, which was dubbed Hollywood Boulevard. When the $70,000 film debuted on the real Hollywood Boulevard, they took turns photographing one another beneath the marquee. At the time, this seemed all the reward they needed.

Two years later, Jon was the producer of Joe’s solo directing debut, Piranha. I’m sure it was he who came up with the official Piranha presskit, which solemnly advised exhibitors to create “exciting pre-publicity” by leaving dead piranhas on the banks of local lakes and streams: “Promote community interest and fear by organizing groups (Boy Scouts, citizen volunteers, etc.) to guard against the ‘coming onslaught.’ Give enterprising kids in your area a few bucks to make themselves scarce for a few days. Watch your grosses soar!!”

Inevitably, talented young people move beyond Roger Corman. For Jon, this has meant producing such mainstream hits as Airplane!, RoboCop, and Starship Troopers. And, of course, providing the tinny metallic voice of RoboCop’s murderous malfunctioning robot. Corman folks are always good at wearing more than one hat.

Ballyhoo, or the Necessity of Blowing Your Own Horn

It’s been a good week for my self-esteem. Loyal reader Craig Edwards (a former denizen of Movieland himself) has posted on his website a most amusing interview with yours truly, complete with slightly zany photos. And biographer Jack El-Hai (author of The Lobotomist and other fascinating books), chose Beverly in Movieland as one of the history blogs he most enjoys. Naturally I’m spreading the word. We who live and work in Movieland know the value of good publicity.

There’s a fine art to generating buzz, which is why most Hollywood regulars call on the services of a public relations firm. I first encountered publicists when doing celebrity interviews for the Los Angeles Times and Performing Arts magazine. A good publicist wants his or her client to get attention in the media, but it’s also part of the job to shield that client from discomfort of any sort. I remember a lengthy interview I once did with Steve Tesich, who won an Oscar for writing Breaking Away. We spoke in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and throughout our chat there was a stony-faced publicist sitting in the corner, silently weighing every word. When at last the publicist slipped out for a moment, Tesich looked at me quizzically. “What exactly,” he wondered aloud, “does she think she’s protecting me from?”

Working for Roger Corman taught me all about the other side of the publicity game. Corman folk quickly learned to ramp up public interest in our films through creative exaggeration, not to mention outright lies. When working on press materials, my colleagues and I let our imaginations run wild, announcing that Big Bad Mama actress Susan Sennett was the granddaughter of filmmaking pioneer Mack Sennett, and bestowing on Jeanne Bell, who starred in the martial arts flick TNT Jackson, the coveted (and purely imaginary) Ebony Fist Award, in recognition of her “expert form, flexibility, and muscle tone.” Jon Davison, now a producer (Airplane!), was a master at creating publicity campaigns that essentially parodied serious hype. Jon’s official Piranha press-kit suggested that exhibitors create “exciting pre-publicity” by leaving dead piranhas on the banks of local lakes and streams: “Promote community interest and fear by organizing groups (Boy Scouts, citizen volunteers, etc.) to guard against the ‘coming onslaught.’ Give enterprising kids in your area a few bucks to make themselves scarce for a few days. Watch your grosses soar!!”

Meanwhile, Roger Corman himself pays an off-again on-again publicist to keep his name in the news. One of my duties at New World Pictures was to come up with bogus items suitable for planting in the columns of Hollywood trade papers. Just of grad school, I couldn’t resist giving my items a literary spin. Thus it was duly announced by Hank Grant in The Hollywood Reporter that Roger had signed the legendary Orson Welles to star in a new screen version of The Scarlet Letter, and that he planned to film Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. (I chose The Confidence Man as a quiet in-joke, because it was the least cinematic public-domain novel I could think of.)

Year after year, the game has continued. In 2002 I asked Corman veteran Frances Doel about an item in Variety. It announced that Roger was prepping The Return of the Animator: “The head of an animation company comes back to life in 2066, one hundred years after having been cryogenically frozen.” Part of the joke, of course, lay in the cheeky reference to rumors surrounding the late Walt Disney. Frances was also tickled to learn that she herself was supposedly writing the script.