Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 4/5/2025

Roger Corman

There's a moment in the documentary Corman's World, during a section dealing with Roger Corman's lack of embrace by the film industry in Los Angeles that caught my attention. About a moment after Nicholson is mugging to the camera about how Corman had refused him more than scale for writing The Trip, which had led to Nicholson essentially cutting Corman out of any residuals from Easy Rider, Nicholson says "If Roger feels unappreciated, I'll go over to his house tomorrow night."

It's a wonderful microcosm of Corman as he worked for decades: a terror to work with but building marvelous relationships at the same time.

Corman is, of course, known primarily as a film producer, not a film director. I am more concerned with him as a director for the purposes of this essay, though. That isn't to say that I haven't dabbled in his producing career. I've worked through the complete filmographies of both Joe Dante and Martin Scorsese, so I'm well aware of some of the more famous examples of his producing work (Hollywood Boulevard, Piranha, and Boxcar Bertha in particular).

However, I was really interested in who Corman was as a director himself. Instead of a shepherd for other people's work as producer, what kind of filmmaker was he when he was in as total control as one usually can be on a film set? I also had only little exposure to exploitation and B-movies in general, and I wanted an introduction (I had considered doing Budd Boetticher first because of his connection to Randolph Scott). So, in my eternal quest to discover cinema, I dove headfirst into the world of Roger Corman, the King of Cult, the King of the B's.

The Beginnings

I've heard Corman tell the story of his time in the story department at Fox. He was the youngest member of the team, took a script, covered it with notes, and the script got approval from the studio. It became the Gregory Peck film The Gunfighter, but Corman received no credit at all for his work, despite his notes being used. So, he quit Fox and went out to make movies on his own. He developed a relationship with American International Pictures, which had been formed just before Corman connected with them, and started on his career of making tiny-budgeted films to great profit.

One thing he took advantage of was the rules around profit and revenue sharing with the cast. This combined with the fact that distributors at the time where just looking for anything remotely professionally made to put on screen allowed Corman to simply grind out content for theaters at an incredible pace. In the first four years of his directing career from 1955 to 1958 he directed and released twenty films. In 1957 alone, there were 8 movies. I've seen directors working at incredible pace before (John Ford averaged three movies a year for literally his entire career), but that's incredible.

And Corman had no formal film education. Unlike those who supplanted him in the genre making game like Spielberg and Lucas, Corman learned not from university programs but from making movies. His first film, Five Guns West is a western (most of his early films were of the genre) with complex camera moves, handsome compositions, and strong performances. It also has serious logical leaps because the script isn't quite up to snuff, but from the beginning it was obvious that even though Corman was working cheap (as Beckoningchasm insists, I should say "frugally") and fast, he could make well-made films. It really was just up to the scripts to be up to snuff.

So, even if he's dabbling in science-fiction like in It Conquered the World with hilariously unbelievable rubber monsters, he's working to learn in these early years, grinding through product, selling movies at a profit so he can jump from one production to the next, and build up his own side-industry in Hollywood. It's also here where his constant efforts to actually just keep the wheels of his organization moving (much like how studios relied heavily on B-movies in the 20s and 30s to keep the studio lights on while larger pictures took longer to make) led to some lasting relationships professionally that went on for many years. There are faces in front of the camera like Dick Miller who started in Apache Woman in 1955 and Barboura Morris in Rock All Night in 1957, but there are also names from behind the camera like his regular writers Charles B. Griffith, R. Wright Campbell, and Leo Lieberman and his technical crew who became known as some of the best crews in the entire industry. And it was all fostered by this breakneck pace of making a movie, working through problems as fast as possible, and moving on.

Probably the best stories of his production methods come from the last movie of this era: The Little Shop of Horrors. Famously one of Jack Nicholason's first roles (Corman having met him in an acting class and propping him up with work for a decade afterwards), Corman borrowed dental equipment for the film. They were working so fast, needing to shoot an entire half of a film over one working day, that when, in the middle of a shot, the dental chair falls over, Corman called cut to save the chair, had no time to redo anything, and just moved on. The scene in question doesn't actually end in the final product. It just stops and fades into the next scene. But, it's funny and works at the same time.

Revenue Sharing and Poe


The Little Shop of Horrors has a couple of explanations for its very short (even by Corman standards) production schedule of two days (though, reportedly, pickups happened a few months later). Either it was a bet, or the revenue sharing model was changing. At the start of 1960, any film produced in Hollywood needed to share revenue with actors. The profits of distribution that Corman worked out with AIP no longer went straight into his pocket, he had to split it across his cast and crew to different degrees.

If you follow his career purely chronologically by release, there isn't a clean break because of how certain films got held back for distribution for months and even years, but there is a break that happens and is quite discernable from 1960-61 onwards. Suddenly, Corman's films, which I'll always defend as well-made even if I don't like them, suddenly feel...better made. He's taking more time, sometimes as long as six weeks (six weeks!) to make a whole movie. He obviously hated working that slow (he says so in interviews), but the slowdown actually helped things. He'd still cut corners wherever he could (The Terror was supposed to be just made on the leftover sets of The Raven, but that plan got...sidetracked), but he was directing higher quality physical productions, still enslaved to the quality of the scripts.

The best thing that happened to Corman at this time was the hiring of Richard Matheson (of I Am Legend) to adapt the first of the seven films that Corman would make based off of Edgar Allan Poe material, House of Usher. Starring Vincent Price, it's a surrealist, nightmare of the macabre with spare storytelling and a heavy emphasis on tone and style. It works wonderfully well. None of the other Poe movies quite reach it (The Haunted Palace comes in at a close second, but Scorsese himself likes The Tomb of Ligeia most), but the depth of color, the use of large sets (sometimes just left over from other movies like Becket), the quality of performances (especially from Price), and the sheer imaginative and focused nature of the scripts combine to make the Poe cycle the overall height of Corman's body of work as a director himself.

Counterculture


Roger Corman tried to go serious one time with the adaptation of the novel The Intruder by Charles Beaumont (also a somewhat regular screenwriter for Corman, who also wrote for The Twilight Zone). It's the story of a northerner, played by William Shatner, who goes to a small Southern town to rile up the population against court-mandated integration of the schools. It still borders on exploitation like his other movies, but it's his most serious-minded film trying for some kind of respect from his peers. It was also a financial failure, Gene Corman, Roger's brother and sometimes producing partner, calling it the only financial failure Roger ever made.

However, Corman did not let that failure kill his desire to make socially conscious movies. He just learned that he needed to hide it better. I mean, let's be honest, it's hard to dig out a social message from X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes, but it informs his efforts to make movies starring the counterculture, especially his biker film The Wild Angels. Starring Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern as well as a bunch of real Hell's Angels, it's a counterculture anthem with Fonda announcing, "We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride! We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do. We are gonna have a good time. We are gonna have a party." At a funeral of all places.

(That little speech jumped out at me because Edgar Wright samples most of it near the beginning of The World's End.)

However, this counterculture affectation didn't last very long, going through The Trip, the film about an LSD trip (starring Fonda, Dern, and Dennis Hopper) and Gas-s-s-s, a post-apocalyptic comedy about a world where everyone over twenty-five was killed by a government weapon. The latter film was massively recut by AIP while Corman was in England making Von Richthofen and Brown, apparently cutting out the very heart of the film's message which was supposed to be anti-hippie while the final product is very pro-hippie. As an aside, I doubt the mythical director's cut (which does not exist) would save the film. It's just a mess.

My personal favorite of the little era is The Wild Angels whose ending is surprisingly affecting, but overall Corman felt lost in the middle of a changing culture. That's not to say the movies were failures financially (they were not, they were big successes, especially The Wild Angels), but that the counterculture crowd would take just about anything that was different. This explains, in my mind, the seismic shift that Easy Rider, a very definite and direct result of Corman's work of the period, represented (a movie I consider more interesting as a cultural artifact than as an actual movie).

Producer Only Credits


And Corman's time on Von Richthofen and Brown convinced him to quit directing. In his own words, it seems like the scale of the production was just too much for him. He worked his way through the film (a handsome, accomplished bit of WWI drama that I enjoyed a good bit) and chose to stop directing. He would come back nearly twenty years later for a million dollar paycheck to make Frankenstein Unbound, but that was it. He was done making movies himself. Instead, he focused on being a producer.

And Corman wasn't the kind of producer to just sign a check and hang out in his office. Along with his wife Julie, he shepherded movies for decades, often on set (though only so far since he could be producing as many as twelve films at one time). He was a hands-on producer who did everything he could to help make other people's films (usually with his money) as good as he could aid them. This is where his reputation really lies.

Yes, he helped start Jack Nicholson's career. Yes, he made some movies that many film fans enjoy even to this day (I got some serious pushback for not like Swamp Women). But, it's his producing work, establishing the careers of Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13 being made right after The Young Racers), Ron Howard (Grand Theft Auto), Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha), Jonathan Demme (Caged Heat), Joe Dante (Piranha), Peter Bogdanovich (Targets), John Sayles (Return to the Secaucus 7), and James Cameron (who did special effects work on a few films, most notably Battle Beyond the Stars), that really made the mark on the industry as a whole.

And he kept going long after the model he had relied upon (the drive-in movie) had died, replaced by home video and even streaming. Last year, about a month before his death, it was announced that he had greenlit a new version of Little Shop of Horrors to be directed by Joe Dante (it was supposed to film in September of last year, but I haven't seen anything else about it and assume the project died with Corman).

Personality


And I find it hard to talk about Corman without talking about him as a man. I, of course, never knew him, but I've seen enough interviews with and about him to get, I think, a sense of who he was. He was incredibly smart, incredibly hard working, and incredibly demanding of other people. He refused larger budgets for anything, but he did it with a smile and an assurance that the people who worked with him would go on to bigger and better things.

Ron Howard tells a story of how, during the production of Grand Theft Auto, he asked Corman for more money for more extras for a big scene. Corman refused, put his hand on Howard's shoulder, and said, "Kid, if you can do this picture for me well, you'll never have to work with me again."

And everyone seemed to love him. Nicholson cries in Corman's World because of how much Corman means to him personally. Scorsese had only the nicest of things to say about him. Everyone seemed eager to finally celebrate him in 2009 when the Academy awarded him an honorary Oscar, and the people who spoke about him were effusive with praise. I think they meant it all.

Roger Corman was a singular figure in American cinema. Unabashedly only in it for the money to make another movie, only there to entertain, and ready to face any challenge head-on and with a smile, Corman became a treasure of an industry he was never really part of, an industry he always seemed to rebel against. Are his films high art? Not really. Do they need to be? Not at all.

He entertained me. He helped shepherd the careers of many more who entertained me.

Thank you, Mr. Corman, for all the good times.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

A Minecraft Movie

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Anora (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's really funny. It's got wonderfully written, rounded characters. It embraces reality in compelling ways. I just feel like it really didn't need to be the full 140 minutes." [HULU]

The Haunted Palace (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's something of a joy from Corman that represents a shocking maturity in its pursuit of exploitative thrills. I kind of loved it." [Tubi]

The Masque of the Red Death (Rating 3/4) Full Review There was something about these films that brought out the best in him as a filmmaker." [Pluto]

The Wild Angels (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "That it ends with this weirdly affecting final stretch almost comes out of nowhere, but I appreciate it nonetheless." [YouTube]

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, it's not really engaging. It's got a lot of solid actors being solid, but they're lost in a sea of other characters. It looks good and has some moderate interest, but it's far from compelling." [YouTube]

The Trip (Rating 1/4) Full Review "It's unengaging, dull, and sometimes simply hard to follow." [YouTube]

Gas-s-s-s (or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It) (Rating 1/4) Full Review "He's trying to be experimental, but he's not executing it well. He's trying to find new ways to do things, but his production methods don't give him the kind of time he needs to manage it. I think there's something to be said about how it's a precursor to John Landis' anarchic comedy stylings, but that's about it." [Library]

Von Richthofen and Brown (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, the end result is good, very solid drama from a filmmaker who'd dabbled in it from time to time in between less ambitious pursuits. Corman, at the end of the main period of his directing career, was showing that he still had it in him. He just didn't want to do it anymore." [YouTube]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 4/26, and it will be about the directing career of Ivan Reitman.