IF IT'S A GOOD PICTURE, IT'S A MIRACLE!
RIP ROGER CORMAN, THE CHIEF OF CHEAP.
Roger Corman. “Your money AND your life.”
Producer/director Roger Corman, the most frugal and profit-oriented of Hollywood film-makers, died this week at a respectable 98 years. We sometimes rubbed shoulders in the ‘eighties, when I lived in Los Angeles. I even have a tiny role in one of his films, as I described shortly after in a magazine piece. Here is an excerpt.
An 8am call in the rundown Los Angeles suburb of Venice isn't everyone's idea of movie glamour - but then Roger Corman has never been concerned with peoples’ expectations. It may be a converted lumber yard, and the weathered "Miracle Pictures" sign over the gate a prop from Hollywood Boulevard, made here thirteen years ago.(“If It’s a Good Film, It’s a Miracle!”) But to Corman, king of starvation cinema, it's his current studio, Concorde, and don't let anyone forget it.
Tall, impassive, composed, Corman stalks through the chaos of preparations for Hollywood Boulevard II and the debris left over from something called Time Trackers. He looks as close as he ever does to content. And why not? The bleary-eyed group in the echoing shed that passes for a hospitality suite, dunking doughnuts in polystyrene coffee cups, is a cross-section of Hollywood glitterati. We've turned out to play cameos in Hollywood Boulevard II as tribute to the man who, if he didn't give many of the big names their start, at least booted their waxing or waning careers when they needed it.
Brad Dillman drifts by. That dark-eyed teenage siren serving the coffee is Sidney Greenbush who, from three-years old to eight or so, rolled down the hill at the start of The Little House on the Prairie. And the star of Hollywood Boulevard II is Ginger Lynn Allen, also better known in another context as Ginger Lynn, star of scores of porno pix but now working on her twelfth fully-clothed feature.
Enjoying this sentimental journey most of all is someone who graduated with honours from the Corman college more than a decade ago. Joe Dante actually co-directed the first Hollywood Boulevard in 1976, with Allan Arkush, before going on to make the hit Gremlins.
Joe Dante and fiend.
Dante began his Hollywood career in charge of the trailer-making department of Corman’s studio, then named New World. It had only two rules: make it cheap and sell it hard. "We cut the trailers,” said Dante. “We wrote the copy. We did the advertising. We sold the hell out of those films." Since Corman also bought foreign pictures and re-edited them for the American market, Dante faced some strange merchandising challenges. He still recalls his promotional lines for a Filipino martial arts movie called TNT Jackson: "TNT Jackson - She'll Put You In Traction", "This Hit Lady's Charms Will Break Both Your Arms" and "With That Dynamite Bod, She's A Jet Black Hit Squad." He also wrote the film's press book, suggesting, under "Seat Selling Slants", that cinema managers "blow up local power stations, and leave a note saying 'TNT Jackson was here'."
"If a film didn't work,” Dante continued, “Roger would not give up on it. He wouldn't let a film die. He would change the advertising campaign, change the title, misrepresent it in any way possible in order to get his money back."
Among New World's disasters was Cockfighter, the tale of "Silent" Frank Mansfield, a Florida breeder of fighting cocks who, in his desire to be "Cockfighter of the Year," has sworn not to speak until he achieves his ambition. "Roger was sure,” says Dante, “that, because there was a lot of cockfighting in the south, this was a picture people would want to see - not realising that people in the south were embarrassed by cockfighting. They hated the whole idea of it. The film opened and just dropped dead. It got horrible reviews. Roger was in Europe. He called me the day after and said 'Here's what we're going to do. I want you to go into the negative of Night Call Nurses and take out the dynamite truck chase. Take the sex scene out of Private Duty Nurses...' He gave me this list of footage, none of which had anything to do with cockfighting.
“Now there's a scene in the movie,” Corman continued, “where Mansfield turns off the light and it fades out, then fades in the next morning. In that section, I want you to cut a minute and a half montage of all these scenes, and take some lines from the picture and put them over the footage, and this weird music cue. And it'll be a dream sequence. Then take all this stuff and put it in the trailer. We're going to retitle the film Born to Kill.'"
"This didn't work," says Dante, "so he changed it again, first to Wild Drifter, then to Gambling Man. Each time, we sent it out again - sometimes to the same cinemas where it had played last time. People would say 'What the hell? I seen this picture already.' They weren't pleased, and neither were the exhibitors."
If anyone can put Paradise into profit, Corman is the man. I can’t wait to see his first posthumous production. Action!