The man of a thousand movies

Noel Vera

A thousand may be an exaggeration--but not too much. The title of
his 1990 autobiography says it all: " How I Made a Hundred Movies in
Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime," although "a hundred," as it turns
out, is an uncharacteristically modest number: to date, Roger Corman
has produced over three hundred and sixty feature films and directed
fifty-five, and apparently not lost money on any of them. Except one-
-"The Intruder" (1962) also known as "Shame" and "I Hate Your Guts!"
a passionately felt film about racism starring William Shatner.

Corman was born in the Motor City (Detroit, Michigan) in 1926, and
went on to earn a degree in Industrial Engineering in Stanford; he
started out as messenger in 20th Century Fox, rising to story
analyst; in 1954 he partnered with James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff
to establish American International, doing low-budget examples of
tried-and-true genres like westerns ("Five Guns West" 1955),
gangsters ("Machine-Gun Kelly," 1958), horror ("A Bucket of Blood,"
1959), science fiction ("Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet " (1965),
the occasional sexually provocative expose ("Sorority Girl" 1957),
or any combination thereof, no matter how bizarre ("The Saga of the
Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea
Serpent" (1957); "Gas-s-s-s... or, It May Become Necessary to
Destroy the World in Order to Save It" (1971)).

Perhaps his most famous no-budgeter was "Little Shop of Horrors"
(1960), reportedly shot in two days (actually two days plus some
extra time for pick-ups) using existing sets and a repertory stable
of actors (who often doubled as production crew), which has come to
acquire a cult following and reputation. The script by Corman and
Charles Griffith, reportedly written overnight at 24-hour Hollywood
coffee shops, takes its cue from H.G. Wells' short story "The
Flowering of the Strange Orchid" and the classic tale of Faust
(Mephisto here played by a flesh-eating orchid). The film showcases
Corman's genius for turning blatant flaws (like a nonexistent
production budget and one-take performances) into triumphant virtues-
-its very off-the-cuffedness helping offset and even lending charm
to the horrific theme of selling one's soul (or flesh) for material
success. The film went on to be reborn as a hit off-Broadway
musical, which in turn was made into a big-budgeted (by Corman's
standards) Hollywood film by Frank Oz. Featuring Jack Nicholson in
the tiny but memorable role of a masochistic dental patient.

In the 1960s Corman began doing a series of adaptations of Edgar
Allan Poe's more famous stories, including "The Fall of the House of
Usher" (1960), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1961), "The Premature
Burial" (1962)--even a poem ("The Raven," 1963); the films starred
Vincent Price plus Corman's cast of regulars ("The Raven" featured
yet another supporting role from Jack Nicholson in period costume)
and were sumptuously produced and photographed (on a relatively
higher-than-usual but still small budget, of course). If changes
were made to expand Poe's shorts to feature-film length, the
adaptations nevertheless showed Corman's love for the feel and
essence of Poe, the baroque elegance and hint of approaching menace
that gives way to shrieking terror.

Perhaps the finest of these wasn't even a Poe story, but
Lovecraft: "The Haunted Palace" was marketed as a Poe adaptation and
takes its title from a poem read aloud in "The Fall of the House of
Usher," but is really an adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Strange Case
of Charles Dexter Ward," where Vincent Price (Who else?) plays both
Ward and his cursed ancestor Joseph Curwen, who comes to possess
Ward and use him as an instrument of revenge on the villagers (or
their descendants) that killed him years ago. Price is wonderful in
the film--haunted in every sense of the word--but he's almost
upstaged (almost) by the film's Grand Staircase, a gargantuan stand-
alone construct, easily the single most expensive thing Corman ever
built, winding its way down several floors to the basement below. As
Corman himself put it: "'The Haunted Palace' has the Big Staircase
to end them all."

Arguably the single best film Corman ever did had a Faustian
theme: "X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes" (1963) starred Ray Milland as
Dr. James Xavier, who develops the ability to see beyond the normal
spectral range of vision--in effect, trading his eyes (the windows
of the soul) for the ability to see more penetratingly below the
surface of things. The effect is amusing at first--we see shots of
beautiful women unclothed (or at least their unclothed shoulders and
feet), but as his powers increase, his ability to comprehend and
tolerate what he sees decreases. "X" is the harrowing portrait of a
man spiraling into madness and despair from seeing sights, as the
cliché goes, that human eyes are not meant to see--Corman's
achievement here is to make that cliché unshakably, unforgettably
real.

"The Trip" (1967) from a script by Jack Nicholson (yes, he did
screenplays for Corman) presents Peter Fonda as a tall, lanky
television princeling (he directs TV commercials) who wants to try
LSD for the first time. He visits Bruce Dern's house for the
experiment, has one interesting hallucination after another, freaks
out and escapes, wandering the city in a drug-induced haze. The
hallucinogenic effects are interesting in that they're sharply shot,
largely avoiding the cliché of double-exposed images, and are
obviously drawn from actual experience (for the record, Fonda,
Nicholson and Dennis Hopper (who played a supporting role) were the
expert consultants; Corman claims to have taken the drug only once
before filming to find out "what it's like"--the results were
pleasant, so he had to ask the others what a "bad trip" was like;
Dern was adamantly drug-free, and had to ask Corman all about LSD
for his role). Even more interesting were Fonda's reactions (again,
obviously drawn from experience), as he goes from mildly curious to
passionately focused (on an orange, of all things), to disoriented
and terrified. The film's mindbending visions would predate those of
the better-known "2001: A Space Odyssey" by almost a year.

Corman officially retired from directing in 1971 (although he did do
one more feature--"Frankenstein Unbound," a creaky if lowbrow fun
adaptation of the novel by Brian Aldiss, in 1990) to establish New
World Pictures, making low-budget films and using the profits to
distribute arthouse fare like Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers"
and Federico Fellini's "Amarcord" (both 1972), producing along the
way a French animated science fiction classic ("Fantastic Planet,
1973), and a Japanese anime fantasy ("Galaxy Express 999," 1979). In
1982 he sold his interest in New World to establish Concorde
Pictures, which produces the kind of low-budget movies he used to do
at the beginning of his career.

Any essay or biography of Corman would be incomplete without noting
the enormous influence he has had over several generations of
filmmakers. Aside from actors Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern there's
Robert de Niro, Talia Shire, Cindy Williams, Ben Vereen; directors
Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter
Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Paul Bartel,
Jonathan Kaplan, Gale Ann Hurd. Robert Towne has written and
directed for him, so has John Sayles; Nicholas Roeg was director of
photography for his "The Masque of Red Death" (1964). Not that any
of them have forgotten their debt: Scorsese admits, in the
commentary track of "The Last Temptation of Christ"--easily the
finest Christ movie in recent years, if not ever--that the
techniques he used to produce the film on a $7 million budget (which
was the most money he could muster for the controversial project) he
learned from working for Corman.

But beyond the people who have actually worked for him is the
influence he's had on the American moviemaking landscape: when he
started out, prestige studio pictures were adaptations of literature
and stage plays or productions with big themes; nowadays, most big
studio projects look and sound and feel like, well, Corman
movies: "The Terminator;" "Fatal Attraction;" "Lethal
Weapon;" "Indecent Proposal;" "Last Action Hero;" "Bad
Boys;" "Resident Evil;" "Attack of the Clones;" "Sky Captain and the
World of Tomorrow;" "Gangs of New York." These pallid imitators,
produced by lesser mortals like Bruckheimer, Silver, Lucas, the
Weinstein brothers and the like, don't put the words "inspired by
Roger Corman" above their marquee-spanning titles, but they might as
well have: they thrive, feed, and produce under the long, long
shadow of his inescapable presence.

(10/6/05)