ROGER CORMAN - 1926-2024

It’s always a surprise when someone dies, even if it wasn’t surprising that it would be happening sooner rather than later. Roger had been in seclusion for the past several years due to what I knew was Alzheimers when I saw him at his birthday party in 2013, the last public event at which we “Graduates of the Roger Corman Film School” participated. My neighbor Kevin saw him earlier this year when he delivered a car to the family (his father was Roger’s long-time go-to guy for cars). I was glad to hear that Roger not only remembered me, but asked how I was and seemed glad to hear about the writing career I’ve made f or myself since leaving Hollywood when Kevin told him.

If you had told me back in 1960 when I saw “The Fall of the House of Usher” - the first of the “Poe Trilogy” (the other two being “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Raven,” which I saw while in the Navy) - that I would not only meet but work with and become friends with Roger Corman, I’d have wondered what planet you came from. To that time - and for several years after - no one had ever told me my attempts at writing betrayed any hint of promise. No one had ever commented that I had any discernible talent. But Roger compared me favorably to Robert Towne when he called Ron Howard in 1988 to tell him he should hire me to write “R ‘n’ R” (a very interesting project I could have written as memoir, having visited Hong Kong in the service several times - such was not to be when the Great Writer’s Strike of 1988, which everyone thought would last two weeks and instead lasted six months, ended many projects), which surprised the hell out of me when Ron told me he’d said it and that thus he would change his mind and hire me for the project. I finally believed it when Roger said it to me personally when complimenting me about the screenplay for Beyond The Wall Of Sleep, which he and I both thought would be the best thing we’d done together - until the producer hired the son of the richest man in Spain to direct it and proved (once again) that the one thing you cannot buy at any price is talent.

As with nearly everyone who gets a break in Hollywood, my break with Roger came because someone else couldn’t take the job. Clark Henderson wanted to hire my friend Jim Lenahan to do a Vietnam war movie based on a series of novels about Military Police in Saigon during the war, but Jim had just made it into the Writers Guild and couldn’t take a non-union gig. We were both represented at the same agency, and he had read In The Year of the Monkey; he told Clark to hire me since I had written “the best Vietnam movie I’ve read.” So I adapted Saigon Commandos and Clark took it to Roger, who said he would finance it (I just discovered a couple weeks ago that it’s up on Amazon and tied to my page, and there were many good comments about it). A year later, I got a phone call from Catherine Cyran, then Roger’s executive assistant (later an Emmy-nominated director and award-winning writer-director-producer - I just discovered she died of cancer a month before Jurate passed), asking if I was interested in doing a science-fiction movie for Roger. Hell yes! Wow, Roger Corman wanted to hire me? When I met him the first time, he told me he wanted to work with me because “Saigon Commandos was the most intelligent script that came through here last year.”

People who think Roger’s movies were what the Washington Post’s James Hohmann described as “dozens of laughably ridiculous and ridiculously profitable movies about crab monsters, a human-eating plant and buxom women in prison,..”never did and never will understand who and what Roger was.

I can distill it down to a conversation we had after the deal had been made to write The Sisterhood, that s-f movie Catherine Cyran called me about. “Tom. I don’t have a million dollars to spend on special effects to hide the fact there’s nothing there.” All of Roger’s movies are “about something,” and finding ways to put “about something” into any screenplay I wrote for Roger almost spoiled me for the rest of Hollywood, where being “about something” is mostly seen as a negative by too many of them.

Saigon Commandos was “about” PTSD. The Sisterhood was “about” how men too frequently dismiss women, to their later regret. Heroes Stand Alone was “about” the end of the Cold War and the possibility of Russians and Americans stepping away from being enemies. So much for “laughably ridiculous.”

The obituary writer at Variety obviously “got” Roger, writing this:

“Corman’s staggering output encompassed nearly every film genre: adventure - She Gods of Shark Reef; biker - The Wild Angels; dystopia - Death Race 2000; film noir - 1955’s The Fast and the Furious; gangster - The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; horror - Pit and the Pendulum; monster - Attack of the Crab Monsters; psychedelia - The Trip; racing - The Young Racers; rock and roll - Carnival Rock; sci-fi - Not of This Earth; social drama - The Intruder; space opera - Battle Beyond the Stars; teenage rebellion - Rock and Roll High School; war - Von Richtofen and Brown; westerns - Five Guns West; women-in-prison - Caged Heat; and W.T.F. - Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf.

He went on to write, “Corman may be best remembered for the budding talents he nurtured and the careers he launched. It is testament to his influence that the 47th Academy Awards ceremony, presented in 1975, was more like a reunion of the so-called Roger Corman Film School, with six of the top eight Oscars awarded to former Corman ‘graduates:’ Francis Ford Coppola, Ellen Burstyn, Robert Towne, and Robert De Niro.

Jack Nicholson, nominated that year for Chinatown, made his film debut in Corman’s Cry-Baby Killer. Diane Ladd and Talia Shire, nominees for best supporting actress, also got their starts in Corman films - \ The Wild Angels and Gas-s-s-s, respectively. Robert Towne, won Best Original Screenplay that year for Chinatown. And Corman’s New World Pictures distributed that year’s best foreign film, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.”

Fellini wasn’t the only major European director to benefit from Roger. Volker Schlöndorff’ The Tin Drum was picked up by Roger in 1979. Roger distributed Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire in 1987.

Martin Scorsese’s first film was Boxcar Bertha, done for Roger. Francis Ford Coppola got his first movie job from Roger. Jonathan Demme’s first movie was Caged Heat. Ron Howard - who no one would take seriously as a director after he graduated from USC’s directing program - got taken seriously by Hollywood when he made Gone In Sixty Seconds for Roger (it was an inside joke when he cast Roger as the penny-pinching congressman in Apollo 13). James Cameron’s first Hollywood job was making the models for Battle Beyond the Stars; Roger gave him his first directing job, Piranha II. Cameron’s producing partner, Gayle Anne Hurd, was Roger’s executive assistant when she met Cameron and they decided to make The Terminator.

The list goes on.

I recently had lunch with an old friend, also a graduate of the Roger Corman Film School; we talked about Roger. He said “If Roger Corman hadn’t existed, the first fifty of the last sixty years of Hollywood wouldn’t have been what we now see as the Golden Age it was.”

“Graduate: Roger Corman Film School,” is the Hollywood credit I am most proud of.

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