[On this, the last day
of the A to Z Challenge, I’d like to thank everyone who visited Movieland. A
special tip of the hat to birthday boy Craig Edwards, blogger extraordinaire,
who started me on this alphabetical journey. If you’re craving more insider
Roger Corman stories, I’m announcing that today’s the start of a five-day sale
of my thoroughly updated and unexpurgated “Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers” Kindle ebook. And if you’d like to be notified when the new paperback is
available, do drop me a line at beverly@beverlygray.com
Cormanically yours, Beverly]
Years ago, someone was telling me she’d seen Roger Corman in
person at a film festival. What surprised her the most is that, on stage in a
crowded auditorium, Roger kept nonchalantly puffing away on a big cigar. To me,
this made no sense. I’ve never seen Roger smoke, and public rudeness of this
sort is not his style. It suddenly dawned on me that she had the wrong man.
She’d been in the presence of Sam Arkoff, co-founder of American International
Pictures.
Like Roger Corman, Sam Arkoff inspired stories, and I’ve
heard many. One of the nicest: he was a total family man, who bragged about
shutting the door to the business world when he went home to his family each
evening. The house he went home to, though, created a few hard feelings. It was
an up-to-the-minute ranch house, built by Arkoff and his wife Slim on a Studio
City hillside. One evening when the house was new the Arkoffs invited a
longtime employee, Charles Clement, and his wife Shirley to come visit. They
gave the Clements a full tour, showing off closets full of clothes and many state-of-the-art
design features. Then Arkoff let Charles know that his salary was being
trimmed. After all, new houses are expensive.
Another great story involving Arkoff was told to me by
Barbara Boyle, who became Roger’s attorney and then his CFO before entering the
ranks of Hollywood producers. When she graduated from UCLA Law School, the dean
in charge of placement was hard-pressed to find a suitable spot for someone who
was female and extremely feisty. One day he informed her of a last-minute
interview with a motion picture company looking for a labor negotiator. She was
in jeans and sandals with long loose hair, and there was no time to change
clothes. At the old Chaplin studio, big gates swung open to admit her. In the
waiting room sat three beautiful young women, dressed to the nines, whom she
assumed were from east coast law schools. She was very impressed that this
company was seeking out a female attorney: “I thought, this is real affirmative
action!”
Then she was summoned into the presence of a man with a big
cigar, an open shirt, and his feet up on his desk. First thing he said: “Take
off your jeans.” Barbara recalls, “I completely flipped out. I’m talkative now. You can imagine how I was when I
was twenty-four.” When Arkoff got a word in edgewise, he asked, “Do you ever
think you’re wrong about anything? I’m actually auditioning for a beach party
picture, and you’re supposed to have a bathing suit on. Who are you supposed to
see?”
Somehow
she ended up with Arkoff’s respect—and a job that introduced her to the motion
picture business and Roger Corman. Roger had Sam Arkoff’s respect too, though
not always his friendship. No room here to detail their testy relationship over
the years, but at a tribute event, Arkoff praised Roger as “a cautious man with
a buck—which made him very good for us because
we didn’t have many bucks in those days.” Arkoff then added, “But sometimes he was too cheap, even for AIP.”
