Celebrating Roger Corman, the Most Influential US Filmmaker in the Last 60 Years

I have only half-joked that after Orson Welles, Roger Corman is the most influential filmmaker in American cinema history. If you grew up with the movies of Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Bruce Dern, Brian De Palma, Vincent Price, George Lucas, or literally, dozens if not hundreds of others, you are a fan of Roger Corman.

With his passing earlier this month, cinema history saw another giant off to into Valhalla. There have been plenty of memorials, think pieces, and articles about him in the ensuing weeks, but I think I’ll take a more personal approach. 

A very young Jack Nicholson.

I think I can safely say that I grew up on Corman productions and the first movie that I remember of his was The Terror from 1963 with Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, and Sandra Knight. Now, to be sure, the directing is credited to Roger and this is fair. But the second unit work included Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and Nicholson himself. 

It’s not a great flick, but I loved it. Still do, if only because of finding out that Corman only wanted to do it so the gothic sets from The Raven wouldn’t go to waste. The film only cost $35,000 to make but with it, Corman tried to “out-Por Poe himself.” The original plan was to shoot it in two days. It actually wound up taking nine months.(Corman, p. 88), the longest amount of time for a Corman production ever. Corman also shot it with an unfinished script, didn’t tell the producers he was shooting it (but they had faith in him that he’d get it done and it would be ready for distribution), and after eleven days, turned everything over to the second unit. 

It’s one of the rare Cormans to go over budget. Coppola threw Nicholson under the bus as the party responsible, but Nicholson was only directed for a day, and was quick to point out that Coppola wasn’t responsible for the overrun, either. It seems to have been a group effort that happened while they were shooting in Big Sur and attempted technical shots in ways that Corman simply wouldn’t. It’s this last that speaks to Corman’s affinity, not just for getting a movie shot on time and very often under budget, but that he knew his craft. 

I don’t think Roger gets enough credit as a director; his setups, blocking, camera movement, and more always fit the material. It’s worth reading Pawel Aleksandrowicz’s The Cinematography of Roger Corman to get some idea of just how good a filmmaker he was. But I think it’s better to just watch the flicks. Right from the outset, he was drawn to quick shoots and picked up the ins and outs of directing. His first feature, Five Guns West, from 1955, had a nine-day shooting schedule, resulting in a not-bad first film. Over the next few decades, he’d pound out over fifty movies and even if they weren’t of the highest caliber, they did what they set out to do; they entertained the hell out of people.

I saw quite a few of his creature features either on Saturday mornings on Jungle Theater or Saturday nights on Weird and Late Weird on the ABC affiliate in Houston. The Beast with a Million Eyes, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and Creature from the Haunted Sea would show up every now and again, cheap, tawdry, but enormously fun flicks, particularly for a precocious grade schooler.

As I entered my teen years, though, my tastes grew (slightly) more sophisticated. Corman’s Poe films are still among the best adaptations of the master’s works and I recommend them with no reservations. Seeing them restored an on the big screen a few years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts, only served to settle any doubts anyone might have about Corman’s prowess.

In my early teens, I stumbled into Corman’s range of genres, partly because I was by this time deep in the Warner Brothers’ gangster films of the 30s and 40s, the westerns of the same period (not just John Ford; I had a genuine fondness for the Three Mesquiteers, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and their ilk), and some of the 1950s biker flicks. So watching Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, The Wild Angels, and The Wild Racers, led me into a crazy world, man. But the most defining film for me?

The Trip! Holy shit. Catching this on UHF late at night was transformative. Written by Jack Nicholson, it follows a TV ad director through his existential crisis which is not necessarily helped by his freaking out on LSD during which he is exposed to a remarkable sequence of visions. Now, let’s be clear. When I first saw this, I couldn’t care less about Paul’s issues, his self-questioning or any of the adult drama that drives the narrative. I was taken by how ridiculously vibrant the film was visually. 

The cast is a rogues gallery of the cream of the 1960s up and comers. Peter Fonda, Susan Strasberg, Bruce Dern, and Dennis Hopper breathe life into a script, that regardless of how dated it might sound now, is still pretty remarkable for what it was saying. The principals, plus Nicholson, all dropped acid to understand better what they were supposed to be experiencing or so the story goes. My personal sense is that they’d already done their share of “research”. That said, it’s not an exploitation flick, per se. If anything, a film that would star Dern, Nicholson, and Strasberg a year later would be more likely to fit that bill and wasn’t a Corman production.

Psych-Out would have a bigger budget, a better cinematographer (Lazlo Kovacs), a truly bitchin’ soundtrack (with an appearance by The Strawberry Alarm Clock), but it was most definitively a product of its time. Coming out in 1968, it purported to tell the real story behind the Haight-Ashbury scene, but it’s missing any genuine story or characters. As a young punk, I did like it; but even I knew it was a slick Hollywood cash-in. The Trip, by contrast, was a genuine statement and legitimate drama. 

By this point, I knew who Roger Corman was. I regarded his work as highly as Hammer Films and even more “respected” directors. What I didn’t grasp or know at the time (I’d be curious to know who did) was how much Corman had already influenced filmmaking in the 1970s. As a director, Corman’s output slowed mightily in the 1970s, but his kids were just getting started. In addition to everyone mentioned so far, his on-the-job-training served the likes of almost every filmmaker in the U.S. extremely well. 

Without Corman’s showing how to shoot on a shoestring budget and shoot well, we wouldn’t have The Godfather, Mean Streets, or Silence of the Lambs. And that’s just for starters. The wealth of talent that came out of his film school is incalculable. Even if the only movie he ever produced was Easy Rider, that would have ensured his name a place in the history books, but it was also his distribution production that brought before the public works by Truffaut, Bergman, and Schlondorff. The Story of Adele H., Autumn Sonata, and The Tin Drum are a small sample of what he brought to market.

There is, quite simply, no way I could do justice to Corman’s contributions here. What I’d like to think is that in his wake, there will be a renewed appreciation of what he accomplished. And yes, he continued to produce or executive produce quickly made trashsploitation flicks and maybe he wasn’t as hands-on and discovering new voices anymore, but then, he didn’t need to. He’d done the work.

And that’s rather the throughline in Corman’s life; the work. He loved movies, he loved working, and he surely loved the people who make movies. 

I don’t know where I’d begin with my favorite Roger Corman movies. Off the top of my head, the any of the above-mentioned Poe Cycle entries (The Pit and the Pendulum and The Tomb of Ligeia are biggies for me…oh, and The Masque of the Red Death…perhaps his masterpiece). There’s The Little Shop of Horrors which on its own terms is wonderful, and without which there would be no musical. A Bucket of Blood is a must-see. The Raven, Comedy of Terrors…I’d even submit Bloody Mama and I, Mobster, as well as The Trip. In other words, Roger Corman contained multitudes and watching his work, you might even get the feeling that more of his contemporaries were watching than you might think. 

You see echoes of his shooting methodology in folks like Robert Downey, Sr., Russ Meyers, and other guerilla filmmakers; I’d argue that Lloyd Kaufman wouldn’t exist without Corman paving the way, but it’s difficult to imagine what the cinematic landscape and marketplace would look like had he not existed.

I’ve been toying with running through his directorial work - much of which I really love (The Wasp Woman!!!) and it’s not really that extensive. On the other hand, if I’m being honest, there’s a lot of crap there, too. A more challenging and fruitful endeavor would likely be to do a long-form series on the man’s entire career, but there are plenty of resources for that.

At the end of the day, I’ll still just say watch the flicks and enjoy the hell out of them as Roger intended. And for the record, I still like The Terror!

Bibiliography

Aleskandrowicz, Pawel. The Cinematography of Roger Corman: Exploitation Filmmaker or Auteur? Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. 2016.

Corman, Roger with Jerome, Jim. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. Random House. New York. 1990.

Stills from The Masque of the Red Death. According to Corman, he was influenced by Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In turn, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that Corman influenced Dario Argento, especially as seen in films like Rosso Profundo and Suspiria.

The Rogues Gallery of The Raven. From left to right  (I shouldn’t have to write this), Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price.

The Wasp Woman!!!