E is for Harlan Ellison, Who Called Me a Nazi

And, of course, E is for Roger Ebert: movie critic and devoted movie fan, who died yesterday. He will be missed.

Today is a great day, for it is Roger Corman’s birthday. He was born 87 years ago today, in Detroit, Michigan, to William and Ann Corman. I doubt very much that his proud parents suspected on April 5, 1926 that their firstborn son was Hollywood-bound.

Another product of the midwest is Harlan Ellison, renowned as a writer of what’s sometimes called speculative fiction. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934, but also made his way to sunny California, where he sold many scripts to television. Though he and Roger share an interest in fantasy and science fiction, I think few people realize that they came very close to working together on a TV project. I should know: I was there.

When I first came aboard at Roger’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures in 1986, Roger was thinking of branching out into television production. This despite the fact that the glacial pace of TV decision-making appalled him, and he was never fully comfortable in a roomful of men wearing business suits. After NBC showed itself willing to back a futuristic series produced by Roger, Harlan Ellison was hired to create the pilot for Cutter’s World. This was to be a father-son outer space saga modeled on the old TV western, The Rifleman (which had starred Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford thirty years earlier).

At first working with Harlan on his script was a total joy. No novice (like so many of our usual screenwriters), he was a master at creating character, dynamic action, and atmosphere. He seemed to like me too: he told me that he would consider dubbing one of the female characters Beverly, were it not for the fact that I shared the name with his sister, whom he loathed. Then trouble arose. Once Harlan had written his first draft and we had accumulated extensive notes from NBC, his writing process seemed to grind to a halt. There was a network deadline to be met, and it was clear we would miss it. Under Roger’s direction, I had no choice but to make the changes myself.

When he found out I had dared to try improving his writing, Harlan was livid. His temper, as it turns out, was legendary, and I bore the full brunt of it that day. When I told him I had had no choice but to obey my boss, he sneered that I reminded him of the people of Hitler’s Germany, “just obeying orders.” That’s how, for the one and only time in my life, I was accused of being a Nazi. (No surprise: the series was derailed by NBC soon thereafter.) 

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.

C is for Catherine Cyran, Who Rose to the Occasion

The letter C stands for Corman, of course. In passing, let me salute Roger’s eldest, Catherine Corman, who has done capable behind-the-scenes work on her parents’ films, but has also forged her own career as an author and photographer. Her latest, Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City, features moody black-and-white photos of the L.A. urban landscape that evoke the spirit of Chandler’s detective fiction.

But right now I’d rather remember the career of another Catherine, one whose meteoric career rise shows what can happen to someone who finds favor with Roger Corman. Circa 1990, when I was Roger’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons, a new employee moved into the tiny office next to mine. Catherine Cyran was a pert, petite Harvard grad, whose degree as I recall was in something like political science. She was also interested in business matters, but she had absolutely no background in film. At a time of heightened production at Concorde, she had landed a job as assistant to our two distribution experts, Pam Abraham and Pamm Vlastas, mostly on the strength of her personal connection with Roger’s new staff attorney, Steve Rabiner.

Catherine liked to write, and she also liked the idea of moving forward in the film industry. In 1989, Roger’s wife Julie Corman had just optioned Hatchet, a young-adult novel that tells the uplifting story of a young boy’s fight for survival after a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness. The author, Gary Paulsen, had turned his book into a screenplay, but at the last minute (which is when things always happened in the Corman universe) it was found lacking. That’s why I ended up in a story conference with Julie and Catherine, whom I believe had been invited in at least partly because she was an experienced backpacker. We discussed a number of fixes, making good progress. That’s when I asked, “Who’s going to put our thoughts into writing?” Catherine immediately volunteered. Next thing I knew, she had a screenplay credit on the film that was now being called A Cry in the Wild. (If a movie called Hatchet were to be released by the Cormans, it would doubtless have been taken for a slasher film).

A Cry in the Wild was well received by both critics and audiences, and suddenly Catherine was a writer. Soon after, she was busily both writing and producing a Corman quickie, Slumber Party Massacre 3. Throughout the early 1990s she racked up numerous writer and producer credits. And then in 1993 came another wilderness adventure film, White Wolves (aka A Cry in the Wild II). Catherine devised the original story of a group of high school kids who face mortal danger while on a camping trip. She wrote the screenplay, and this time she got to direct the film too.

Now she’s a director for real, one who has made something of a specialty of family films. But as a writer she’s also stayed close to her Corman roots. Her most recent project, from 2012, once more has something to do with wolves. It’s called Werewolf: The Beast Among Us.  

B is for Beach Dickerson, Jack of All Trades

So many Roger Corman alumni, so little time! I could easily write several hundred words on Peter Bogdanovich, who joined the Corman entourage at the time of The Wild Angels. (He started out as Roger’s personal assistant, then a few weeks later ended up directing second unit, en route to making films like The Last Picture Show.) But I’ll save Peter for another day, while I focus on a more obscure Corman colleague: the late Beach Dickerson.

Beach, an early member of the informal Corman Stock Company, had minor roles in several early Corman cheapies. For Attack of the Crab Monster, he also helped pull the piano wires that made the monster move. He got a costume credit on War of the Satellites when Roger demanded he come up with credible astronaut uniforms overnight: “So I went out to the war surplus store.  I could not believe it: I found eight uniforms. At $10 a piece. They had $60 worth of zippers on them.  The only thing was, we could not have over eight people in one scene.”

For the notorious Teenage Caveman, Beach played so many roles that he ended up with three death scenes in the same film. What was it like being directed by Roger Corman? Beach explained to me, “He told you what to do, and by god you’d better do it.” As a young boy in Teenage Caveman, Beach was supposed to feign drowning in a pond at the Los Angeles Arboretum. He was swallowing scummy water and feared throwing up. When an angry Roger accused him of faking and demanded that he drown more effectively, Beach remembers thinking, “You’d better die, Beach. This man is serious.”   

More recent Corman alumni mostly remember Beach Dickerson as the jack-of-all-trades who served as an unlicensed building contractor on several Corman projects. One was a nearly 5,000-square-foot house—perched rather precariously on the lip of a  Brentwood canyon—designed by noted architect Cliff May. It featured large expanses of glass, a fifty-foot living room with lofty ceilings, and clean, contemporary lines throughout. Beach called his work on this house “the crowning joy of my life,” but he told me of fierce battles with Roger, who’d get sudden notions about moving a fireplace two feet, or subverting the requirements spelled out in local building codes. Roger’s love for outsmarting city inspectors continued when he commissioned the shoddy little headquarters he still occupies on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood. Picture a dilapidated two-story building with a leaking roof, cramped hallways, a steep staircase, and no lobby to speak of. Some of the rear offices were bootlegged onto the roof of neighboring structures, and when I worked for Roger he toyed with further grandiose plans to expand his turf, building codes be damned. 

A to Z Challenge: A is for Allan Arkush, Rock 'n' Roller

Today is the first day of the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. I’ll be spending the month of April blogging daily (except Sundays), with each date assigned a different letter of the alphabet. For my inaugural effort, I’ll confine myself to the movies and cast of characters surrounding the career of the one and only Roger Corman, my former boss and the subject of my newly updated biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers. And by the way, a tip of the hat to A to Z founder Arlee Bird, whose birthday is April 1 – and I’m not fooling.

Hollywood has always cottoned to actors whose names feature double As: I’m thinking about Alan Arkin, Alan Alda, and Amy Adams. Then there’s AA as in Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that many show biz types know all too well. (Years ago, when I got lost while looking for an event in a large church complex, I stumbled upon an AA Meeting on the premises, and a very famous singer-actor welcomed me in.)

But in the Roger Corman world, AA means Allan Arkush, a tall, curly-headed fellow with a sardonic take on life. When I first met Allan at New World Pictures, he was a young film editor and trailer cutter, toiling in a decrepit editing suite alongside his crony, Joe Dante. In 1976, he and Joe made the leap into directing with Hollywood Boulevard, a pastiche of old Corman clips reassembled to tell a story of a starlet come to Tinseltown. The following year, having graduated into the position of second-unit director for Ron Howard’s New World debut film, Grand Theft Auto (1977), he discovered the horrors of going on location Corman-style. Allan has vividly described for me the on-set catered lunch that was so foul that his crew ran it over with a prop automobile while the cameras rolled. Still, location shooting had its up-side: “You went out in the desert all day, you wrecked cars.”

Allan’s New World Pictures highlight was Rock ‘n’ Roll High School(1979), a film that showcased his knowledge of the pop music scene. First order of business was to persuade Roger that disco music of the Saturday Night Fever ilk would not be appropriate for a plot that culminates in the blowing up of a high school by a rampaging student body. In a salute to down-and-dirty rock ‘n’ roll, Allan got the Ramones on board, and the rest is history. True, the film nearly killed him. Shooting 45 musical numbers in a mere 23 days, he collapsed at day 20, and was carted off to the hospital with a heart attack. Fortunately he survived, and has gone on to a directing career that includes an Emmy for TV’s The Temptations. And, of course, lots of music videos.