Happy Birthday, Roger!

When he announced two days ago a spur-of-the-moment Blog-a-Thon to commemorate Roger Corman on his eightieth birthday, Tim Lucas offered something of a challenge: “That gives you about as much time as Roger had to make Little Shop of Horrors (1960).” Time has always dogged Roger, the struggle to maintain production schedules and deliver pictures to theatres as promised. With that, of course, comes the meticulous attention to budget and the art of squeezing as much as you can from a dollar. No interview with him can skirt such basics.

    I was reminded of all this just recently while watching Big Bad Mama (1974), part of my research for the upcoming Angie Dickinson Blog-a-Thon. Though direction is credited to Steve Carver, the picture is Roger’s from start to finish. And, sure enough, there was Roger on the DVD, chatting about getting things done on time and budget.

    It was released by New World Pictures, Roger’s lucrative base of operations during the ‘70s. He’d stopped directing pictures by the late ‘60s to focus on producing and distributing exploitation movies for the drive-in trade, most of them directed by green, young talent. This was where Martin Scorsese was given the opportunity to do Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Ron Howard honed (or busted) his chops on Grand Theft Auto (1977). You may think you’re seeing Scorsese or Howard or Carver in those films, but they’re all Roger’s, a throwback to the producer as auteur.

    One look at Corman’s filmography at IMDb is enough to boggle the mind. While I’d kept tabs on what he was doing thirty years ago (in those days, in the midst of so much critical adulation, who didn’t?), his subsequent work seemed to elude me. (I still haven’t caught up with Frankenstein Unbound [1990], his one return to the director’s chair.) But the list of product he’s worked on as producer or executive producer from the ‘80s on is simply astonishing in both volume and longevity.

    It was “The French” who first noticed Roger in the ‘60s, not long after they’d discovered Jerry Lewis. He was feted for the Godardian influences supposedly percolating between the lines of The Wild Angels (1966), and was one of the first to milk visual references to other films and filmmakers in The Trip (1967). He seized the interview and festival circuit in those heady years, explaining the art of rapid camera set-ups when not pontificating on the Freudian implications in the handful of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he directed in the early ‘60s. Pass the popcorn, please…

    Corman approached his scripts objectively, rarely elaborating on scenes or characters beyond what was required of a day’s shoot. He was fortunate in his friendships and associations, because people like Sam Arkoff, Jim Nicholson, Susan Cabot, Peter Bogdanovich, Dick Miller, Boris Karloff, Barboura Morris, Luana Anders, Floyd Crosby, Jack Nicholson, Charles Beaumont, Vincent Price, and countless others were willing to go the distance at scale. I doubt that they had faith or interest in the films they were making, but the warmth and charm of Corman’s manner was (and is) unquestionably seductive.

Bruce Dern and Peter Fonda in The Trip

    It takes a particular mindset to watch most of the work, because so much is dross and juvenile. But there are a few highlights worth pointing out: the feel of eerie desolation in Day the World Ended (1956) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957); the weird spin on the Bridey Murphy case in The Undead (1957); noir teen rebellion in Teenage Doll (1957) — a personal favorite of mine.

    He later flourished in satire with Little Shop of Horrors and the excellent A Bucket of Blood (1959), and explored the comedic brilliance of Peter Lorre in the otherwise tepid The Raven (1963). However, the once-lauded Poe pictures now seem stiff and hollow, with Masque of the Red Death (1964) a particular disappointment — the script’s black humor and decadence sailed beyond its director’s grasp, material better suited to a Buñuel or a Pasolini.

    Starring the young, pre-Star Trek Bill Shatner, The Intruder (1962) was an earnest attempt to portray racism and hucksterism, but it flopped at the box office and sent Corman back to science fiction, gangsters and hot rod movies. (He wasn’t accustomed to being in the red.) The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) was an all-star hoot, with Jason Robards as a boisterous caricature of Al Capone. Made the same year, The Trip survives as an arresting relic of psychedelia.

    One could go on and on…about the movies, Corman’s infectious enthusiasm, his unyielding influence over generations of filmmakers. But the purpose of this Blog-a-Thon is to wish Roger a Happy Birthday. I do so without hesitation. He was an integral part of my cinema education, one of the first producers and directors I recognized by name. His pictures thrilled me when it counted most, and for that I’m forever grateful.



Note: If anyone has a VHS or DVD copy of CBS-TV’s two-part Camera Three special on Roger Corman that aired in the ‘70s, please drop me a line. (I’m not referring to Christian Blackwell’s Hollywood’s Wildest Angel.)

The Roger Corman Blog-a-Thon:

Video WatchBlog

That Little Round Headed Boy

More Than Meets The Mogwai

Greenbriar Picture Shows

Between Productions

Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee

FilmZoneX

Johnny Larue's Crane Shot

Lance Tooks' Journal

Nadaland

The House of Irony

The Bleeding Tree