Roger Corman: Interviews

271 Pages·2011·0.94 MB·English

by  Constantine Nasr

Roger Corman: Interviews
Conversations with Filmmakers Series
Gerald Peary, General Editor
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Roger Corman
i n t e r v i e w s

Edited by Constantine Nasr
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American Uni-
versity Presses.
Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2011
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corman, Roger, 1926–
Roger Corman : interviews / edited by Constantine Nasr.
p. cm. — (Conversations with filmmakers series)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-165-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-166-3 (pbk. : alk. pa-
per) 1. Corman, Roger, 1926–—Interviews. 2. Mo-
tion picture producers and directors—United States—Interviews. I. Nasr, Constan-
tine. II. Title.
PN1998.3.C68A5 2011
791.4302’32092—dc22
[B] 2011013595
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Introduction vii
Chronology xvii
Filmography xxiii
Science-Fiction in Danger 3
Roger Corman / 1957
Corman Speaks 5
Bertrand Tavernier, Bernard Eisenschitz,
and Christopher Wicking / 1964
Roger Corman: A Double Life 23
Digby Diehl / 1969
Roger Corman 32
Joseph Gelmis / 1969
The American Film Institute Seminar with Roger Corman 44
American Film Institute 1970
The Making of The Wild Angels: An Interview with Roger Corman 62
John Mason / 1972
Roger Corman Interview 72
Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn / 1973
Meeting with Roger Corman 83
Patrick Schupp / 1973
v
vi contents
Working with Young Directors 90
Roger Corman / 1974
Roger Corman Interview 94
Larry Salvato / 1975
Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Changing Scene 103
Roger Corman / 1980
Motion Picture Production Considerations in the 1980s 112
Roger Corman / 1982
Roger Corman: Better to Be on the Set than in the Office 117
David Del Valle / 1984
Cautionary Fables: An Interview with Roger Corman 130
Ed Naha / 1984
The Orson Welles of the Z Picture: An Interview with Roger Corman 136
Wheeler Winston Dixon / 1986
An Interview with Roger Corman 148
Robert Benayoun, Jean-Pierre Berthomé, and Michel Ciment / 1990
Roger Corman: A Mini-Mogul Directs Again 159
Gregory Solman / 1990
California Gothic: The Corman/Haller Collaboration 169
Lawrence French / 2006
Corman: Godfather of the A’s 201
Constantine Nasr / 2008
Academy Award Acceptance Speech 219
Roger Corman / 2009
Key Resources 221
Index 223
Introduction
Roger Corman once hired a first-time director and gave him this advice:
“What you have to get is a very good first reel, because people want to
know what’s going on. Then you need to have a very good last reel be-
cause people want to hear how it all turns out. Everything else doesn’t
matter.” Many years later, Martin Scorsese admitted that the guidance
was “probably the best sense I have ever heard in the movies.”1
After sixty-plus years of nonstop activity, Roger Corman has created a
body of work that surpasses in quantity the output of workhorses John
Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Michael Curtiz combined. As an indepen-
dent producer and director, he was making more films per year than any
other filmmaker in the 1950s and ’60s. He became the first moviemaker
to form a studio with its own distribution arm, both his most successful
venture and a turning point for independent cinema. He launched the
careers of most of the major players in the second half of twentieth-cen-
tury Hollywood. His films still command retrospectives, and he recently
won an Academy Award, two decades after he directed his last picture.
Roger Corman may be in his eighties, but he foreshadows no hint at a
closing act.
And yet the man Hollywood once christened its Wild Angel remains
an enigma to his followers. He has notoriously remained typecast as a
maker of exploitation flicks—those low-budget, non-studio productions
aimed at secondary markets and suburban drive-ins. An overview of his
most eclectic and creative period (1960–71) could place him among the
most successful and promising young filmmakers of that era. He mas-
tered the horror genre and explored its potential, more successfully and
more inventively than any contemporary except Mario Bava. His movies
spoke to that postwar teenage generation more than any other producer/
director, essentially inventing the biker genre with The Wild Angels and
the “drug film” craze with The Trip. Everyone has a Corman story to tell,
vii
viii introduction
building up a legend that has overtaken history, even in his own lifetime.
For as it goes, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Since critics started paying attention in the sixties, many apologists
have valiantly attempted to set right Corman’s legacy, to pull him out of
the ghetto of the “B” and help lift him into the stratosphere of the “A.”
He’s never enjoyed the same praise that is lavished on acknowledged art-
ists like Edgar G. Ulmer, a director who also defied his miniscule budgets,
or Val Lewton, a producer who made art out of schlocky assignments.
Toiling under similar conditions, Corman embraced his limited medium
with gusto and ingenuity and delivered much more than his audiences
had the right to expect.
“Some of my peers, making low-budget films, simply couldn’t get up
much enthusiasm for the work,” Corman recalled in 1978. “Their typical
reaction was, ‘These quickies are ridiculous, and certainly not worth my
serious effort. I’ll just grind out something trashy, grab the money and
run.’ Well, anyone who feels his talent is greater than the crummy as-
signment in front of them is doomed to failure.”2
Corman has always been a man about his work, pouring enthusiasm
into the process and displaying little care for the accolades. He was, how-
ever, concerned that people didn’t mix up “low-budget” with “B” pic-
tures, a thing of Hollywood’s block-booking past. He taught others to
appreciate the freedom that comes with free, the resourcefulness bound
by lack of resource. He might not have sought out the attention, but as he
matured into an elder-statesman and grand-mentor of the indie move-
ment, he certainly never turned it down.
Starting his Hollywood career as a runner for Fox in 1950, Corman
quickly discovered he had very little tolerance for studio ways and its
crumbling system. Unafraid to grab the bull by the horns, he produced
movies before he directed them—a sure sign of things to come. Corman
had an excellent grasp of story, and coupled with his business acumen,
had a knack for turning out good product fast and cheap. In the realm
that he worked, his movies stood out above the rest. His talent caught
the attention of eager showmen Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff, and to-
gether they discovered the most important audience of the movie mar-
ketplace: teenage America. Forming American International Pictures
(AIP), they specialized in fun, hip, sexy, and contemporary alternatives
to Hollywood’s stuffy spectacles and mundane melodramas. By satisfy-
ing this hungry portion of cinemagoers, AIP became the most successful
independent film company in the world, of which no small part was due
to Corman’s entertaining and energetic pictures.
introduction ix
Note that word pictures. More often than not, Corman refers to his
output as pictures, a subtle but telling distinction. Maybe this is because
he was informed with an old Hollywood attitude that viewed films first
and foremost as entertainment. He might also have been referring to
cinema as the art of the moving picture, a form that he loves with pas-
sion, not pretense. But he was an artisan first, artist second, and he made
pictures.
Throughout the fifties, he developed both his intuitive knack for stay-
ing ahead of the curve and his reputation for speed, key factors neces-
sary to maintain his output. He produced nearly every film he directed
and established a tight unit that allowed him both comfort and control;
this period climaxed with his first real film of merit, A Bucket of Blood,
in which Corman basically created the horror satire. The sixties gave us
Corman at his peak, starting with the first of his classic Poe cycle, House
of Usher, which re-established American horror as a viable and lucrative
genre and properly launched Corman as a filmmaker with a vision; at
the same time, he could still crank out an auspicious programmer like
The Little Shop of Horrors, which to this day remains a remarkable black
comedy whose celebrated reputation has lifted it well above its poverty-
row roots. The seventies saw Corman turn from directing to producing
and distributing through New World Pictures, a period crucial in his es-
tablishment of New Hollywood and his support of foreign artists; cin-
ema after Corman, both at home and abroad, would never be the same.
After selling New World in 1983, he remained exploitative, and usually
profitable, but the critical value of his direct-to-video and television pro-
ductions are far removed from the strength of his early work. Even his
brief return behind the camera, aptly named Roger Corman’s Franken-
stein, was a throwback to an era that Hollywood had left behind.
His oeuvre is a mixed bag, but that comes with the territory he staked
out. Remembered today as a “fearmaker,” he worked in every known
genre: comedy, western, musical, gangster, suspense / thriller, action,
war, sci-fi, drama, period, swords-n-sandals, fantasy, and of course, hor-
ror. Even his singular big-studio picture, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
(1967), is remarkably at odds with Hollywood gangster fare, in structure
and style, and yet it still nails down the consistent Corman anti-hero
embodied by both Al Capone (Jason Robards) and Bugs Moran (Ralph
Meeker).
Regardless of his milieu, Corman remains a thinking-man’s filmmak-
er, passionate about the value of ideas. His deep fascination with human
psychology boils below the surface of his stories and in the actions of