U is for UCLA, Springboard for Future Cormanites

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.  

T is for Talia Shire, Who Dated Roger ‘Way Back When

Back when the world was young (okay, it was 1968) a young actress named Talia Coppola played the “1^st girlfriend” in The Wild Racers, a low-budget race car drama directed by Roger Corman’s veteran art director, Daniel Haller. The film starred familiar B-movie names -- Fabian, Mimsy Farmer, Dick Miller – and its plot, as well as its title, sounded a lot like The Young Racers. When Roger Corman had directed and produced that earlier Grand Prix flick in Europe in 1963, his assistant Francis Ford Coppola had gone along as a very novice sound man. Talia of course is Francis’s little sister, and in 1972 her role as The Godfather’s Connie Corleone Rizzi would make her a bankable Hollywood star. But in 1968 she, like brother Francis, was just getting started.

In 1969, three years before The Godfather, Talia was directed by Roger Corman himself in the film that acrimoniously ended his long relationship with American International Pictures. It was an oddity called Gas-s-s-s! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It, and it reflected Roger’s countercultural impulses in that turbulent era. The premise of Gas-s-s-s! is that a mysterious air-borne poison has killed off everyone in the United States over the age of twenty-five. Corman’s youthful characters form into family units and begin a strange odyssey through the American Southwest. Though the cast included, along with Talia, such rising stars as Ben Vereen, Cindy Williams, and Bud Cort, no one’s career was much advanced by this box office flop.

Around the time she was appearing in Gas-s-s-s!, Talia worked behind the scenes in other Corman films, and dated Roger briefly. She was one of many bright young women over the years who have benefitted from on-the-job training in a Corman company. As she told People magazine in 1980, Roger’s assistants typically begin by answering the telephone, and two weeks later progress to reading scripts and scouting for locations: “It beats hell out of going to the Yale School of Drama.”

Though I’m sure Talia did well in the role of what Roger has always liked to call his “ace assistant,” her success in the Godfather films, and as Adrian in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky franchise, ensured that she would have no further need to sit behind a desk in a Corman office. Ironically, it was in a Corman office that I met her. Circa 1994, she’d approached  Roger with a screenplay for an erotic thriller called One Night Stand. Her plan was to make this her directing debut, and so we spent many hours beefing up the script. Alida Camp, the film’s producer, later told me that Roger had always thought highly of Shire. For that reason, said Camp, “he was willing to let her have a lot of freedom. And he put more money into her movie also. Well, it ended up being more money than he wanted to put in.” The upshot was that Roger abruptly slashed several hundred thousand dollars from the budget, but Shire refused to believe he was serious. She ended up owing him money, and the once-cordial relationship soured.

Sadly, during the script development phase of One Night Stand, Talia’s husband Jack Schwartzman passed away, following a long illness. The couple had two sons together, and both of them have followed their mother into the acting profession. Jason Schwartzman, a favorite of Wes Anderson, has enlivened everything from Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom. So the Coppola dynasty continues.   

S is for Cirio Santiago, No Better Than He Had to Be

One of Roger Corman’s last films for American International Pictures was something called Gas-s-s-s! So you can see that Roger definitely likes the letter S. In thinking back through the cast of characters of the Roger Corman world for the A to Z Challenge, I came up with plenty of S names: like actor William Shatner, director Katt Shea, and the marvelous poster artist John Solie. Then there’s Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest directors to have emerged from the Corman stable. Not to mention Alex Stapleton, whose recent Corman documentary I am happy to say was inspired by my book, Roger Corman:Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers.

But I’ll go with none of the above. Not when Cirio Santiago is waiting to get his due. Cirio hailed from Manila, where he followed in the footsteps of his filmmaker father, who had founded Premiere Productions in 1946. It was not long before Cirio had created his own film empire, specializing in English-language action films shot in the Philippines. Of course  Roger Corman soon got wind of Cirio’s talent for making do with little, and soon Cirio was producing (and sometimes directing) New World women-in-prison and blaxploitation flicks. Like The Big Bird Cage! And Fly Me! And who can forget TNT Jackson?  As tastes changed, Cirio’s projects did too, encompassing Mad-Max-type apocalyptic sagas and a whole raft of war dramas in which the Philippines stood in for Vietnam. (I have a screenplay credit on one of the latter, Beyond the Call of Duty.) The Roger and Cirio connection ebbed and flowed, but at one time, when animated films were all the rage, there was even talk of setting up an animation studio in Manila under Cirio’s auspices.

When Cirio visited the Corman headquarters, we were always happy to see him. He was an affable fellow, quick with a joke, and he sometimes brought little gifts for the office staff. But I’m glad I never worked on a Cirio set. As a director he got bored easily, and would sometimes walk off mid-scene in order to go play golf. More seriously, he had a cavalier attitude toward danger. He had easy access to the Philippine Army for battle scenes, and real weapons (modified to shoot blanks) were used with casual enthusiasm. Clark Henderson, who was there, remembers how “they would fire guns up in the air to make the crickets stop.  Guns all over the place, everywhere you went.”

Though the Filipino stuntmen were fearless, they couldn’t be used to double tall American actors, which is why Corman stalwart Rick Dean shattered his collarbone on a Cirio set, after riding a motorcycle through fire and then jumping fifteen feet in the air. Still, Rick called Cirio “a great man,” noting with approval his treatment of actors who think too highly of themselves. One leading man kept demanding retakes of a scene because he wasn’t satisfied.  Cirio reshot the scene multiple times, “but there was no film in the camera.  Cirio was just sittin’ there smiling and laughing hysterically.”

Cirio survived various changes of political leadership in the Philippines with grace. We worried about him when President Marcos was ousted, but he popped up next as the Minister of Film in the new Aquino government. He seemed unsinkable—until lung cancer got him in 2008. Here’s Jim Wynorski’s off-the-cuff tribute: “I loved Cirio personally.  But I never saw a Cirio film I could actually watch.”  

R is for Roger Corman, and Roger Ebert, and Russ Meyer: An Unholy Trinity

Today’s a special day here in Movieland: my chance to salute three memorable men whose names begin with the letter R. The first is my former boss, Roger Corman, who plucked me from a doctoral program in English literature at UCLA and made a dishonest woman out of me. By which I mean, of course, that at New World Pictures he taught me the fine art of making and distributing exploitation films, saving a buck by any means necessary. For instance, in order to drum up free publicity, he asked me to invent bogus news items involving major Hollywood stars who were supposedly appearing in our cinematic versions of public-domain literary works. That’s why you can find, in a long-ago issue of the Hollywood Reporter, an announcement that Roger Corman has signed Orson Welles to star in New World’s adaptation of Melville’s The Confidence Man.

In the late 1950s, while Roger was coming of age as a filmmaker, another World War II veteran was directing his first films. Russ Meyer, like Roger Corman, made low-budget movies with a high quotient of sex and violence. Especially sex. Meyer began as a photographer, and big-busted women were his specialty. If they talked -- and acted -- tough, he liked them all the better. One of his 1965 movies epitomizes his tastes: it’s called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Before I was hired by Roger Corman, a friend named Stan Berkowitz applied for the same job. It’s no surprise that I beat him out. Roger is impressed by advanced academic degrees like mine, and he prefers that his assistants be female. It’s not simply that he’s looking for young ladies to fetch him coffee. Several generations of women in Hollywood (including Gale Anne Hurd of Terminator fame) can attest he believes women work harder, work cheaper, and are more loyal. That’s why he entrusts them with technical positions as well as office jobs, pioneering their ascent into the ranks of producers and directors.

My friend Stan ended up working on a Russ Meyer film, Supervixens. On the set he saw plenty of women, most of them flaunting the audacious “Guns of Navarone” bazooms that were Meyer's stock in trade. But on Meyer’s production team there was not a female to be found, and the pneumatic starlets were strictly off-limits. Meyer made movies to feed his personal obsessions. He wanted his crews, like himself, in a permanent state of arousal.

Today Corman, at eighty-seven, is still churning out monster movies. Meyer passed away in 2004, at age eighty-two, though his mind had abandoned him a decade earlier. He might have been his own most perceptive critic when, in a 1978 interview, he told a young reporter, “If I wasn't so into tits, I probably could've been a great filmmaker.”

And as for Roger Ebert, whose death we all recently mourned, where does he fit in? We knew Ebert as a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, as well as a man who was courageous in the face of his own mortality. To his credit, Ebert was no snob, and he freely admitted to enjoying Russ Meyer’s tawdry but energetic brand of filmmaking. In 1970, when big studios were desperately trying to be hip, Meyer was actually hired by Twentieth Century-Fox to direct a sequel of sorts to Valley of the Dolls. For Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Meyer concocted a baroque spoof chockfull of drugs, porn, nudity, gender-bending, and a final burst of mayhem reminiscent of the 1969 Manson murders. And yes, Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay. It was not exactly his finest hour.

To celebrate Roger Corman’s 87^th birthday (a few weeks late), I’m hereby announcing a big sale on my Corman Kindle ebook, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, for the bargain price of $2.99. This was the book that just got a rave in last week’s Wall Street Journal, as one of reviewer Carl Rollyson's five favorite Hollywood biographies. The sale price should show up on the Kindle site by April 21, and the last day of the sale will be May 4, so come one, come all! 

Q is for Quentin Tarantino, Roger Corman’s #1 Fan

Those of us who write about movies for the A to Z Challenge have got to be grateful to Quentin Tarantino. He fits snugly into today’s “Q” spot, in the same way that he fits snugly into the Roger  Corman world. Not that Tarantino was ever on Roger’s payroll. But he illustrates what can happen when a dedicated Corman fan decides to make B-movies with A-budgets.

When Tarantino was a lad, he’d sneak out of his mother’s house in suburban Torrance, California and head for the seedy Carson Twin Cinema, where he could watch late-night double bills of New World nurse movies and women-in-prison flicks. As a budding exploitation-film  connoisseur, he developed a special preference for Jonathan Kaplan’s Night  Call Nurses, which he has described as “a classic mix of sex, nudity, and political consciousness.” (His fondness for statuesque woman-warrior Pam Grier led him to star her, years later, in Jackie Brown.)

After dropping out of high school, Tarantino wound up with a job at a video store in a South  Bay shopping mall. There he was befriended by a friend of mine, herself a movie buff with a job in the same mall. Since he always seemed hungry, she took him home and fed him pizza. But they didn’t get too close: for one thing, it didn’t seem that he bathed very often.

Tarantino exemplifies one of the upstart filmmakers who moved on to fame and fortune by going the film festival route, rather than toiling in Roger Corman’s vineyards. He made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival with his first effort, the brutal but extremely creative Reservoir Dogs (1992), and the rest is movie history. It’s worth noting that, although he dedicated his film to Roger Corman along with such cinema icons as Chow Yun Fat and Jean-Luc Godard, Tarantino never approached Roger when trying to raise financing. Instead he turned to early Corman protégé Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop), who proved invaluable in showing him where the money could be found. In 1996, a Variety reporter asked Roger Corman, “If a Quentin Tarantino came to you with the script of Reservoir Dogs, and asked you for a million dollars to make it, what would you say?” Corman’s reply: “I’d say I’ll give you $750,000 and you’ll do the film.” Maybe that’s why Tarantino kept his distance.

But he’s never lost his appreciation for Roger’s output. At the 2009 ceremony at which Roger was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an honorary Oscar, Tarantino made a lively speech, summing up the Corman legacy. He ended with a flourish: “Roger, for everything that you have done for cinema, the Academy thanks you, Hollywood thanks you, independent filmmaking thanks you, but most importantly -- for all the wild, weird, cool, crazy moments you’ve put on the drive-in screens -- the movie-lovers of the planet Earth thank you!”

Spoken like a #1 fan.  (I wonder if he’s seen Misery.)