The Art of the Deal

R.I.P. Roger Corman

The death of Roger Corman on May 9 has been occupying a lot of my thoughts lately. Maybe it’s not a tragedy when a 98-year-old man passes after a long, prolific, and singular career, but still, I’m sad to lose him. Certain people are living history, and I’m sad to lose someone who could be plausibly described as the single most important figure in American film after the Second World War.

What would the last 70 years of American culture look like without Roger Corman? Maybe Martin Scorsese would have still made Mean Streets even if he hadn’t made the Corman-produced Boxcar Bertha (1972), and maybe he would have even developed the skills of efficiency and frugality that would make The Last Temptation of Christ possible – but maybe not. Maybe The Godfather would have been made, but Francis Ford Coppola probably wouldn’t have directed it, which means it wouldn’t have been The Godfather. Certainly if Corman had never produced and directed a pair of counterculture blockbusters called The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967), three of his collaborators – Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson – would not have had the runway to make Easy Rider. And if Corman had never tossed off The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) in two days and a night, then Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, the men who turned it into an enduring Off-Broadway musical, would never have become the architects of the ‘80s/‘90s Disney Renaissance beginning with their music for The Little Mermaid. And if Corman had never started New World Pictures, would the environment have existed for a young gearhead from Canada named James Cameron to ascend from production assistant to model maker to production assistant to…

Okay, and if a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the globe, the chain reaction eventually reaches us, fair enough. Getting back down to earth, I’d say that Corman is important because no one more perfectly embodies the central dilemmas of cinema, which is that it is both an art and a business. But it’s a bad realm for business because one can never really predict the zeitgeist, and an unpromising realm for art because it’s so expensive and collaborative by nature. Still, Orson Welles was right to call it the most expensive electric train set a boy ever had. Corman personinified all of these tensions.

To the extent that Corman was an artist in his early career, I think his satisfaction came from what another American entrepreneur later called “the art of the deal.” He was a Standford engineering student and left-brain thinker who liked movies more than engineering. He emerged in the early 1950s as an independent producer for the burgeoning drive-in market, mastering the skill of spending a certain number of pennies and selling for a few more pennies to earn a couple of pennies profit. He became a director because it seemed easy enough and allowed him more control, and for the rest of the decade he enjoyed riding the market and getting the most out of a dollar. One of the stories he liked to tell was that the day he read about the launch of Sputnik in the newspaper, he booked a meeting with Allied Artists and promised he could deliver a cash-in movie in just three months if they gave him $70,000. Three months later, he delivered the answer print of War of the Satellites (1958). (Checking the dates, I discover that that movie’s May 1958 release was a little over seven months after the October 1957 satellite launch, but I would never question a good story).

War of the Satellites is not very good, and humans are built to want more. Obituaries cited his gangster movie Machine Gun Kelly (1958) as a creative milestone – it was when the French critics first started taking an interest, and Corman himself described it as “a major turning-point in my career.” Next year he tried a provocative mix of horror, satire, and what was then called “sick humor” with A Bucket of Blood (1959), my favourite of his films, the basic structure of which was quickly adapted into The Little Shop of Horrors. These films, both shot in under a week, have the infectious energy of friends mucking around, knowing they can do whatever they want because the films are too cheap to not be profitable.

He levelled up with the handsome, elegant House of Usher (1960), the first of his eight-film Edgar Allan Poe cycle. It was shot in color, over 15 days instead of five, and had a genuine (if affordable) movie star in Vincent Price, not to mention literary pedigree. It was a calculated gamble, but Corman always emphasized that he simply loved Poe and wanted to adapt him. In each of the subsequent Poe movies, he flexes new creative muscles: incorporating comedy into The Raven (1963); hiring Nicolas Roeg to shoot the proto-psychedelic orgies of The Masque of the Red Death (1964); leaving the studio for the melancholy English countryside in The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). In the midst of the Poe cycle, he also made his most conspicuous attempt at capital-A Art, The Intruder (1962), the socially conscious story of a racist demagogue (a never-better William Shatner) in a small southern town. Three years before the March on Selma, the subject matter was still too hot for the southern drive-ins that were Corman’s bread and butter, and he suffered his first box office failure. In interview after interview, he said his lesson was: “I had to pull back. From that moment on I made films that would be entertainment on the surface and at the same time contain a social or political subtext.”

I think Corman was wrong to consider The Intruder such an outlier in his filmography. The director side of his brain no doubt cared passionately about the material, but the producer side surely thought (mistakenly, it turned out) that the hot-button issue of integration had untapped commercial potential. In short, it was a quintessential Corman production from the time when he was firing on all cylinders, his artist and businessman personae in perfect synch. He could be a confident and imaginative stylist in this decade, but a lot of his talent was in reading tea leaves and picking up on emerging trends. Later in the decade he struck gold with The Wild Angels and The Trip, hitting on the novel idea of making movies about and for the counterculture from a perspective that was unreservedly sympathetic. The success of those films must have made the failure of his hippy-dippy comedy Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) sting harder, and must have remained a sore spot given how often he brought it up. Corman always blamed his bosses’ post-production meddling for its fate, but I think a deeper problem is that the movie had nothing to say. Corman was an interested observer of the counterculture, but he was not of it.

How different might film history have been if Gas! had been a hit and he continued directing? Maybe he would have tried to keep a finger on the pulse of the ‘70s and ‘80s with more of his political exploitation films. Or maybe he would have continued into the Cinema of Quality realm that his dry, intelligent The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) and Von Richtofen and Brown (1971) occupied. We’ll never know, because after the latter film, he took a sabbatical from directing that turned into retirement, during which he founded New World Pictures and became a mogul. With his eye always on the balance sheet, he fostered a working environment that encouraged a lot of creativity and even a little bit of art, as long as it was also good business. That was enough room for Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, Jonathan Kaplan, Amy Holden Jones, Paul Bartel, Stephanie Rothman, and Ron Howard to create distinctive and memorable work early in their careers. It also gave Corman room to live up to his better angels by distributing films by the giants of international art cinema: Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, Werner Herzog, and Akira Kurosawa, to name only five.

Star Wars, Jaws, and the rise of big-budget genre movies has been credited with squeezing Corman out of business. Miramax and other studio “art-house” divisions bought up the next generations of foreign auteurs. By the ‘90s, Corman was consigned to the direct-to-video market, churning out trashy erotic thrillers and Bloodfist sequels. Budgets were smaller and there was less room to experiment. By the 2010s, when he was producing campy monster movies for the Sci-Fi (or Syfy) Channel, the goal had shifted from thriving to surviving. Corman was better than the movies he produced in the last few decades of his career, and to be honest, I used to hold this against him. Maybe I still do a little bit, but maybe it’s also time to let that go. It’s not bad to have ruled the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, and then be the only one of his contemporaries in the ‘50s exploitation circuit to remain a player (even if a diminished one) right up to a few weeks before his death, when he was still announcing new projects. In 2009, when I was a 20-year-old intern at an alt-weekly, I interviewed him by phone and he told me that he was working on a movie called Dinocroc vs. Supergator. “Originally we were going to make Dinocroc 2, and – this shows that you can still learn at my age – the head of the Sci-Fi Channel said that when they show a film with ‘2’ in the title, it doesn’t do well. So I said, ‘Oh, did I say Dinocroc 2? I meant Supergator!’”

When he accepted his Honorary Oscar in 2009, Corman told the industry audience, “I believe the finest films being done today are done by the original, innovative filmmakers who have the courage to take a chance and to gamble. So I say to you: Keep gambling, keep taking chances.” An unkind observer might suggest it had been a while since he had taken a major risk, but maybe staying in such an impossible art form was a gamble enough for him. I felt a little moved when, during a 2022 episode of Charles Band’s podcast, Corman remembered some advice he gave after his son, Roger Junior, produced his first film. “They made the film, and when the results came in, they made a slight profit. And he came to me and he said, ‘Dad – I never worked so hard in my life, and I made such a small amount of money.’ I said, ‘Roger, if you’re in films to make money, get out. You wanna be in films simply because you want to make films. If it’s money, go into real estate or finance or something like that.” His son went into real estate, and he stayed in movies.