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Much has been written about director/producer Roger Corman, also known
as the King of the B's (though technically, he never made a B-movie
- as in second feature - in his life), but more often than not, his achievements for the
cinematic art and business alike are obscured by the fact that he
kickstarted the careers of many a now-famous A-list and/or arthouse director like Francis
Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Monte
Hellman, Joe
Dante, Ron Howard and Paul Bartel - and I'm happy I've gotten all that
name-dropping out of the way up front to get into the thick of things ... When
it comes to the making of popular films, Roger Corman was a rare genius,
in the 1950's, a time when the traditional Hollywood studio system was
collapsing due to the comeptition from television, he knew how to get a
teenage audience into local drive-ins, provided them with the films they
wanted to see (and it was not only horror and science fiction, genres to
which Corman is often reduced), and he knew how to make these movies on a
tight budget (and more often than not under budget, too). But Corman also
wasn't anything if not adaptable, with the 1960's, his films changed in
both style and genre, and more often than not, he hit homeruns with his
respective target audiences. In the 1970's, he gradually got out of
directing but continued to produce low budget exploitation fare, and he
was even able to score the occasional box office number one. With the
1980's, the B film as such lost much of its significance due to big budget
Hollywood blockbusters taking up way too much screens all over the
country, but still, to this day, Corman hasn't tired from producing films,
primarily for the home video and television market, and while many of his films are rather unremarkable (and are
meant to be nothing more than products for the exploitation market), the
occasional gem is still to be found. But let's start at the beginning
...
Early Life, Early Career
Roger Corman was born Roger
William Corman in 1926 in Detroit Michigan. Since Corman's father was an
engineer, it was expected of young Roger to become the same, and he
actually got a degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University.
But Corman's real passion was film - and thus he eventually got a job as
messenger at 20th
Century Fox and soon rose through the ranks to story analyst.
Eventually however, he figured there was more to the film business than
just reading and doctoring other people's scripts, and thus he travelled
to England to study a semester of 20th century English literature, then
stayed in Paris for a while for inspiration, and eventually he came back
to the USA with a (film-)story co-written with U.S.Anderson called The
House in the Sea - which they managed to sell to Allied
Artists, which made a movie out of it in 1954, called Highway
Dragnet (Nathan Juran) - to cash in on the then popular TV-series Dragnet
-, which turned out to be a standard crime drama of the low budget variety
(which essentially meant cutting lots of corners). According
to his own accounts, Corman was shattered about how Allied
Artists treated his vision and he saw his career over before
it has actually begun, convinced the movie was nothing but a turkey - but
as a B-picture, Highway Dragnet did actually do decent business,
and Corman was quick to realize there might be more to low budget
filmmaking than just one man's vision ... and thus, later in 1954, and
using the money he got for The House in the Sea aka Highway
Dragnet, he went on to produce the first low budget movie of his own
...
The 1950's
and Drive-In Cinema In the 1950's, the film industry was in
turmoil: With the overwhelming competition of television, the traditional family
night at the movies was a thing of the past, now the family's would by
and large stay home and watch TV for free - even if the production values
of most early TV-shows did by no means match those of even your low budget
movies - rather than pay for comparable entertainment on the big screen
... and especially the major studios were taken by surprise by this development, also of course because they tended to look down on television as
a distant relative who wasn't even invited to their party - and in the
process the majors back then by and large missed out on an audience
segment that was more than willing to go to the movies - and especially
drive-ins as it is -, if only to a) get away from the parents, and b) make
out, and that audience segment was the teenage crowd. Teenagers back in
the days though didn't give too much of a heed about production values
or stuff, they wanted movies that spoke their language and gave them cheap
thrills, that had plots that were easy enough to follow (quite important
if you make out about half of the film's running time), and that were, in
a weird, sensationalist way, somehow related to current headlines (like
the Cold War, the nuclear scare, science gone wrong, but also Rock'n'Roll
and juvenile delinquency) rather than being of
epic scale but removed from their time.
Roger Corman had
learned this lesson (the hard way?) with Highway Dragnet, but his
first film as a producer (he had a co-producer credit on Highway Dragnet, but
was doing little more on the set than watching others doing their stuff), Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954, Wyott
Ordung) was a direct reaction to his newfound knowledge: The film dealt
with a nuclear monster, had some cool underwater sequences - and cost a
meagre $ 12,000 (some of his own money from the Highway Dragnet-deal
plus dough borrowed from friends and family, mainly). To keep production
budget that low, Corman used every trick in the book, cut every corner
there was: For one of the film's main props, a one-man-submarine, he
contacted the company that built such a thing and promised them a mention
in the movie's credits if he could use it for free, to save on drivers and
crew, he actually drove equipment to and from the location himself, would
carry cameras around and set up scenes, just to not have to pay anybody
overtime, and he would keep the special effects as basic as could be. And
the whole thing worked out, too, Corman could sell distribution rights for
his $12,000 epic to Lippert
(where his brother Gene worked at the time) for a whopping $60.000
advance. Actually, Corman had even another offer for the movie from Realart
at the time, but they refused to give an advance, which was unacceptable
for Corman inasmuch as he wanted to make a second film pretty much right
away ...
Corman's next film after Monster from the Ocean Floor
was The Fast and the
Furious (1955, Edward Sampson, John Ireland), a film about an
escaped convict (John Ireland) who joins a carrace to stay ahead of his
captors. The production values in this one were decidedly bigger than in Monster from the Ocean Floor
(reportedly, The Fast
and the Furious cost $ 50.000), and with John Ireland and Dorothy
Malone, it even featured two established actors in the lead ( Ireland
actually only agreed to do it for the opportunity to also try his hands on
direction, which Corman happily accepted). Still, Corman tried to cut a few corners to make the film
looking more expensive than it actually was: He persuaded car company
Jaguar to lend him the cars for free, as promotion, he shot a considerable
amount of footage during official races, and he served as a stunt driver
as well, since there was no way he would afford two stunt drivers.
The outcome is no classic but a pretty nice (if clichéd) racing movie,
and because of all its vintage cars it's a virtual must for car lovers. The
real important aspect of this film though is not its inherent quality but
the fact that it was the first ever film distributed by the American Releasing Corporation,
a company just founded by James Nicholson and Samuel Z.Arkoff that would
eventually change its name to AIP
and become the drive-in fare production house of the 1950's. Corman
claims he got distribution offers from pretty much every company there
was but decided to go with American Releasing Corporation
because they offered him a three picture deal - and one thing was for
sure, he wanted to go on making movies, and not only that, he also wanted
to move on to the director's chair.
The first film Corman
produced/directed for Nicholson and Arkoff was Five
Guns West (1955), a decent but less than exciting Western - back
then still B movie staple -, which was actually shot in colour, followed
by Apache Woman (1955) - another Western, as the title suggests -
and The Day the World Ended (1955).
Of the three films, The Day the World Ended
was the most important one because this post-doomsday drama was Corman's
first brush (as a director that is) with science fiction - and the
post-doomsday topic is one premise that Corman would return to every now
and again for the rest of his directing career, from Last
Woman on Earth (1960) to the wacky Gas-s-s-s! Or It Became Necessary to
Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1971) as well as in his
subsequent career as a producer. Nicholson and Arkoff loved the stuff
Corman had made for them, and they loved his approach to filmmaking: He
was a director who had no aspirations of becoming an auteur (not
back then anyways, though in later years he was branded just that), he was a craftsman who was keen
on finishing his films on budget and on time (if not even below) and
whom Nicholson and Arkoff could give little more than a title or the
poster art for the next movie, and he would come up with something they
could distribute and make a profit of. For Nicholson and Arkoff at
least, Roger Corman was the ideal drive-in director ...
Of all the films Corman made in the 1950's, he is nowadays
most closely associated with his science fiction flicks, and it's true,
science fiction, in its various guises, was a genre Roger Corman would
return to several times during the 1950's and early 60's, directing films
like the alien invasion flicks It Conquered the World (1956)
starring Peter Graves and Lee Van Cleef, Not of this Earth (1957)
and War of the Satellites (1958), the monster movie Attack of
the Crab Monsters (1957), the science shocker The
Wasp Woman (1959) and above mentioned Last
Woman on Earth. Besides those, Corman also had his hands into
production of such sci-fi-schlock classics like The Beast with a
Million Eyes (1955, David Kramarsky, Lou Pace), Night of the Blood
Beast (1958, Bernard L.Kowalski), The
Brain Eaters (1958, Bruno Ve Sota), Beast
from Haunted Cave (1959, Monte Hellman) and Attack of the Giant
Leeches (1959, Bernard L.Kowalski). Especially as director, Roger
Corman was responsible for what we perceive today as the inherent style of
1950's drive-in science fiction - which was of course also dictated by the
low budget of these films -, including its very plain, no-nonsense, sharp directorial style, its not always convincing special effects smuggled by
the audience by expert editing, its many outdoor-scenes (to save on studio
costs), plus a returning stock of character actors, including Dick Miller [Dick
Miller bio - click here], Jonathan Haze, Susan Cabot, Barboura Morris,
Beverly Garland and Betsy Jones-Moreland
- but to reduce Corman's 1950's output on science fiction
alone would be dead wrong, Corman proved to be able to handle
pretty much every popular genre thrown at him, and with his personal style, too:
- With Oklahoma Woman and Gunslinger (both 1956), Corman
directed two more well-crafted Westerns.
- Swamp Women (1955), Naked Paradise/Thunder over
Hawaii and Teenage Doll (both 1957) were Corman's
excursions into crime drama, with each film putting the emphasis on a
different aspect of the genre to make it more marketable to drive-in
audiences - and I guess in this respect the titles are telling.
- Machine-Gun
Kelly and I, Mobster (both 1958) were low budget versions of the kind of
gangster cinema that had its heyday in the 1930's - and especially Machine-Gun
Kelly, featuring a flawless early performance by Charles Bronson, has turned out to be a surprisingly solid,
intelligent and
entertaining film that got Corman his first positive reviews.
- Carnival Rock and Rock all Night (both 1957), with
appearances by the Platters, Bob Luman and the Shadows, and the
Blockbusters, were Corman's contributions to the then booming
rock'n'roll music that also found its way into films, obviously.
- Sorority Girl (1957) was, in a way, Roger Corman's chick
flick, a teenage melodrama set in a sorority house - but Corman's very
plain and sharp directorial style and the film's very straight-forward
script make it totally watchable for guys as well.
- With The
Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great
Sea Serpent (1957), Teenage Caveman (1958), She-Gods
of Shark Reef (1958) and Atlas (1961) tackled the
various variations of the adventure genre - with the films varying in
quality of course. But the way he could even treat period pieces on a
budget and give them the certain drive-in feel was quite remarkable.
Corman's weirdest film of the 1950's though is without a doubt The
Undead (1957), a film that combines horror, witchcraft and time travel motives
to a story that starts in the now and ends in the Dark Ages, and that
weaves sci-fi mainstays and esoteric elements into the plot. I'm not
saying this is Corman's best 1950's film, but for the sheer audacity of
its plot and Corman's low budget approach to the movie's lofty themes it's
almost a must-see.
As solid and stylistically unique Roger Corman's filmwork was quite
from the start, the 1950's can best be described as his formative years,
he perfected the art of working on a budget (with tactics like shooting
films back-to-back, on confined sets, with a small cast and with a
skeletal crew), making movies out of poster art, titles or even headlines,
and he even learned how to handle actors - something nobody felt was
terribly important in 1950's drive-in cinema, but Corman took evening
classes nevertheless ... where he met a guy called Jack Nicholson (yes, that Jack Nicholson), whom he later gave his first lead in
one of his productions, Cry Baby
Killer (1958, Jus Addiss).
By the end of the 1950's though, it seems that Corman has grown tired
of directing your usual drive-in fare, as he, around the turn of the
decade, shot three films that perfectly spoofed the various horror and sci
fi-themes he had taken so seriously for quite some time. The first of these
films was A Bucket of
Blood (1959), a film in which a lamebrained wannabe-artist
suddenly becomes a big sculptor after he has accidently covered his cat in
plaster - which leads him to cover other things, especially corpses, in
plaster as well. The film is pretty much cheap as can be and it shows, but
it is also enjoyably macabre and beautifully carried by Corman regular
Dick Miller [Dick
Miller bio - click here] in what would turn out to be his only
lead.
Even cheaper than A
Bucket of Blood was Little
Shop of Horrors (1960), shot back-to-back with the former on an
obvioucly extremely hasty schedule: Allegedly the film was shot in two
days and a night, a world record for a feature film. Again, the cheapness
and the hasty schedule do shine through this film about a man-eating
talking plant, no doubt about that, but just
like A Bucket of Blood,
this one's wickedly funny, enjoyably macabre and surprisingly fresh in
approach - and in supporting roles, Dick Miller as plant-eater and Jack
Nicholson as masochistic dentist's patient give memorable performances.
Both A
Bucket of Blood and Little
Shop of Horrors were very well-received by the audiences back in
the day, and especially Little
Shop of Horrors has since become a cult item.
Corman probably went a bit too far over-the-top with his third drive-in spoof
Creature from
the Haunted Sea (1961), a film that goes wild in spoofing
everything from the Creature
from the Black Lagoon-series to To Have and Have Not
(1944, Howard Hawks) without the least bit of respect - much to the
enjoyment of contemporary audiences. But while the film was a hit back in
its day, it failed to catch on with the cult crowd the same way A
Bucket of Blood and especially Little
Shop of Horrors did, and now, despite its ready availability on DVD,
the film has some sort of an obscurity status ... which is a pity of course, because the film is hilarious.
In 1959, Roger Corman, along with his brother Gene, also set up their
own production company, Filmgroup,
as a direct competitor to Roger's mother-company AIP,
and starting with The
Wasp Woman (which is often regarded as one of his worst movies,
though it has its merits), Roger Corman started to direct/produce for his
own company - besides continuing working for AIP
and even occasionally fulfilling assignements for other production houses.
Under such circumstances, Filmgroup
of course was unable to flourish, so after only a handful or so films,
including Monte Hellman's Beast
from Haunted Cave, the World
War II-on-skis movie Ski Troop Attack (1960) - this one also
featured a rare extended acting performance by Corman and was shot
back-to-back with Hellman's film -, Little
Shop of Horrors, Corman's Puerto
Rico-trilogy - consisting of Last
Woman on Earth, Creature from
the Haunted Sea and Joel Rapp's war movie Battle of Blood
Island (1960), shot
back-to-back in Puerto Rico -, Atlas
and the seminal The
Intruder (1961) - more about that one later - Filmgroup
just vanished into obscurity again. The brand remained intact, and would
every now and again pop up on a Corman-produced vehicle, but as a company,
Filmgroup
would never get off the ground. For some reason the time was not yet right
for Roger Corman to head his own studio ...
Moving Up - The 1960's
By the turn of the decade, Roger Corman had obviously grown tired of
making the same film for the same crowd over and over again (even if he
dressed up his movies differently every time around), and even though he
didn't see himself as a director with a message or even an arthouse
director, he did at least have some higher aspirations and would in the
early 1960's gradually move away from doing the typical drive-in fare he
has become known for.
Corman's aspiration to make a meaningful movie is most clearly apparent
in The
Intruder (1961), his most overtly political picture ever about a slick,
ultra right small fry politician who tries to create racial tensions in a
sleepy rural village to exploit them to his own ends. The whole film is
extremely well-written, subtle despite its sensationalist topic, and
intelligent without being brain-heavy - and William Shatner in the role of
the politician gives probably the performance of his life, playing the role
as a charming yet sleazy guy trying to hide an inferiority complex
behind a phony facade. The film was so provocative in topic and solid in
direction it was even invited to a few film festivals
and met with critical acclaim - and wouldn't you know it, upon its initial release,
the film completely failed to catch on with American audiences and was the first of Corman's films
that didn't make its money back - seems as if the USA of 1961 just wasn't
ready yet to be confronted with the errors of racism.
Of course, in the decades that have passed since The
Intruder's initial release, times definitely have changed and
nowadays, it is regarded as one of Corman's most important as well as best
films (and deservedly so) and is the one Corman-film serious cineasts can
agree on - and with all its reruns and re-releases on video and DVD, by
today The
Intruder (not an expensive film to begin with) might have made its
money back (multiple times) after all ...
However, even before The
Intruder, Roger Corman launched another project of his that took
him away from traditional drive-in fare, while at the same time it
couldn't be further removed from The
Intruder's stark realism and grim political messages: An Edgar
Allan Poe adaptation, shot in colour and scope and on a comparatively
large budget (an estimated $ 270,000 compared to the sub-$ 100,000-flicks
Corman had made so far - still cheap compared to major studio releases of
the time). At first, AIP-producers
Arkoff and Nicholson were not too keen on making such a big picture, but
they had no reason not to trust Corman, whose instincts had always been
right so far, so they went with it and wouldn't come to regret it, as the
resulting movie, The House
of Usher (1960), would turn out to be one of the production house's
biggest successes so far.
Of course, the success of House
of Usher is not all that surprising, British production house Hammer
had had the American market for colour gothics for itself for three years and
had been phenomenally successful with their remakes of horror classics, so
it did take less of a genius that comparable fare from the USA (or
wherever else as it would turn out) could do decent business as
well. Still, Corman did not attempt to merely rip off the Hammer-gothics
but he brought his own style to it - adapted to gothic settings though -
and in Vincent Price [Vincent
Price bio - click here] - the biggest star he had worked with so far
and that
his limited budget cour afford - he
found a perfect charismatic leading man/villain who would put his own brand to House
of Usher as well. The film, scripted by Richard Matheson, was
only reasonably faithful to Edgar Allan Poe's short story, but that didn't
matter in the least since it did provide its audience with a creepy
atmosphere throughout and chills in all the right places, and it was even
intelligent enough to be taken seriously by the critics - something new
to Corman, whose drive-in fare usually tended to alienate critics (with the
exception of Machine-Gun
Kelly, actually). But what mattered the most, House
of Usher became a runaway success for its production company AIP
- so much so that they soon commissioned more of the same - and Roger
Corman's Edgar Allan Poe-cycle was born ...
1960's House
of Usher was followed in 1961 by Pit and the Pendulum,
a very free and somewhat silly adaptation of Poe's admittedly incredibly
skeletal short story, but still, the film was well-directed and again
Price gives a wonderful performance, supported by Barbara Steele [Barbara
Steele bio - click here], then a
fresh face in horror cinema.
The
Premature Burial from 1962 was originally intended to not be made
for AIP
but for Pathé
(which ram AIP's
processing lab),
which is why the film doesn't star Vincent Price (Corman's only
Poe-adaptation without Price) but Ray Milland - however, during
production, the production of the film was acquired by AIP
after all, since Pathé
did not want to risk upsetting (and probably losing) an important
customer, and thus the film became an AIP-film
after all. If
anything though, The
Premature Burial proves that Corman's
Poe-movies also function without the imposing presence of
Vincent Price (and Milland's acting style differs vastly from Price's) and
gives credit to Roger Corman as a director. By the way, this film also
stars Hazel Court, who had previously found fame in Hammer's
seminal gothic Curse
of Frankenstein (1957, Terence Fisher [Terence
Fisher bio - click here]).
With Tales of Terror, also from 1962,
Corman departed from his usual formula for Poe-movies inasmuch as he made
an anthology film, turning four of Poe's short stories into three
featurettes, all with Vincent Price in the lead. Two of the film's segments,
Morella and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - the last
one co-starring Basil Rathbone [Basil
Rathbone bio - click here] and Debra Paget - are ok but nothing great
by standards of the series, but the middle segment, based on Poe's Black
Cat and A Cask of Amontillado and pitting overacting Vincent
Price against understating Peter Lorre [Peter
Lorre bio - click here], is simply wonderful, mainly because
Corman focusses on the humourous aspects of his plot and lets his actors
have a go at comedy - and out of mutual respect for each other Lorre and
Price refrain from trying to upstage one another, instead work as a great
team.
Corman was
quick to realize that the Price-Lorre segment of Tales of Terror
caught on with the audience the most, so he turned his next Poe-adaptation
into an outright comedy - The
Raven (1963) - which had very little to do with Poe's poem of the
same name, instead it tells an over-the-top tale of two sorcerers duelling
one another, parodying clichées of Corman's
Poe-series every step along the way. Truth to be told, The
Raven is nowhere near as ingenious as the Black Cat/Cask
of Amontillado-episode of Tales of Terror,
despite reteaming Vincent Price with Peter Lorre (who once again make a
great duo), but it's great innocent fun nevertheless that also features
Boris Karloff [Boris Karloff
bio - click here], Jack Nicholson and Hazel Court in comical roles
- and everybody seems to be enjoying him-/herself, which easily translates
onto the screen.
After this excursion into comedy, it was back
to serious business with The Haunted Palace
(1963). But while The Haunted Palace
was marketed as a film of Corman's
Poe-cycle and bears the name of one of the author's
stories, it actually has nothing to do with Poe but is an adaptation of
H.P.Lovecraft's The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Still, on
a stylistic level, the film is totally in the tradition of Corman's other
Poe-films, and of course Vincent Price stars, supported by Debra Paget and
a definitely past his prime Lon Chaney jr [Lon
Chaney jr bio - click here]. In all, The Haunted Palace,
while still entertaining, is not one of the better films of the series,
basically, because a) the typical Poe-settings seem to somewhat clash with
Lovecraft's accomplished concepts of the Elder Gods and everything
and b) with its sixth film, Corman's
Poe-cycle seems to have run a little out of steam.
However, just when you thought the
Poe-series was definitely past its prime, Corman delivered
what would probably be his best Poe-film ever: The
Masque of the Red Death (1964) an unusually faithful adaptation of
Poe's story of the same name plus a totally unrelated story called Hop-Frog,
peppered with sequences inspired by Ingmar Bergman's Det
Sjunde Inseglet/The Seventh Seal
(1957). Basically the film tells the story of a decadent nobleman (Vincent
Price, who else?), who tries to shut the plague out of his castle, and as
if to mock death, he has a masque - but what he didn't know was he had
shut the plague in with him and his guests to begin with ... The
result is stunning, greatly helped by British cameraman Nicolas Roeg,
whose images lend an extra dimension to the proceedings. Once again, Hazel
Court co-stars.
Like The
Masque of the Red Death before it, the Tomb
of Ligeia (1964), the last of Corman's Poe adaptations, was shot in
Great Britain, mainly to make use of the UK's generous tax incentives that
lured many an American production company to the island in the 1960's, but
very much unlike The
Masque of the Red Death, Tomb
of Ligeia is a rather dull affair, and a silly one too. Problem is
that Poe's source material is little more
than the fascinating description of a dream of an opium clouded mind,
which screenwriter Robert Towne - years before gaining intertnational
recognition with Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn), Chinatown
(1974, Roman Polanski) and the like and doing his first and only Poe
adaptation - knows remarkably little to do with his premise other than
throwing out all opium references and cooking up a by-the-numbers horror
story.
After Tomb
of Ligeia, Corman realized it was really time to let go of Edgar
Allan Poe for good, and so he did ... but not AIP,
who handed over direction of the next Poe-feature to legendary genre
director Jacques Tourneur, but the resulting film, The City under the
Sea (1965), once again starring Vincent Price, was less a horror film
in Corman's tradition than a rather
disappointing, Jules Verne-like science fiction adventure that could not compete on a
quality level with even the weakest of Corman's efforts. (Tourneur
by the way also directed the Raven-rip-off
Comedy of Terrors for AIP,
starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff plus Basil Rathbone in
1964.)
Even after the disappointment of The City under the Sea, AIP
wasn't ready to let go of Poe quite that easily, so they marketed Michael
Reeves' masterpiece starring Vincent Price, Witchfinder
General (1968) - which they coproduced with Tigon
- as Conqueror Worm (named after an Edgar Allan Poe poem) stateside,
produced Gordon Hessler's Murders in the Rue Morgue - without Vincent
Price - in 1971, and in 1972, they had Vincent Price recite four Poe short
stories - The Tell-Tale Heart, The Sphinx, The Cask of
Amontillado and The Pit and the Pendulum - on television in An
Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (Kenneth Johnson).
Roger Corman might have moved up a few notches as a director
thanks to the
Poe-series, and the films certainly did look like big budget productions, but even then,
Roger Corman could not and refused to deny his drive-in low budget roots:
The reason that the Poe-films look so polished is that he was able to use the
sets more than once, actually most of the props and even costumes of these
films show up in several movies of the series, and Corman always knew
where to get props and costumes cheap so as to not having to start from
scratch. Also, Corman continued shooting films back-to back, like when he
realized he still had a few days of shooting left with Boris Karloff [Boris Karloff
bio - click here] after finishing The
Raven, he was quick to cook up a (confusing) story starring him
and Jack Nicholson called The
Terror (1963), which Corman directed on the existing sets in tandem with several of his
protegées including Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman and
Jack Hill - surprisingly enough, while the production history of this
seems to have been chaoticand the plot is choppy at best, the result looks pretty coherent for this
big a number of directors.
It was years later that Corman realized that
Karloff still owed him two shooting days from The
Raven, so he handed the veteran actor over to young director Peter
Bogdanovich together with material from The
Terror and told him to make a movie (pretty much any movie) out of
this. The result is Targets
(1968), which has over the years become a bona fide genre classic - so
you see what cost-cutting might eventually lead to ...
However, even besides the
Poe-cycle, Corman remained pretty productive during the first
half of the 1960's, making films like the mock-Shakespearean Tower of
London (1962) for smalltime producer Edward Small, starring Vincent
Price [Vincent Price bio -
click here], most possibly to cash in on the
Poe-series as it was. But that film was cheap even by Corman
standards: First and foremost, the film was shot in black-and-white -
which produceer Small didn't care to tell Corman until the very last
moment. Then whole action sequences were lifted from Universal's
Tower of London
(Rowland V.Lee) from 1939, an earlier version of the same story starring
Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff - with Price in a supporting role,
actually. And finally, the sets of the film looked so incredibly
cheap and spartanic it's almost embarrassing. Thanks to a swift and
atmospheric directorial job by Corman and a great ham performance by Vincent Price,
the film hasn't turned into a total desaster - actually it's pretty good as
dirt-cheap period pictures go - but it's definitely not the film Corman had in mind. The
Young Racers (1963) was a project that once again proved Corman's
economic ingenuity: The film is little more than a soap opera in front of
marvelous Formula 1 Grand Prix settings, but Corman was wise enough to
film his story following the actual Grand Prix circuit all across Europe,
which provided him with exceptional production values a cheap film like
this couldn't otherwise boast, and he got two actual race drivers, Jimmy
Clark and Bruce McLaren, to do some driving on his film too. And this way,
Corman did not only get an impressive film, he also got extensive holidays
in Europe for himself (Formula 1 races traditionally take
place only every other weekend, so there's plenty of spare time between
them), and he
quite correctly figured actors would work for him on reduced wages if he
threw an European vacation into the mix.
On top of that, Corman's light man, young Francis Ford Coppola,
persuaded Corman to let him shoot a movie in Ireland in the spare time
using The Young Racers' actors William Campbell, Luana Anders and
Patrick Magee - a film that Corman ultimately got for pretty much next to
nothing. And the film in question is of course Dementia
13 (1963), widely considered Coppola's first feature film
(actually, he made the nudie Tonight for Sure [1962]) before that).
But while The
Young Racers was merely nice and Dementia
13 was ok, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) was a genuine
sci-fi maserpiece, the story of a man (Ray Milland) blessed with X-ray
vision ... whose blessing soon becomes a course that leads him to a
drastic measure after turning to religion. The film shows Corman at the
height of his game: a straightforward no-nonsense directorial job is
combined with an intelligent script, a great central performance by Milland (who was previously in Corman's
Premature Burial of course) and special effects looking much
better than the budget would have allowed thanks to some ingenuity on the
director's part all add up to a great piece of science fiction cinema,
period.
Roger Corman tried his hands on war cinema (again) with The
Secret Invasion (1964), which he filmed in Yugoslavia starring Stewart
Granger, Edd Byrnes, Raf Vallone, Mickey Rooney and Henry Silva. Because
the film was backed by a major studio, United
Artists, Corman suddenly found himself with a considerable budget
- $600,000 or twice as much as any of his Poe-adaptations - at hand and
with a comfortable shooting schedule of 36 days - but with a major studio
in charge, Corman had to give up quite a bit of creative control, so what
actually could have become the prototype for The Dirty Dozen (1967,
Robert Aldrich) - the story similarities are striking - has merely become
a competently executed war film.
After the conclusion of the
Poe-series, Corman thought it was the right time to move on as
a director, and he left his employ with AIP
to try and work for a major studio - after all, he was by now an
acclaimed director who could produce hits. It wasn't long before Corman
was approached by Columbia,
who initially promised to give him carte blanche to direct whatever he
wanted - but for whatever reason, when he sugested to adapt Franz Kafka's The
Penal Colony for the big screen, they first dragged on with
pre-production for way too long and finally backed out. Corman's next
project for Columbia
was a Civil War Western, to be scripted by Robert Towne, but after only a
few days of shooting, he and Robert Towne left the project over artistic
differences. The film was ultimately finished by Phil Karlson and released
as A Time for Killing (1967).
Working for Columbia,
Corman quickly grew restless about the lack of speed the big company put
into making movies so he produced two Monte Hellman-Westerns starring Jack
Nicholson out of wedlock (he was employed as a director at the studio, not a producer), The
Shooting (1966) and Ride
in the Whirlwind (1966, this one was also written by Nicholson), two films that might have been made on the
cheap, but they gave the genre an existentialist treatment and over the
years have become bona fide classics - and helped elevate Hellman from
drive-in- to arthouse-director status.
When things continued to move way too slowly at Columbia,
Corman even took an absence of leave from the company to return to AIP
to make another low budget feature: The Wild Angels (1966). Corman, who was by now
a mere 40 years old, had always made an effort to keep in touch with youth
culture, so the stories about the Hells Angels and similar biker
gangs that made the rounds in the latter half of the 1960's had of course
not escaped his attention - and thus he decided to shoot a non-judgemental
film about the Hells Angels, with Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Diane Ladd
and Bruce Dern in the leads (Ladd and Dern, then a couple, actually procreated their
daughter Laura Dern during the shoot of this film by the way), and lots of real Angels in the cast who could
be used as authentic extras and who would even provide their own bikes to
add production value - and ride those bikes themselves, too. The filming
of The Wild Angels went relatively smoothly, because Corman found
some common ground with the Angels - after the release of the film though,
the Angels allegedly tried to sue Corman for defamation, feeling
themselves presented wrongly, while all that The Wild Angels
is a
non-judgemental but also unapologetic portrait of the Angels ... which is
exactly what makes the film so enjoyable even today. The Wild Angels
of course was not the first biker movie, The Wild One (1953, Laslo
Benedek) beat Corman to the punch by more than a dozen of years, but it
was with Corman's film - which turned out to be AIP's
biggest grosser so far - that the genre really took off, and for the next
few years, drive-ins around the nation were literally flooded with biker
movies that were for the most part nothing but sensationalist but cheap
rip-offs of Corman's film. On the other hand, without Wild Angels, there
probably would have never been Dennis Hopper's cult classic Easy Rider
(1969), which also stars Peter Fonda ... but more about that one later.
Peter
Fonda was also in Roger Corman's sort-of follow up to The Wild Angels,
The Trip (1967), together
with Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper, while Jack Nicholson provided the
script. Other than the pretty straightforward Wild Angels
though,
The Trip is a pretty
confusing film, a trippy experience as the title actually does suggest. It
has to be credited to Roger Corman though that before making the film
about a man (Peter Fonda) going on an LSD trip to forget his problems, he
went on a trip himself, as an experiment to get the film's mood right.
Still, The Trip isn't
half as impressive as The Wild Angels
(and wasn't as successful
neither), but it still works as an interesting document of 1960's
counter-culture.
In between The Wild Angels
and The Trip,
Roger Corman finally got a major studio film made. It wasn't for Columbia
though (the split over artistic differences was final) but for 20th
Century Fox, and the film took Corman back to the 1920's to make another (period) gangster
flick, The St.Valentine's Day Massacre (1967) a rather detailed (if
not always historically accurate) account of the events that led to the
titular shooting - in which top mobster Al Capone had several of his
competitors shot while conveniently vacationing in Florida - and the
aftermath.
Concentrating on this one event in Capone's life rather than
giving the man the epic treatment works quite nicely and St.
Valentine's Day Massacre
has turned out to be a quite stringent and hard-hitting film, even if
Jason Robards doesn't quite hit the chord as Al Capone (20th
Century Fox insisted in him playing Capone while Corman wanted Orson
Welles as the lead and Robards as Bugs Moran) and the film is by far not as multi-layered
(and as great) as
Corman's earlier Machine-Gun
Kelly - but still, it's a very decent gangster flick.
Just
like his collaborations with other big studios, the time with 20th
Century Fox was less to Corman's liking, and he returned once
again to AIP -
only to find out that the studio's bosses Samuel Z.Arkoff and James
Nicholson were less and less interested in his increasingly liberal-minded
flims (like Wild Angels
and The Trip),
as with AIP's
growing success they had become part of the Hollywood establishment - which is why
Corman didn't direct another film for them for the rest of the 1960's,
though he did help out on films like the Fabian-vehicle The Wild Racers
(1968, Daniel Haller) and the erotic epic De Sade (1969, Cy
Endfield) about you-know-who, without taking any credit for it.
During
these days, Corman was more invovled with the production side of AIP's
operations, being responsible for mostly trash actually, even if some
of the films he produced have over the years become cult classics and essential schlock. Corman's most interesting titles from that era
include Voyage
to the Prehistoric Planet (1965, Curtis Harrington) and Voyage
to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968, Peter Bogdanovich) - two
films using large chunks of footage from the Sowjet sci-fi-epic Planeta
Bur (1962, Pavel Klushantsev), for which Corman had bought the
American rights, spiced up (?) with some footage starring
American actors (Basil Rathbone in the former, Mamie Van Doren in the
latter) -, the shocker Blood
Bath (1966, Stephanie Rothman, Jack
Hill), the science fiction film Queen of Blood (1966, Curtis
Harrington) - starring John Saxon [John
Saxon bio - click here], Basil Rathbone and Dennis Hopper -, and the biker movies Devil's Angels (1967, Daniel Haller)
- starring John Cassavetes - and Naked Angels (1969, Bruce D.Clark).
There
was one film Corman wanted to produce that was a long shot away from the
schlock he used to make back then, and which was to some extent a combination of
his own films The Wild Angels
and The Trip:
Easy Rider. In fact, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda pitched the idea
to him and wanted Bruce Dern for the role of the straight lawyer (all
three men were incidently in Corman's The Trip).
Corman was quite interested in producing the film with Dennis Hopper in
the director's chair, and he figured it could be made for as little as
$360,000, but when he tried to sell the concept to AIP,
they were less than impressed by the film's counter-culture statement, and
were opposed to Dennis Hopper as director. When it became more and more
clear that AIP
would not make the film, at least not on Hopper's and Fonda's terms, Jack
Nicholson took the project and successfully pitched it to Columbia
- and as you might all know, the film got made without the involvement of
either Corman or AIP,
and Dern's role ultimately went to Nicholson (who thanked Dern by giving
him a role in his directorial debut Drive, He Said [1971]) - and
wouldn't you know it, Easy Rider became a phenomenal success,
easily blowing Wild Angels
out of the water, and is by now
considered one of the cult flicks of the 1960's.
During
these last few years of the 1960's, Roger Corman had not totally forgotten his true
vocation - directing - though, and he made a movie (away from AIP)
for American TV-channel ABC,
Target: Harry
(1969). The film is a sort-of variation on Dashiell Hammett's The
Maltese Falcon, but with internatinal settings and a James Bond-ish
espionage subplot built in - and somehow, the film, while competently
made, fails to impress. ABC
even kicked the film out of its schedule (though it is certainly no
worse than most other ABC
television movies), which meant it was released theatrically after all. At
least, Target: Harry
featured exotic locations (Monte Carlo, Istambul, Greece) and a few good
character performances from seasoned actors like Victor Buono and Cesar Romero, plus
a young Charlotte Rampling, but the lead, Vic Morrow, who most certainly
is no Humphrey Bogart, fails to carry the film. In 1970, Corman
finally agreed to do another AIP-movie,
Bloody Mama, starring Shelley Winters as Kate 'Ma' Barker, a
notorious gangster of the 1920's and 30's whose gang was made up mainly of
her own sons (played in the film by a pre-star Robert De Niro, Don
Stroud, Bobby Walden and Clint Kimbrough) and who spread terror across the
nation around the same time as Bonnie and Clyde - and as a
matter of fact, Corman's Bloody Mama possibly would not have been
made without the success of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). An
interesting note on the side: Before taking the lead in Bloody Mama,
Shelley Winters made a guest appearance as Ma Parker, a character
modelled after the real-life Ma Barker, on the enjoyably campy Batman
TV-show in 1966. Bloody Mama was quite a powerful
gangster flick, and for AIP,
it was comfortably far enough away from any of Corman's counter-culture
statements - which was not true for Corman's next film, Gas-s-s-s! Or It Became Necessary to
Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1971), an incredibly wacky
post-doomsday comedy that pokes fun at pretty much everything while
delivering a decidedly anti-authoritarian, left-leaning message. Actually, the film has
a make-it-up-as-we-go-along feel to it - and this was exactly how it was
filmed, as due to scheduling conflicts, Corman had to start filming
without a finished script, and he and writer George Armitage never quite
managed to have the writing catch up with the filming - anyways, in
this case works for the movie, a mad patchwork of youth culture mainstays, elements from Corman's earlier films and twisted philosophy.
Needless to say, AIP
was less then pleased, and while Corman was out of the country filming his
next movie, the company did a little bit of re-editing - enough to make
Corman mad and part ways with Samuel Z.Arkoff and James Nicholson for good
...
After Gas-s-s-s and his split with AIP,
Corman hooked up with a major studio once more, this time United
Artists, to make a World War I epic full of aerial stunts in
period biplanes: Von Richthofen and Brown/The Red Baron
(1971). But while on the outside, Von Richthofen and Brown seems
like nothing more a spectacular war drama, on closer inspection, it is
also a very personal tale about class struggle, with the flamboyant German
aristocrat Baron von Richthofen aka the Red Baron (John Phillip
Law), the German ace pilot of his time, fighting the Canadian working
class hero Roy Brown, whose name hardly anyone knows. Of course, Corman
did take quite some liberties with the actual story, but that doesn't make
Von Richthofen and Brown a less powerful film that appeals on both
the action and the psychological side of things.
Discovering a New World -
Roger Corman, Producer
After Von Richthofen and Brown, Roger Corman pretty
much quit directing films (true, he did return to the job almost 20 years
later, but this was merely a one-off gig) in favour of producing.
According to him, that wasn't even so much a conscious decision, but since
he had just started his own production (and distribution) company, New
World, in 1970, he probably just didn't have sufficient time
anymore to make movies of his own, especially after his experiences with
his earlier company, Filmgroup,
which went bust because he was too tangled up in film projects for other
people/companies.
Corman had started the company originally
because he did feel the partnership with AIP
has come to the end of the line - the split was amically though - and he
didn't feel himself too much in line with the way major studios ran their
operations ... so that pretty much left him just one way out, didn't it? The
first movie ever produced by New
World was The
Student Nurses (1970) by Stephanie Rothman, whose Blood
Bath he had produced back in 1966 and with whom he would collaborate again. Basically, The
Student Nurses was nothing more than a typical drive-in flick that
mixed R-rated sex scenes with a bit of comedy and a bit of action, just to
please the audiences, but Corman also saw to it that some liberal
political ideas were subtly woven into the plotline - probably more to
please himself and to justify his split from AIP
-, which Stephanie Rothman, a woman much more intelligent than most of her
films, quickly agreed to. The film was made for a meagre $150,000 and -
just like Corman had predicted - easily made its money back and then some.
The
Student Nurses actually proved to be successful enough for Corman
to produce a handful of similarly themed films, Private Duty Nurses
(1971, George Armitage), Night Call Nurses (1972, Jonathan Kaplan)
and Candy Stripe Nurses (1974, Alan Holleb), films that were little
more than slight variations on the first film. Stephanie Rothman in the
meantime was assigned to do another film for New
World, the visually stunning and highly erotic vampire movie Velvet
Vampire (1971). Actually, Rothman had the intention to become an
arthouse filmmaker, and she certainly had the talent to do so, but
after only a few more films (for other producers) she quit the business
somewhat disillusioned.
In 1971, Roger Corman figured out another way to save a few bucks on
production of his films and at the same time give them a somewhat
exotic look: Move production of at least a few movies to the Philippines
which were back in the early 1970's only beginning to be discovered by the
international film community, and which Corman himself stumbled upon thanks to actor/friend John Ashley, who
invited him to one of his Filipino sets back then - and Corman was quick
to notice the cost-effectiveness of filming in the Philippines. The first films
Corman produced in the Philippines were female prison camp movies - which
was an ideal genre to be shot in the Philippines inasmuch as it would
combine the exorix locations with plenty of action and nudity to appeal to
the drive-in crowd. The first of these movies was Big
Doll House (1971, Jack Hill) - New
World's only second film as a matter of fact -, which pretty much
set the formula for all future films, a bit of politics wrapped into much
sex and crime to keep the audience happy, plus ... Pam Grier. Pam Grier
was only at the beginning of her career back in 1971, in fact Big
Doll House provided her with her first bigger role, but Corman was
quick to notice the effect the statuesque black actress had on the
audience, thus in future women in prison films - Women in Cages
(1971, Gerardo de Leon) and the hilarious Big
Bird Cage (1972, Jack Hill) - she got bigger and bigger roles ...
before she even caught AIP's
attention, who cast her in their Filipino women in prison flick Black
Mama, White Mama (1972, Eddie Romero) - a film incredibly similar
to New
World's genre fare - before shooting her to fame with
blaxploitation classics like Coffy
(1973, Jack Hill), Foxy Brown
(1974, Jack Hill) and Friday Foster (1975, Arthur Marks).
(Of
course, with Caged Heat [1974. Jonathan Demme], Corman proved that women
in prison films, even without Grier, could just as effectively be made in
the USA.)
Interestingly
enough, in 1975, New
World tried to jump the blaxploitation babe bandwagon with
the Filipino-lensed TNT
Jackson (Cirio H.Santiago), and while that film's lead Jeannie
Bell is certainly no Pam Grier, the film (co-scripted by Corman regular
Dick Miller [Dick
Miller bio - click here] by the way) is at least incredibly
amusing.
In 1973, Corman took his women in prison formula (complete with Pam Grier by the way) that worked so well in the Philippines
and moved it to Italy (and to ancient Rome on a story level) with The
Arena/Naked Warriors
(Steve Carver) - however, as funny as this may sound in
writing, in period settings the whole concept just didn't make all that
much sense, and a bad script and Carver's uninspired direction didn't help
much either of course.
Back in the USA, New
World had its hands pretty much in every drive-in or exploitation
genre there was, including of course biker movies - Angels Hard as they
Come (1971, Joe Viola) -, blaxploitation - The Final Comedown
(1973, Oscar Williams) -, science fiction - The Cremators (1972,
Harry Essex) -, horror - Night of the Cobra Woman (1972, Andrew
Meyer) -, even a rollerderby-drama - Unholy Rollers (1972, Vernon
Zimmerman) -, and the like.
Interestingly enough, Corman also
continued to produce period gangster films, like Big
Bad Mama (1974, Steve Carver), a rip-off of his own Bloody Mama
with Angie Dickinson taking over the Shelley Winters role, and William
Shatner in one of his few great post-Star Trek-roles. In
1975, Corman also took another shot at Al Capone with the
tellingly titled Capone (Steve Carver), with Ben Gazzara in the
title role and a pre superstar Sylvester Stallone as Frank Nitti.
Interestingly, Capone incorporated portions of Corman's earlier
self-directed St.Valentine's Day Massacre into its footage - a
cost-cutting measure, quite obviously. However, New
World's best gangster film of the early 1970's was without a doubt Boxcar
Bertha (1972) by a young Martin Scorsese starring Barbara Hershey
in the title role, her real-life boyfriend David Carradine as her
boyfriend and Carradine's father John [John Carradine bio - click
here] as
their nemesis. Perhaps of all of New
World's productions, Boxcar
Bertha was best at delivering Corman's self-imposed liberal,
left-leaning message in an entertaining piece of film - and it has since
become a classic not only because of being an early Martin Scorsese-directing-credit.
Another New
World-production with a slightly left-leaning message that was destined to become a classic was 1975's Death
Race 2000 (Paul Bartel), a film starring David Carradine fresh
from TV's Kung Fu as ace race driver and Sylvester Stallone
as his nemesis in a futuristic world in which car races are everything and
human roadkill is a good thing. The film is pretty much action and science
fiction spectacle and sharp media satire all rolled into one, and it also
seems to be a parody of post doomsday carcrash films à la the Mad
Max series - even though Death
Race 2000 preceded all these films by several years.
Death
Race 2000 became a phenomenal success for New
World, it even topped the box office for a week - an incredible
feat for an independent production even back then -, so it was only a question
of time until the company put out more carchase flicks, like Pau Bartel's
own disappointing Cannonball
(1976) starring David Carradine, the Ron Howard-starrers Eat my Dust
(1976, Charles B.Griffith) and Grand Theft Auto (1977, Ron Howard),
and Thunder and Lighting (1977, Corey Allen), again starring David
Carradine.
Quite a bit of the footage of Death
Race 2000 and some of the props (cars especially) on the other
hand were reused in Hollywood
Boulevard (1976, Allan Arkush, Joe Dante), a loving hommage to the
low budget end of Hollywood filmmaking ... but the film is nowadays more fondly
remembered for its good intentions than for its actual outcome though, as
it tends to become rather cheesy every time and again and quite episodic
throughout.
Be that as it may, the film did kickstart the directing careers of both
Dante (formerly New
World's resident editor) and Arkush, who would go on to more
films for Corman which were upon New
World's more memorable output, e.g. Piranha
(1978, Joe Dante) and Rock'n'Roll High School (1979, Alan Arkush)
featuring the Ramones. In all fairness it has to be mentioned though that
Arkush was also co-responsible (with Nicholas Niciphor) for the rather
abysmal David Carradine-starrer Deathsport
(1978).
Even though New
World had produced the occasional genre classic though, most of
its output was - let's face it - schlock along the lines of, say, Humanoids
from the Deep (1980, Barbara Peters) - at times very charming
schlock but schlock still. However, through the distribution arm of New
World, Roger Corman started to look for respectability in the
1970's and started to distribute international arthouse films in the USA,
beginning with Viskningar och Rop/Cries and Whispers (1972,
Ingmar Bergman), soon to be followed by Federico Fellini's Amarcord
(1973), the animated sci fi spectacle La Planète Sauvage/The
Fantastic Planet (1973, René Laloux), Francois Truffaut's L'Histoire
d'Adèle H./The Story of Adele H. (1973), Akira Kurosawa's Dersu
Uzala (1975) and the like. And this part of his business did not only
prove to be a financial success, Corman also proved himself to have a
lucky hand in picking future foreign language film Oscar winners.
By the early 1980's, the air got increasingly thinner for an
independent producer like Roger Corman: the major studios were taking over
more and more of the market by buying up drive-in and theatre chains, by
spending more and more money on advertising to make sure ad campaigns for
smaller films weren't even heard, and they were starting to make essentially the same
(genre-)movies little studios made (and the majors wouldn't have touched
with a stick even 10 years ago), but pumping millions upon millions into
special effects so little productions couldn't compete with films of the
majors on that level.
Corman knew it was no longer possible to beat the majors like
he did with Death
Race 2000, but he tried to stay with the game by ripping off
successful blockbusters like the Star Wars-series of films, Alien
(1979, Ridley Scott), Conan
the Barbarian (1982, John Milius) and Halloween
(1978, Jophn Carpenter). Many of Corman's rip-offs admittedly didn't
amount to much - e.g. Galaxy of Terror (1981, Bruce D.Clark), Slumber
Party Massacre (1982, Amy Holden Jones), Forbidden World/Mutant
(1982, Allan Holzman), Deathstalker (1983, John Watson) -, but at times,
the New
World-films even then showed a spark of originality, like the
amusing Battle Beyond the Stars (1980, Jimmy T.Murakami), a sort of
Magnificent Seven (1960, John Sturges) in outer space starring Richard Thomas, Robert
Vaughn,
John Saxon [John Saxon bio -
click here] and Sybil Danning [Sybil
Danning bio - click here], or Android (1982, Aaron
Lipstadt), a highly original character study featuring - you guessed it -
an android set in outer space starring
Klaus Kinski. However, towards the middle of the 1980's, Corman
had to realize that New
World, the way he ran it, was no longer viable, and he figured he
had to at least shed the distribution arm of the company - but he got an
offer that seemed way better ...
Concorde and New Horizon
In 1983, a trio of Hollywood lawyers got interested in
Corman's New
World, and after much negotiations, Corman got what he thought to
be a dream deal for the company: He sold the company name, offices and
distribution staff to the lawyers, but kept New
World's entire film library and the new owners of the company were contractually
committed to distribute Corman's productions for (at least) 6 more years for a
smaller-than-usual margin - but unfortunately, that deal did not live up
to its promise when the new New
World didn't distribute Corman-production the way he thought they
deserved to be distributed, and didn't pay him the promised percentage and
... ultimately it all ended in court. Only eventually did both sides agree
to settle the whole thing out of court (in Corman's favour by the way),
but that left Corman as a movie producer with no distribution arm for his
operations - so he saw no other way out than to form another company that is
interestingly alternatively known as Concorde
and New Horizon
- and sometimes even as Concorde-New Horizons or New Concorde
- in 1985. When the theatrical market for independent productions was
really thinning out in the mid-1980's, Corman was clever enough to look
for (and find) other sources of income that could keep his company going,
like pay TV and the booming home video market, and he has kept his company
going since 1985, while New
World, which had had soon gone to the stock exchange and grown
into a media conglomerate in the late 1980's/early 90's and had even owned
Marvel Comics
for a while, has since gone out of business, with only a few of its
television stations now owned by the News Corporation still
carrying the company name. Sure, Corman's Concorde
and New Horizon
do not carry the same influence as New
World had during its prime, and all artistic aspirations Corman
once had were also gone due to the changed marketplace, but production has
gone on like in a powerhouse, with an output of about ten to twenty films
per year, with Corman still involved in all major artistic decision of at
least most movies, just like he was at New
World. Sure, most of Concorde
and New Horizon's
pictures were trash, but at least enjoyably so. Some of the better known
films of the company are:
-
Barbarian Queen
(1985, Hector Oilvero), which marked the first lead role of Lana Clarkson
after she made an impression in Deathstalker.
After this film, Clarkson enjoyed a brief career as one of the very few female American
action stars in the 1980's, however, she later found sad fame when found being
shot dead in music producer Phil Spector's house in 2003 [Lana
Clarkson bio - click here]. Barbarian Queen
was successful enough to be followed by Barbarian Queen II: The
Empress Strikes Back (Joe Finley) in 1989, a film not at all connected
to the first one, while Wizards of the
Lost Kingdom 2 (1989, Charles B.Griffith) re-used large chunks of Barbarian Queen.
All these films did star Lana Clarkson though. Deathstalker
by the way,
to which Corman still held the rights, also spun off quite a number of sequels, but none featuring
Clarkson.
- The horror comedy House (1986, Steve Miner) starring William
Katt was successful enough to spawn a series of rather popular
comedic shockers of its own - even though this film and its sequels
are not narratively linked.
- Not of this Earth (1987, Jim
Wynorski [Jim Wynorski
interview - click here]), a remake of Corman's
1957 film [click
here] of the same name, was allegedly only produced because
director Wynorski bet Corman he could make the film in less time than Corman did in
'57 (it's unclear who won the bet though). Also, Not of this Earth
is
the first mainstream film of former underage porn starlet Traci Lords
- and the only non-porn flick she does topless nudity in.
- In 1987, Corman produced Big Bad Mama II (Jim Wynorski), a
film that is mainly carried by Angie Dickinson, reprising her role
from Big
Bad Mama from 13 years earlier.
- With Bloodfist (1989, Terence H.Winkless), Corman helped
kickboxing champ Don 'The Dragon' Wilson to film stardom, though the
film itself is a run-of-the-mill action flick about a man wanting to
avenge his brother in a martial arts tournament. The film was
successful enough to spawn a number of sequels though.
- Masque of the Red Death (1989, Larry Brand) starring Patrick
Macnee was an attempt to cash in on the Edgar Allan Poe boom that
seemed to come out of nowhere in the late 1980's/early 90's - but the
film paled in comparison to Corman's own Masque of the Red Death
from 1964. The Haunting of Morella (1990, Jim Wynorski) was
another Poe-cash-in.
- Warlock (1989, Steve Miner) starring Julian Sands, Lori
Singer, Richard E.Grant and Mary Woronov proved to be quite a success
around the world and over the years has become a minor genre classic ...
and it once again spawned numerous sequels, though the series was
taken over by Trimark
from film two onwards ...
- With films like Munchie (1992, Jim Wynorski) - starring Loni
Anderson, Dom De Luise and a young Jennifer Love Hewitt in a small
role - and The Skateboard Kid (1993, Larry Swerdlove), Corman tried to break into the kiddie market.
- Carnosaur (1993, Adam Simon) was a quite obvious attempt to
cash in on Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) - and had Jurassic
Park's Laura Dern's mother Diane Ladd in the lead -, but to be
fair, Carnosaur is nowhere near as cheesy as Spielberg's film,
was released 3 weeks earlier than Jurassic Park (Corman always
knew how to put out a film quickly), and it was based on a novel by
John Brosnan that was a direct influence to Michael Crichton's (better
researched and better written) source novel for the Spielberg-movie.
- The Fantastic Four (1994, Oley Sassone), based on the popular Marvel-comic
of the same name, was only produced so Bernd Eichinger and Constantin
Film would not lose the film rights of the property. The film
was allegedly never intended to be released though and hasn't been officially -
however, through various sources, quite watchable versions of the film
have seen the light of day (and of the black market). And while The Fantastic Four
is by all means a low budget film and no masterpiece, it still blows
the silly big budget adaprations by Tim Story from 2005 (click
here) and 2007 (click
here) out of the water.
(For more about the issues surrounding The Fantastic Four,
you might want to watch the documentary Doomed:
The Untold Story of Roger Corman's the Fantastic Four [2015,
Marty Langford], a totally recommended extensive movie on the
subject.)
- Dinosaur Island (1994) by trash maestros Jim Wynorski and
Fred Olen Ray is an incredibly stupid attempt to combine dinosaurs and
topless nudity - and a definitive must just because of that.
- Revenge of the Red Baron (1994, Robert Gordon) is simply
miles away from Corman's own Von Richthofen and Brown, as it's
nothing but a silly, family friendly horror comedy about the Red Baron returning from the dead wanting to have
revenge on the pilot who killed him decades ago. And now the Red Baron
is using toy planes. Mickey Rooney stars.
- In 1995, Corman started to have films from his backlog remade for
television, including Bucket of Blood (1995, Michael McDonald),
The Wasp Woman (1995, Jim Wynorski), Piranha (1995,
Scott P.Levy) and Humanoids from the Deep (1996, Jeff Yonis).
- Dillinger and Capone (1995, Jon Purdy) - with Martin Sheen
and F.Murray Abraham in the title roles - and Babyface Nelson
(1995, Scott P.Levy) - C.Thomas Howell in the title role, F.Murray
Abraham as Capone once again and Martin Kove as Dillinger - are two
more period gangster flicks made on the cheap, but they simply pale in
comparison to Corman's own (cheap) Machine-Gun
Kelly - nor are these films in the least historically accurate
in fact.
-
Black Scorpion (1995, Jonathan Winfrey) is a
made-for-television movie about a hot cop (Joan Severance) who dons a
sexy outfit every night to do crimefighting on the side, Batman-style. And while
this might all sound a little silly, it is actually a pretty
entertaining and even erotic film. Quite obviously, Black Scorpion
was intended as a pilot for a TV-series, but that didn't happen right
away. Instead, Corman produced a sequel, Black Scorpion II:
Aftershock (Jonathan Winfrey) in 1997, before a 22-episode-series
finally came into being in 2001, with Michelle Lintel taking over the title
role.
- While most of Concorde
and New Horizon's
output could be considered trash aimed at the teen market, Corman
didn't shy away from the occasional adaptation of a work of literature
either, with
source material ranging from Bram Stoker - Burial of the Rats
(1995, Dan Golden) - and Jack London - The Sea Wolf (1997, Gary
T. McDonald) - to Henry James - The Haunting of Hell House
(1999, Mitch Marcus) - and Robert Louis Stevenson - The Suicide
Club/The Game of Death (2000, Rachel Samuels). These adaptations vary in quality,
though.
- Besides works of literature, Corman also adapted the comicbook Vampirella
(1996, Jim Wynorski), which was created back in 1969 by horror movie
critic legend Forrest J.Ackerman, who also has a cameo in the film.
The movie, starring Talisa Soto in the title role and Roger Daltrey as
the main vampire villain, has some charmingly naive aspects, but
misses too many marks to really make it as a cult classic.
- Contrary to the highly fictional world of Vampirella, Marquis
de Sade/Dark Prince (1996, Gwyneth Gibby), a co-production
with Russian Mosfilm,
claims to tell the true story of the notorious Marquis, played here by
Nick Mancuso - but one might be adviced to not watch this for
historical accuracy.
- In 2001, Corman had the 1974 film The
Arena remade as - you might have guessed it - The Arena.
The film was another American-Russian co-production directed by Timur
Bekmambetov, who would eventually go on to direct the vampire movies Nochnoy
Dozor/Night
Watch (2004) and Dnevnoy Dozor/Day Watch (2006),
two of the most successful Russian films ever, as well as Wanted
(2008) starring Angelina Jolie.
- When Eagles Strike and Operation Balikatan (both 2003,
Cirio H.Santiago) took Corman back to the Philippines. Both are war
films starring bodybuilder Christian Boeving.
- Barbarian (2003, Henry Crum) is - you guessed it - a
barbarian movie shot in the Crimea that reuses quite a few scenes from
Deathstalker
from 20 years earlier - Corman never was a producer to waste either
money or footage from his library.
- Dinocroc (2004, Kevin O'Neill), Saurian (2006, John
Carl Buechler), Scorpius Gigantus (2006, Tommy Withrow) and Supergator
(2007, Brian Clyde) all have titles that speak for themselves - and
which should be inducted in the trash movie hall of fame on the strength of
their titles alone.
- On the other side of the spectrum, Corman also had the decency to
produce arthouse director/guerrila filmmaker Alex Cox' micro-budget
movie Searchers 2.0 (2007) [Alex
Cox bio - click here], as well as play a part in it.
- Unfortunately, Corman also had the bad idea to sell the rights of Death
Race 2000, one of New
World's best productions and a bona fide genre classic, to
Cruise/Wagner Productions, who, under the title Death Race
(2008, Paul W.S.Anderson) turned the film into your typical brainless
summer blockbuster, derived of all political subtext and underlying
irony. Corman has an executive producer-credit on this one, which was
produced by neither Concorde
nor New Horizon
...
While this list of Roger Corman/Concorde/New Horizon
productions seems incredibly long as it is, it only scratches the surface
of the man and his company's output - and yet despite of all of his
involvement with the company, Corman had time to return to the director's
chair one last time, for Frankenstein Unbound (1990), a project handed to
him by 20th
Century Fox,
and they granted him a considerably larger budget than he had on any of
his films as a director or producer, too. The film is of course based on
Mary W.Shelley's Frankenstein,
but also on Brian Aldiss novel Frankenstein Unbound, which combines
the traditional Frankenstein-tale
with timetravel motives, giving the story a whole new dimension. Corman's
film based on this book is an incredibly light-footed
horror-sci-fi-comedy that's witty and intelligent ... but that is easily
forgotten in just a few days time - which by no means makes Frankenstein Unbound
a bad film, just not one of Corman's better ones.
By the way, Raul Julia stars as Frankenstein in this one, Nick Brimble
plays the monster, while Michael Hutchence from INXS and Bridget Fonda can
be seen as Percy Bysshe and Mary W.Shelley, with Jason Patric playing Lord
Byron, but the lead - a time traveller from the future - is played by John
Hurt.
Of course, Corman wouldn't be Corman wouldn't he have tried to use the
momentum of Frankenstein Unbound
- which was no blockbuster but a successful enough film - to produce Dracula
Rising (1993, Fred Gallo), a reinterpretation of the Dracula-myth
with Christopher Atkins as the vampire ...
Closing Words
Whether you like Roger Corman or not, his influence on the American and
international moviescene as director and producer has been enormous, his
energy has been and still is inspiring, and even though some of his films
are seemingly trash for trash's sake, he has created or helped to create
an incredible amount of classic genre movies - and in many ways, he has
been a trailblazer - targeting the teen-market in the mid-1950's,
something mainstream Hollywood hadn't done until 20 years later, taking
film projects out of America (to the Philippines, Europe, Argentina,
Russia, ...) to cut cost and profit from the local creative potential
(nowadays standard procedure in Hollywood), and making films fitting their
ad campaigns instead of the other way round. And yet, Corman's films (at
least those he has directed) were always distinguishable from comparable
Hollywood product, on one hand because he was an incredibly economic
director who could get amazing results from very little, on the other hand
because he was quite an intelligent man and was opposed to simply dumbing
down his films (as they do in Hollywood these days) or streamline his
films' political subtexts and radical tendencies (ditto).
If you want to learn more about Corman than you already have here, the
man has written his autobiography How I Made a Hundred Movies in
Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime in 1990 together with Jim Jerome. At
first this book might seem like nothing but an entertaining collection of
showbiz-anecdotes, but once seeing the bigger pattern, it also offers an
amazing insight into the world of low budget filmmaking and is full of
valuable suggestions for wannabe filmmakers - and it will probably help
you to better see the man's many merits, which are invaluable to the film
industry as such.
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