In the mid-1970s, Ron Howard was attempting to make a name for himself as a movie director after he had grown up over the years as a child actor. For a man who had appeared on two popular TV shows, been in the Oscar-nominated American Graffiti and even co-starred alongside The Duke himself John Wayne in The Shootist, he still was a young filmmaker in the eyes of Hollywood. So, he went to Roger Corman to direct his first movie, Grand Theft Auto, which he had co-wrote with his father, Rance.
Corman had already been known in Hollywood for penny-pinching and putting his foot down never going over budget. When he wanted another day to reshoot a scene, Corman told Howard, “Ron, you can come back if you want, but nobody will be there.” Corman also told the future Oscar-winning director and major Hollywood producer, “If you do a good job, you’ll never have to work for me again.” The movie was only made with about $602,000, which still was a lot for the time but not near the budget of major movies. Regardless, it made $15 million as it was distributed through Corman’s New World Pictures in 1977. Then, Howard made Night Shift, Splash and Cocoon in the early 1980s. All were successes and Howard never had to work for Corman again.
Howard was one of many famous celebrities who either had their first acting credit in a Corman movie or directed a movie he produced. Jack Nicholson appeared in his first screen role as the high-pitched voice masochist dental patient in 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors. The movie was filmed over the course of two days and also featured Dick Miller, another Corman regular. Reportedly by 9 a.m. on the first day of filming, Corman had said they were already behind.
Corman passed away on May 9 at the age of 98. Despite making a lot of movies at a low-budget, he actually appeared in Oscar-winning movies such as The Godfather Part II as a U.S. Senator, The Silence of the Lambs as the director of the FBI, and in Philadelphia as a client of Tom Hanks’ Andrew Beckett who is cross-examined during the civil trial. Having appeared on screen with Oscar winners Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen and Joanne Woodward, Corman himself would earn an honorary Academy Award in 2009.
He deserved it. We might not have had filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme (director of Silence and Philadelphia), Peter Bogdanovich, Gale Anne Hurd, James Cameron and Robert Towne as well as many, many more. Some times, people in the entertainment industry need someone to give them a chance and that person was Corman. Yet, sometimes the movies weren’t the best. Grand Theft Auto got negative reviews and it’s mostly a cheap chase exploitative movie. After seeing Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha, filmmaker John Cassavettes hugged Scorsese and said, “Marty, you’ve just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit. It’s a good picture, but you’re better than the people who make this kind of movie. Don’t get hooked into the exploitation market, just try and do something different.” Scorsese’s next movie was Mean Streets. Then, he made Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver. And from that moment on, he was an A-lister and would become one of the most influential filmmakers of the last 50 years.
It seemed like it was a rite of passage to work for Corman. However, some filmmakers weren’t big fans of him. Paul Schrader had a complicated history saying Corman didn’t want help him make Rolling Thunder and even with Richard Pryor on board to do Blue Collar, Corman passed. Blue Collar was Schrader’s first movie as a director. Barbara Peeters who directed Humanoids from the Deep when it was originally titled Beneath the Darkness, was upset over scenes of rape and nudity which was shot by second unit director James Sbardellati by the order of Corman. Peeters and James T. Murkami, who also directed, asked their names to be taken off the credits. Other cast and crew were upset over these changes. Murkami criticized Corman on talk shows and in interviews.
Granted a lot of the movies he produced and directed weren’t the most memorable. He directed a young Robert DeNiro in Bloody Mama, a very fictional recount of Kate “Ma” Barker and the Barker boys. Shelley Winters played Kate. He also directed Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels with the famous quote: “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!” His last official role as director was the horror movie Frankenstein Unbound in 1990. He reportedly directed Conan O’Brien’s cameo in the TV movie, Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda.
Corman was also the producer of the infamous Fantastic Four movie which was supposed to be distributed through his new company New Concorde. However, the movie unbeknownst to the cast and crew, even Corman himself, was never intended to be released. Bernd Eichinger, of Constatin Films, had film rights to the comic property that were set to expire unless production began before Dec. 31, 1992. Otherwise, the rights would’ve gone back to Marvel. Eichinger couldn’t negotiate an extension. And questions have circulated that it was never meant to be released, but Corman disputed that saying he had to be bought out by Eichinger. All negatives were supposed to be destroyed but bootlegs still remain online.
Of course, some of his movies were intended to be complete rip-offs of more popular movies. Bloody Mama and Big Bad Mama both piggy-backed off the success of Bonnie and Clyde. Galaxy of Terror was a rip-off of Alien. (This along with Humanoids made people wonder if Corman’s jovial smile was more sinister as it also contained a brutal alien rape scene. He had to pay actress Taaffe O’Connell more money.) Incidentally, Cameron would work on this movie only to release his Alien sequel Aliens five years later. And you don’t have to be a genius to deduce that Battle Beyond the Stars was ripping off Star Wars. Both Cameron and a young Bill Paxton, then working as a carpenter and painter, would meet and collaborate many more times. Cameron was working as a set/production designer and they would line the walls of the interior of a ship with styrofoam food plates.
Tina Birsch would direct the cheap horror comedy Munchies in 1987 which was a rip-off of Gremlins, which Birsch also worked on as the editor. Birsch had worked with filmmaker Joe Dante for years. Dante, himself, directed the Jaws rip-off Piranha in 1978 which was written by John Sayles, another aspiring filmmaker who would go on to make Eight Man Out, Passion Fish, Lone Star and Men With Guns, among others. Sayles would reportedly take the salary he made off Piranha to finance his directorial debut Return of the Seacaucus 7.
Corman was also able to beat Steven Spielberg by one month with the release of Carnosaur in May of 1993. The movie involved a scientist who is able to genetically engineer DNA to create dinosaurs. Sounds like Jurassic Park? Well, it also featured Diane Ladd as the scientist. Ladd is the mother of Laura Dern who was in Jurassic Park. Incidentally, the book by John Brosnan predated Michael Crichton’s bestseller by about seven years. Corman knew what he was doing. And Carnosaur got bad reviews as many movies Corman was involved in. It did turn somewhat of a profit, making $1.8 million off a budget of $850,000.
Spielberg was one of the few filmmakers of the New Hollywood movement from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s not to be associated with Corman. And despite many of his movies ending up on the year-end worst lists, he probably had a soft spot in many critics’ hearts for handling the U.S. distribution of well-renown foreign directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut. Now, that I think of it, Truffaut, who was part of the French New Wave movement, was in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So maybe Corman did help Spielberg out when you look at it from a certain point of view.
Sometimes in life, our best accomplishments are not what we do but how we help others achieve theirs. Every now and then, people need a helping hand. They need someone to give them a boost. Corman did that. I’ve always admired Rodney Dangerfield for making comedy specials on HBO introducing stand-up comics, such as Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy, Sam Kinison, Robert Townsend, Bill Hicks, Andrew “Dice” Clay, Carol Leifer, Louie Anderson and Yakov Smirnoff, to say a few. Corman was to the movie industry what Dangerfield was to stand-up comedy.
According to imdb.com, Corman was credited as producer on about 490 productions. A lot of them were mostly schlock. He was called “The King of Cult.” He was also known as the “King of the Bs” which were lower-budget movies that often played in movie theaters that were individually owned or on smaller screens in theater chains. Even with the home video market era, he still churned out many movies.
Dante said if Corman didn’t exist in real life, the filmmakers would have had to invent him. Scorsese, himself, commented that Corman taught him to do better work on film productions. “He set the guidelines, and then he gave me tremendous freedom within those guidelines,” Scorsese said. “In essence, he taught me how to actually make movies. If I hadn’t worked with Roger, I wouldn’t have known how to make Mean Streets or, when it comes right down to it, any of the pictures that followed. It was the same for many, many other filmmakers of my generation. I admired Roger, I loved him, I loved the pictures he directed (especially the Poe adaptations) and the spirit of his filmmaking. And I will always be grateful for the opportunity he gave me, and the education. I will always be proud to say that I graduated from the school of Roger Corman.”
Do you have a favorite Corman movie? What is it?
Zane Says 