It will be my pleasure and
privilege to conduct a Q&A with the legendary Roger Corman on Friday, Jan. 3, following the 7 pm screening of his classic Masque of the Red Death at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. And I’m
even happier to report this will occur just one night after the Houston Film
Critics Society — of which I am a founding member — honors Corman with a special
lifetime achievement tribute during HFCA’s annual awards show at MFAH.
You can purchase tickets for
both the awards show and the Masque of
the Red Death screening at the MFAH website. Or you can opt not to attend
either event, and spend the rest of your life tortured by gnawing regret. The
choice is yours.
For the benefit of those who
tuned in late…
(Cue the cut-and-pastings
from the mini-bio I have prepared for my film studies students.)
Roger Corman has earned millions and entertained millions more throughout his decades-long
career as a director, producer and/or distributor of over 300 highly successful
small-budget, high-concept films, and continues to regale audiences with a
steady output of similar fare for theatrical, home video, streaming and cable
platforms. Indeed, just three weeks ago, the remarkably spry 93-year-old legend
presented his latest effort as an executive producer, the sci-fi
action-thriller Abduction, at the
Bahamas International Film Festival — where, not incidentally, he and his wife, producer
Julie Corman, conducted mentoring sessions with budding screenwriters.
The titles of many of Corman's 1950s films -- The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955),
It Conquered the World (1956),
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957),
War of the Satellites (1958) and A Bucket of Blood (1959) --
indicate why he earned early on the nickname “King of the Drive-in.” (In 1960,
he produced and directed the cult classic Little Shop of Horrors, which reportedly was shot in two days
and one night on a leftover set).
During the 1960s, however, he began to attract serious
critical attention, domestically as well as internationally, as the auteur of several stylishly gothic
horror films based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), and, of
course, The Masque of the Red Death (1964),
featuring such established actors as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris
Karloff, Ray Milland, and Peter Lorre. (If you are of a certain age, these
films are more likely than all the English classes in the world to have sparked
any interest you’ve ever had in Poe’s literary output.) But Corman is equally
proud of The Intruder (1962), his
socially conscious indie drama about a charismatic demagogue (brilliantly
played by a young William Shatner) who stokes racial tensions in a small
Southern town. The movie was boldly progressive for its time, and remains, in
the words of critic-historian Wheeler Winston Dixon, “one of the most brutal, honest, and unflinching
examinations of American racism in cinema history.”
In 1970, Corman formed New World Pictures, an
independent mini-major that produced the work of such up-and-comers as John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante,
Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, and Peter Bogdanovich. New World's first
film, The Student Nurses (1970),
was shot in three weeks for $150,000 and grossed more than $1 million. Other
early New World releases included horror, biker, and women-in-prison films. The
profits from these low-budget features allowed Corman to act as the American
distributor for a number of prestigious foreign films. In a 10-year period, New
World released three Academy Award winners in the Foreign Language Film
category: Federico Fellini's Amarcord
(1974), Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu
Uzala (1975) and Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979).
It should be noted that when Corman told Ingmar Bergman that he had attempted
to expand the potential audience for the latter’s 1972 masterwork Cries and Whispers by releasing it
in some drive-ins, Bergman approved.
Corman’s influence on American cinema has been incalculably
enormous, both as a filmmaker — his Poe films continue to inspire many
directors of gothic horror movies — and as a nurturer of up-and-coming, destined-for-prominence
actors, screenwriters and directors. (In addition to those previously
mentioned, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Fonda, Sylvester
Stallone, Pam Grier, Bruce Dern, Gale Ann Hurd, Ron Howard and Robert Towne are
among the luminaries he gave significant early-career boosts.) In 2009, the
Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors voted to give Corman an honorary Oscar “for his unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers by providing
an environment that no film school could match.”
In short: Roger Corman has made an immeasurable impact
on American movies — on movies, period — as a maverick and a mentor. And I
would venture to say the secret of his success has been his savvy as an
entertainer. He has always known that audiences will respond to a wide variety
of films — everything from low-budget horror flicks to socially conscious
dramas to slam-bang B-movies to challenging art-house fare — if they have access
to, and are encouraged to sample, the full scope of that variety. To paraphrase
Walt Whitman, Roger Corman understands and appreciates that cinema is large —
it contains multitudes.
