I’ve told the story often: how I came to work for Roger
Corman at New World Pictures. I was finishing my doctorate on The Self-Conscious Artist in Contemporary
American Literature when a professor-friend called with some surprising
news. As chapter president of Phi Beta Kappa, he’d just received a phone call
from a moviemaker named Roger Corman (who?), who was looking for a bright young
assistant. Since, while working on my dissertation, I was also writing regular
movie reviews for the UCLA Daily Bruin,
I seemed an appropriate choice. But it was my scholarly accomplishments that
appealed to Roger, I think. He loved showing off underlings who had earned
fancy degrees and titles.
I was
hardly the first UCLA alum whom Roger had hired. From the film school he’d
plucked Monte Hellman, then Francis Ford Coppola, and still later such
behind-the-scenes wizards as Clark Henderson and Steve Barnett. Other
assistants before me had also come from the Westwood campus, which was located
not far from Roger’s own headquarters. In 1964, he interviewed a smart and
attractive brunette named Julie Halloran who held a bachelor’s degree in
English from UCLA. She didn’t get the job being offered, because another
candidate was Stephanie Rothman, who had
earned a master’s degree from the USC Film School and an award from the
Directors Guild of America for directing a student film. But Roger asked Julie
for a date, and six years later they were married.
As Roger’s own star rose, he looked further
afield for assistants. When hiring technical personnel (like editors and
department heads) to staff the Corman studio, he could have his pick of eager
film school grads from USC, UCLA, and NYU. But in the Corman offices, he seemed
to value young people with more intellectual backgrounds. For a while it pleased
him to look to his own alma mater, Stanford University, for assistants like
Gale Anne Hurd, Virginia Nugent, and Rob Kerchner, who could evolve into future
producers, even though they didn’t arrive with much in the way of hands-on
filmmaking experience. In my own Concorde-New Horizons years, many of my
colleagues hailed from the Ivy League, like Anna Roth (Columbia), Mike Elliott
(Cornell), Rodman Flender (Harvard), and Sally Mattison (Yale),
Beginning
in 1974, a UCLA law school graduate named Barbara Boyle worked closely with
Roger, first as his staff attorney and later as his head of business affairs. After
a successful producing career, Barbara accepted the chairmanship of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film
and Television, a post she still holds. In 2004, an article
in the trades trumpeted Roger’s pledge to award production funding -- to the
tune of $100,000 -- to one or more UCLA film students. The plan was that Roger
would choose the feature-length projects to be funded, then would donate
one-third of each film’s profits to the school. As with similar much-ballyhooed
agreements made by Roger with other academic institutions, this one never got
off the ground.
I suspect something of the same will hold true for a project
I just learned about, involving a San Francisco college’s advanced film
students remaking Corman’s Munchies
on the cheap. (In the ad I saw, participants are being asked to work without
salary, receiving only screen credit “and the added resume builder of working
with Roger.”) Yes, Roger believes in
college students, but never quite enough to fork over actual money.
