Losing the Invaluable Frances Doel

 It saddens me to report that Frances Doel is no longer with us. Frances, the right-hand woman of Roger Corman for many a decade, passed away last week at age 83. Late in life she had moved from Hollywood to Lexington, Kentucky to be tended by family members who loved her dearly. Honestly, she was dearly loved by everyone who knew her.

 Roger Corman met Frances at Oxford, where she was completing a degree in literature. Always a shrewd judge of character, he concluded she was smart enough and agreeable enough to make a good assistant. And so she was—learning from scratch pretty much every job involving a movie set or a production office. Her obituary notes that she ghost-wrote the first draft of many a Corman classic, and named among her official writing credits 1974’s Big Bad Mama, starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt.  I was there, and I’m happy to share how this first Frances Doel screen credit came to be.

 Starting work as Roger’s new assistant in 1973, I immediately gravitated toward the New World Pictures story department, which was Frances. Roger wanted a seriocomic rural crime thriller à la Bonnie and Clyde. Back then, he was obligated to use WGA writers, and it was a lot cheaper to hire a union writer for a re-write than for an original script. That’s why he gave Frances an entire weekend to crank out a workable first draft. Of course she came through with flying colors, devising a story about a poor but feisty mother and her two nubile daughters who take up robbery in Depression-era Texas. She slapped a fake name on the draft, and we hired a veteran screenwriter to take over.

 William Norton, a very nice guy, seemed to enjoy story meetings with Frances and me. As we worked our way through characterizations and plot points, Bill started wondering aloud about the author of  the original draft. He went so far as to ask if this “man” could come in and discuss some story questions he had. At which point, Frances and I began to giggle. Eventually we couldn’t hide the fact that Frances herself was the screenwriter in question. A true gentleman, Bill insisted that she share script credit with him. It was the start of her string of Corman writing credits, which ultimately included such low-budget classics as Crazy Mama and Sharktopus.

 Did Frances get paid extra for her weekend labors? She couldn’t recall exactly, but suspected that Big Bad Mama earned her about $100. Over the years, her earnings increased, netting her $5000 each for quickie creature-features like Dinocroc. But she never entirely earned Roger’s full respect. As she told me in 2011, soon after her retirement, “Roger got very fed up with me,” because he didn’t feel she was writing fast enough. Ten script pages a day seemed to him a reasonable amount, even though she was putting in this work solely on evenings and weekends.

 Frances stayed with Roger in various capacities for decades, earning the genuine praise of such celebrated Corman alumni as John Sayles and Ron Howard. But the time came when she got a better offer, moving on to Disney, and then ultimately joining with Corman alum Jon Davison to produce hits like Starship Troopers. Eventually she hit on hard times, and Roger—in a burst of generosity—gave her my job as Concorde-New Horizons story editor. It hurt, but I couldn’t blame Frances. She was too gracious and too special for that.   

 And I could never have written my Roger Corman bio without her.   

Stan Berkowitz, Bat Scribe

I first met Stan Berkowitz in the rather grubby offices of the UCLA Daily Bruin. I was a grad student who thought it would be fun to write about movies for my fellow collegians, while continuing to crank out serious literary papers for my profs. And Stan was my oh-so-amiable editor. Decades later we re-connected, when he showed up at one of my book signings. I found out then that—like me—he’d eventually gone Hollywood. In fact, he insisted that, post-college, he was a candidate for the same Roger Corman job that ultimately changed my life. As a graduate of UCLA’s film school Stan doubtless had far better credentials than I did for making B-movies, Corman-style. After all, he was a budding filmmaker, not an English major. Still, I was female, which doubtless helped me get Roger’s nod. Stan instead found work with Russ Meyer, the auteur behind such deathless sexploitation flicks as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  Meyer, unlike Roger, didn’t want women doing challenging work in his offices or on his sets. He wanted them in front of the cameras, flaunting their “Guns of Navarone” bazooms, leaving his all-male crews in a permanent state of arousal.

 Following his Russ Meyer stint, Stan eventually found his way into television, He started out writing for crime dramas like T.J. Hooker, then eventually discovered his niche in the wonderful world of superheroes, crafting shows like Batman Beyond, The New Batman Adventures, Superman: The Animated Series, and Justice League Unlimited, ending up with two Emmys on his shelf. Now that he’s old enough to be considered an expert in his field, he’s decided to share his wisdom in a charming little volume called Beyond the Bat: Secrets of a Superhero Scribe.

 In thirteen lively essays, Stan bares his insights on how to succeed in Hollywood. He describes working with a closet racist, trying to create a show for Middle Eastern audiences that featured Muslim superheroes, and struggling to incorporate Old Testament stories into an animated series for the Christian market. (That chapter is titled: Written by Stan Berkowitz . . . and God.”) He dishes about what it’s like to butt up against a superstar’s vanity. (William Shatner, here’s looking at you!) In one hilarious chapter, he reveals how to get attention for your student film. This involves a curvaceous unclad lass and a whole lot of donkeys.

 Chapter 3, titled “The Green Group,” struck a chord with me by merging a story from Stan’s early life with a discussion of why some people are attracted to superhero characters. Back in the first grade, when learning to read was at the top of the agenda, Stan’s teacher automatically assigned “the little bespectacled kids” to the Blue Group, on the assumption that they would be fast learners. Stan, though, was among the “big, oafish-looking kids” stuck at the Green table, where they were clearly being identified as slow. Fortunately, he and his buddy Gregory (also a Green Group-er) fought back, via their parents, and eventually got moved up to the smart kids’ table. The episode convinced young Stan to distrust the judgment of those in power, and his anti-authoritarian streak has stayed with him from that day to this. No wonder he has gravitated toward characters like Batman and Superman who are essentially vigilantes, going over the heads of elected officials to clean up crime and save the world on their own terms.

 If you think the world of TV production is glamorous, Stan provides a healthy reality-check. And his book, amusingly illustrated by Dan Riba, is a ball to read.  

 

Shatner Claus is Coming to Town

You’d better not shout, you’d better not cry, you’d better not pout, I’m telling you why—William Shatner is coming to town! Yes, Captain Kirk himself has just  released a new holiday recording, with the unlikely title of Shatner Claus:-- The Christmas Album. Though he was not exactly raised as a Christian, Shatner has gathered established folk and pop musicians to help him celebrate the Yule season by way of Christmas songs, among them both kitschy secular ditties and such religious classics as “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Silent Night.”  Of course, no one accepts William Shatner as a serious singer. But his spirit is fully committed to this enterprise. As he puts it, “Every song – good or bad – has my interpretation with the desire to bend it a little or fulfill more fully its original desire.”

I’ve been interested in Shatner for years, largely because of his longstanding Roger Corman connection. Roger was my boss for nearly a decade, and when scholars wrote to ask about his gutsy production of The Intruder (1962), I handled the correspondence. As spelled out in my biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, Roger was disturbed enough by the issues surrounding the desegregation of schools in the Deep South that he veered away from his usual horror fare to film the story (based on actual fact) of a rabble-rouser who descends upon a small Southern town to rile up the citizenry for reasons of his own. To play the charismatic but nefarious Adam Cramer, he chose Shatner, then a young Canadian actor best known for his stage work. The production company ran a real risk by shooting on location in southern Missouri, close to the Arkansas border, where the emotions of the citizenry were already raw. For three weeks cast and crew dodged sheriffs, eluded threats of violence, and sidestepped accusations that they were communists. Crowd scenes were shot in such a way that Shatner made his most incendiary speeches after the majority of locally cast extras had gone home. Shatner, whose performance won high praise from critics, emailed me years later that as a director, Roger was “wonderfully quick and efficient. He knew exactly what he wanted.” He recalled the making of The Intruder as “harrowing, stimulating, enabling, and frustrating. Because we shot the film on location in the South, we weren’t able to do a lot of the controversial things contained in the script.”

Shatner enjoyed himself less in 1974 when he co-starred with Angie Dickinson in a Depression-era cops-and-robbers romp, Big Bad Mama. His role is that of a con artist bubbling over with Southern charm, one who wins Angie away from the younger and more obviously virile Tom Skerritt. Though Skerritt’s nude sex scenes with Dickinson are genuinely sexy, Shatner was clearly panicked by the thought of performing in the altogether. Director Steve Carver has told me the lengths to which Shatner went to protect his modesty. (He tried covering his privates with gaffer’s tape, looking like, in Steve’s words, “jungle boy.”) He was also vain about his toupee, which led Skerritt (with whom he feuded) to find creative ways of knocking it askew as the camera rolled. He also antagonized Angie and everyone else, partly by playing fast and loose with his scripted dialogue.

All this, of course, was after the first three seasons of Star Trek aired, but before the series became a true cult legend.  And it was also long before William Shatner decided to teach the world to sing, in perfect Shatnerian harmony.

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Steve Carver: Director, Photographer, Dog-Lover, Mensch

Temecula, a growing population center in Riverside County, California, today would be called suburbia. But back in 1974, Temecula was the real deal: a rural outpost far from anywhere. That’s why it became a principal location for a classic New World Pictures Depression-era crime romp, Big Bad Mama. Angie Dickinson starred as the sexy heroine; William Shatner and Tom Skerritt played her partners in crime and in bed. At the helm was Steve Carver, not only one of New World’s most promising young directors but indisputably the best-looking. (Forty years have passed, but Steve still has dazzling blue eyes that even Paul Newman might have envied.) I recently got together with Steve and his canine best friend, a sweet-natured Australian shepherd named Indiana, to wax nostalgic about his Roger Corman years.

 Steve came to filmmaking by way of art and photography. A documentary he’d shot in grad school got him admitted to the American Film Institute, then in its second year of trying to give talented young people a bridge into the industry.  In that era the twelve AFI fellows (including David Lynch and one token female) met informally at historic Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. There Steve talked turkey with such masters as Alfred Hitchcock, and came to regard both Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck as personal mentors. AFI taught him a key lesson: movies need to be not just arty but also entertaining. When his final AFI project, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” caught the eye of Roger Corman, Steve was ready to plunge into Corman’s wacky world of commercial filmmaking.

 After a stint dreaming up New World ad spots (“A thousand pounds of hot steel throbbing between their legs!”), Steve was sent off to Rome to direct a female gladiator flick called The Arena. (Becoming friendly with Fellini, who was shooting Amarcord on an adjoining set, was an unexpected dividend.)  In Rome perhaps his biggest challenge was respecting the superstitions of the local crew. But back home in California to make Big Bad Mama, he was suddenly working with big-name stars. The delightful Angie Dickinson approached the requisite nude scenes with cheerful audacity. Shatner, on the other hand, covered his privates with gaffer’s tape and generally refused to loosen up. He was also touchy about his toupée, which rambunctious co-star Skerritt enjoyed knocking askew. 

Steve made two more films with Corman connections: Capone (starring Ben Gazzara and up-and-comer Sylvester Stallone) and Fast Charlie, The Moonbeam Racer, on which he developed a high regard for the “quirky professionalism” of David Carradine. He also shot big-budget epics like Drum, a steamy melodrama set in the ante-bellum South. And increasingly over the years he was asked by studio honchos to take charge of overseas productions that had stalled. But coming onto a set to replace an ousted director could be daunting: “I hated the feeling of being hated.” Eventually, a few double-crosses further soured his feelings toward the industry. “Roger spoiled me,” he says now.  Big-league producers and financiers, often two-faced, “wore me down and chased me back to doing photography.” 

 That’s why he currently devotes his days to fine-art portraiture. He’s especially fond of old-school techniques that require long exposures. He plans to publish a book called The Dying Breed, highlighting the formal portraits he’s taken of some of Hollywood’s old guard. The aim is to “capture an image of these character actors to preserve their legacy.”  His late friend David Carradine, for one, lives on in a photo (above) that speaks volumes. As Steve now believes, “You can only capture truth with a still camera.”  

 Here’s a small gallery of  photos of and by Steve Carver:

Steve Carver directing Capone

On the set of Drum, Steve with Yaphet Kotto and boxing champ Ken Norton

Steve's formal photo of the Capone cast, featuring Ben Gazzara and the young Sylvester Stallone  

New World cheesecake: Margaret Markov and Pam Grier in The Arena 

Man's Best Friend: Indiana (Steve tells me she has a blue merle coat and speaks five languages fluently)