Roger Corman

17May24

Can you be a “great filmmaker” but not make great films?

You can if your name was Roger Corman, If you made about 300 movies, and if you helped launch the careers of Jack Nicolson, Robert De Niro, Marin Scorsese, Jonathan Damme, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard, Sylvester Stallone, James Cameron, James Horner and scores of others.

In 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (The Oscar folks) awarded Corman the Honorary Oscar for his “unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers by providing an environment that no film school could match.”

Roger Corman gave young, inexperienced actors, directors and other craftspeople a chance when no one else would. The lessons learned on his fast and lean shoots informed the future work of all who trained with him.

I discovered Corman while on a quest where two tracks unexpectedly intersected. 

Track one was watching great films. In 1998, the American Film Institute published the first of their many lists – 100 Years… 100 Movies – the greatest American movies of all time. I was intrigued, and had only seen about 35 of the films. So, I decided to see them all. It took me five years, but I watched all 100 of those movies. There is a reason they are on the list. The last one I watched, Amadeus, I dreaded. I mean, 2 hours and 40 minutes of Mozart, seriously? But, just like the others, it was completely worth my time. 

Track two is my love of black and white science fiction movies from the 1950’s and ’60’s. I have a very distinct memory of watching one of these on my 12” Admiral TV, complete with bent-up coat hanger for antenna, when I was about 6 years old. (It was Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.) I had been randomly stumbling across examples, but while I was working through the AFI list, I decided to make a more systematic sweep of the B&W Sci Fi genre. This lead me to a rich vein of really crappy, but intriguing movies produced and directed by Roger Corman. I have seen every one of the movies Corman produced and directed – science fiction or not. 

For much of his career, Corman worked for American International Pictures. They made mostly second bill movies for drive-ins. They would conjure up a wild title, create a wild poster and if enough drive-ins and movies houses signed up to show it, they would make it…and make it on the cheap.  Many times the action on the screen barely matched the action on the poster. 

Corman made full length features for $10,000 to $25,000 for much of his career. To keep costs down, he would sometimes shoot two movies at the same time – a trick Robert Zebecks used while filming Back to the Future II and Back to the Future III. Corman claimed to have never lost money on a film. 

Despite the financial constraints, Corman produced some noteworthy movies include:The Intruder, marred only by William Shatner’s uniquely odd acting style; The Little Shop of Horrors, shot in 36 straight hours on a borrowed set; The Wild Angels – about the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang and birthed the idea for Easy Rider. He also directed a series of Edgar Allan Poe features including The Fall of the House of Usher.

In his later years, Corman’s legacy was honored by many of his directors by giving him cameos in their movies including Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, Jonathan Damme’s Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II.

There will never be another Roger Corman. The world has changed in too many ways, but his legacy lives on in celluloid. 

Some of my personal favorites include:

The Wasp Woman – The female founder of a large cosmetics company is disturbed that she is aging. Her lead scientist has extracted enzymes from a queen wasp that can reverse the aging process. The woman agrees to fund further research provided she can serve as his human subject. Unhappy with the slow pace of the results, she breaks into the scientist’s laboratory and injects herself with mega-doses of the secret formula shedding 20 years in a single weekend. Unfortunately, while getting younger, she is also periodically transformed into a murderous, wasp-like creature.

Attack of the Crab Monsters – A scientific expedition is sent to a remote Pacific island for research and vanishes. A second expedition is mounted to discover what happened to the scientists of the first expedition. Unknown to them, the island is inhabited by a pair of radiation-mutated giant crabs that not only consumed the members of the first expedition, but absorbed their minds, and now plan to reproduce their kind in numbers and take over the world.

The Creature from the Haunted Sea – a parody of spy, gangster, and monster movies (mostly Creature from the Black Lagoon), concerning a secret agent who infiltrates a criminal gang trying to transport an exiled Cuban general with an entourage and a large amount of Cuban treasure. Eventually the creatures kills almost everyone. The movie ends with the creature sitting on the undersea treasure and picking its teeth.  

Gas-s-s-s  also known as Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It – a post-apocalyptic dark comedy, about survivors of an accidental military gas leak involving an experimental agent that kills everyone on Earth over the age of 25. The subtitle refers to the Vietnam war quote “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”  

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