Roger Corman Speaks

I don’t think I like many of Roger Corman’s films, but after hearing him speak I definitely like his style. The master of low budget independent cinema gave a panel discussion at the Los Angeles Film Festival discussing his legendary career. He was joined by former protégés Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Fonda and Curtis Hanson, and his wife Julie. Everything Corman said was a catch phrase of a lesson in the business. For what it’s worth, I asked the James Cameron question when they opened the panel to audience questions.

Q: What crooked path to the film industry?

Roger Corman: It was somewhat of a crooked path. I was writing for the Stanford Daily and I found out that the film critics for the Daily got free passes to the theaters in Palo Alto. I thought, “I’d like to get a free pass.” So I wrote a sample review. They took me on as a film critic and then I realized I had to write about these films and I started taking it more seriously, analyzing the films to write my reviews. It was during that time I thought, “Well, I spent four years of college as an engineer but I’m not going to be an engineer. I’m going to make films.”

Q: And you just came to Los Angeles?

Roger Corman: Yes, and got a job at 20th Century Fox as a messenger at $32.50 a week. I was the failure of the Stanford engineering school.

Q: You’ve discovered so many now famous filmmakers. What did you look for in people you gave opportunities to?

Roger Corman: Well, essentially there are three things One, intelligence. I’ve never met a filmmaker, writer, producer or director, who’s had a successful career who’s not intelligent. You might luck out with one successful film if you’re not that bright but everybody who’s had a full career has been in television. The second thing is the ability to work hard. As everybody here knows, this is a glamorous business but it is also a very difficult and very hard thing to do. So those two things and then the third is the intangible, the creativity. For you [Hanson], I had read your script. For Joe, he was a trailer editor. Peter [B.] had been a writer. Peter [F.] I just knew could do it. And he could ride the bike also.

Q: You left AIP to form your own company. What prompted that?

Roger Corman: Two things: During the ‘60s, AIP had gone public and they had become somewhat conservative in their viewpoint. I was interested in doing something radical and they made cuts in both of the pictures I did with Peter [F.] They cut a couple shots out of The Wild Angels and cut two shots out of The Trip. They cut something out of another picture also so I said, “I’m going to have my own company so no one can cut my pictures.”

Q: What did they do to The Trip?

Roger Corman: Well, The Trip takes place during a night and at the end it’s dawn. We shot at the beach and I wanted Peter to walk out and go through an opening, a sliding door/window and I wanted to photograph him against the ocean with the concept this is a new day, the trip is over, he’s learned something. They put, for some insane reason, a crack across the window and I said, “What did you do that for?” They said, “This shows that he has been destroyed by [the drugs].” I said, “It just shows that there’s something wrong with the shot!”

Q: Did you feel your company, New World, was in the spirit of rebellious times?

Roger Corman: I had read somewhere in advertising that the two most important words in advertising were “new” and “free.” I thought free has got nothing to do with how I want to sell my pictures, but I think new is very good. So it became New World.

Q: How did New World end up distributing movies by Godard, Kurosawa, etc.?

Roger Corman: Well, what happened when we started New World, it got off to an incredible start. Every picture was a success. We became at that time within one year the leading independent distributor in the United States. We produced and distributed, and I always loved what were called art films at that time. I felt that they had not had really good distribution in the United States. I thought well, we’ve now reached a very high level and we’re good distributors. There’s no reason why we couldn’t distribute an art film. It was Bergman’s picture, Cries and Whispers, that was available and I bid for it and got it in the United States. We did very well. We paid very careful attention to how we distributed the film, how we did the advertising. Oh, and at the end, it played all the typical towns for an art film. We plaid big cities and we played college towns as well. For instance, if you’re opening in San Francisco, you will also open in Berkeley and Palo Alto because college towns are very big for art films. It had finished playing by the end of the summer and the drive-in season was winding down. Not too many people wanted to put their pictures in drive-ins because attendance was low and there wasn’t a great deal of money. So I suggested to one drive-in owner, “Why don’t you play Bergman’s pictures? You’ve never played a picture like that. I say give it a try, you never know.” And it did average business. You’d never seen anybody as happy as the drive-in owner and me to do average business. I got a letter from Bergman thanking me for bringing his films to an entirely new audience.

Q: How did you find these movies?

Roger Corman: At festivals and at Cannes. We picked up several pictures at the Cannes Festival. One was in the festival. Another one was [out of competition]. After a while, European filmmakers came to us because we had a record of distribution. We sold New World in the 1980s and started a new company and we didn’t distribute our films. At that time, the majors were bidding up and New Line and Miramax were bidding and I think overpaying, which they were. So we stepped away.

Q: How did you find screenwriters like Robert Towne and John Sayles?

Roger Corman: Bob Towne, as a director, I had been an engineer. I thought I could learn the camera, editing, the technical aspects reasonably well but I knew nothing about acting so I enrolled him in a method acting class taught by Jeff Corey. Bob Towne and Jack Nicholson were in that class. We all became friends and we worked together. His first screenplay was The Last Woman on Earth. How he came to act in it, I was shooting in Puerto Rico and he didn’t have his script finished. I knew he was a good actor from the class. I said, “Bob, I don’t have the money to send both you and the actor to Puerto Rico. I’ll send you to Puerto Rico. You will finish writing it and you will act in it.” John Sayles, I was not happy with some of the scripts we were getting and I, and our story editor, started reading some short stories, the best short stories of the year and so forth to find something. We found John who had never written a screenplay and hired him to learn.

Q: We hear James Cameron does not look back fondly on Piranha II: The Spawning. How do you feel about that film looking back?

Roger Corman: I agree with Jim. What happened with that, James Cameron started with us as a model maker and did just beautiful work. He moved up to the head of special effects, production designer and second unit director. He got a job directing second unit for us and got a job to do Piranha II for an Italian company. The producer fired him after the first week. Jim came back and showed me the picture and the picture wasn’t very good. I didn’t know exactly how to say. I sort of implied that I expected a little bit more. He said, “The producer hired me because there were special effects and he knew I’d done special effects for you, but his plan all along was to fire me. It’s not really my picture. He wanted to put an American name on it.” So I agree with Jim. I don't know the name of the Italian producer but he made a lousy picture.

Q: Whose idea was it to put a World War I protest song in Bloody Mama?

Roger Corman: I remember talking with the composer about it, and it came out of a conversation. I can’t even remember who came up with the idea first, but we both thought it was a good idea.

Q: You also hired a lot of women. Did you realize you were ahead of the game there?

Roger Corman: I felt that I wanted the best person for the job. It made no difference to me whether it was a man or a woman. I wasn’t specifically going out saying I’m going to help the women’s movement by hiring women. I just said I’m going to hire the best person and very often that was a woman. So probably in some way that did help the movement because I wasn’t doing it to help the movement. I was doing it because they were talented.

Q: How did you finance your very first film?

Roger Corman: I had written a script called The House and the Sea for Allied Artists. They paid me a certain amount of money and I took the money from that, went to some of the more successful members of the Stanford engineering class, got them to put up a little bit more money and I raised $15,000 all told. I got a lab deferment from Sid Solow at Consolidated, a name that none of you will recognize. He’s not in this business anymore. He just called me and said, “I’d like to invite you to lunch.” He invited me to lunch and he talked a lot and he said, “I’ll give you a lab deferment. You can have all your laboratory work done free.” So with that, and a few more deferments, I think the final cost of the picture was about $30,000.

Q: That was Monster from the Ocean Floor?

Roger Corman: The title was It Stalked the Ocean Floor and I sold it to the distributor, got an advance. He said he thought It Stalked the Ocean Floor was too arty a title.

Q: What was The House and the Sea about?

Roger Corman: I was vacationing at The Salton Sea. The Salton Sea, as many of you know, is overflowing its banks. I saw all these houses that were flooded on the first floor that were deserted. I thought if I had some kind of a chase picture across the desert and it ended up in one of these flooded houses, you’d have a great climax between the good guy and the bad guy in the flooded house.

Q: Was it ever made?

Roger Corman: It was made under the name The House and the Sea and they changed the title to Highway Dragnet.

Q: How did you make The Little Shop of Horrors in only two days?

Roger Corman: The picture was almost a joke. I was having a lunch with the head of a small level studio head in my office. He had built a rather nice set for another picture. The picture was finished and nobody was coming in. And I said, “As long as that set is up, I might be able to put together a script and shoot something just on that set in a couple of days.” He said, “You can’t do that.” So we made a little side bet. What I did, I hired the actors for a week and we rehearsed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We just came in Thursday and Friday and shot it almost as if it was a play. We then added one night for some exteriors.

Q: What was Jon Davison’s position with you?

Roger Corman: He came in as a general assistant and head of advertising and publicity. He put himself through NYU filming my films at a wayward theater on weekends. I remember one great publicity idea he had. We had Pam Grier, who was our great star, and she really was. She did four or five films with us and it got to the point where she was a huge star. She moved on, she asked me what I thought when she got a big offer. I said, “Take it” and she went on to bigger films and was making more money. So we felt, let us find a new version. Jeannie Bell was a very pretty girl and reasonably good as an actress so we settled on Jeannie Bell for this film. Nobody had ever heard of her so I said to Jon, “Can you find some way to publicize Jeannie Bell.” He thought a lot and he said, “Come in tomorrow morning and wear a coat and tie.” I said okay so I came in the next day with a coat and tie, there was Jeannie all dressed up and Jon had a plaster cast of a fist somewhere. He had painted it black and I presented Jeannie Bell with the first annual Ebony Fist Award. We had found a kung fu woman fighter. It was amazing. We got publicist all over.

Q: If I’m creative, intelligent and hard working, will you produce my next feature?

Roger Corman: Let me take a look at the script. It all starts with the script. We talk about the director being the auteur, the producer what he contributes, but it really starts with a script. Happy to take a look at a script.

Q: What was it like working with Scorsese on Boxcar Bertha?

Roger Corman: I think he was one of the few directors who hadn’t worked with me, but I had seen an underground picture, a black and white underground picture he’d done in New York and I was very impressed by it. AIP wanted me to a sequel to Bloody Mama and I said, “Well, I’ve got my own company now. I’m not going to direct but I’ll produce it.” Just of everybody I could think of, I thought Marty was just the best director and I think Sam Arkoff said, “He’s just a New York kid.  He doesn’t know anything about Arkansas. This is a rural picture.” I said, which I do believe, that a director is maybe best at one particular genre, but in reality, a good director can direct anything. Marty proved that.

Q: What three big tips would you give to aspiring filmmakers?

Roger Corman: I would start, as I say, with a script. Everything stems from the script. You have very little money, you’re going to be shooting very rapidly but when you’re writing the script you have all the time in the world. So take your time to write the very best script that you’re capable of. Or if you’re working with a screenwriter, have him go through as many drafts as are needed to get the best possible script. Then I’m a great believer in preparation. As Peter [B.] said, I go along with Alfred Hitchcock. Sketch each shot, plan as much as you can, so that during the shooting, you’re just shooting. You’re not trying to figure out what shot to do. You’ve already gotten it written down in your script as to what shot you’re going to do. Third, know that you’re not going to follow this plan. Sometimes a shot that you sketched won’t work and you’ve got to come up with something different. Sometimes you get a better idea on the set but if you have it completely planned out, I feel you should be able to shoot 80-90% of the script according to your plan. The other 10-20% you can vary as conditions on the set.

Q: All of your films have been financially successful. What do you consider your greatest artistic successes?

Roger Corman: One of them was a picture I produced with Peter Bogdanovich, Saint Jack. Of my own films, maybe The Intruder, a picture I did with Bill Shatner. It was his first film.