Cinema Retro's London photographer attends a rare London appearance by legendary filmmaker Roger Corman.
SEEING IS "B"ELIEVING
By Mark Mawston
With over
500 movie credits to his name, most of us will have seen a Roger Corman film at
some point, perhaps during their original drive-in engagements or as a
perennial on late night TV. However, a much rarer sight is that of the man
himself, who makes very few appearances on “the circuit†even though he is so
revered. It was therefore a rare treat to meet the maestro at a late night
double bill screening of two of his finest films at the start of the English
bank holiday weekend at the Curzon Soho as part of their Midnight Movies season.
Corman was
in town to introduce what many (including myself) see as his masterpiece - Masque Of The Red Death, as well as the
seldom-seen but highly regarded The
Intruder, starring a young William Shatner. Corman, speaking before a
packed and appreciative crowd, confirmed that The Intruder was his favourite among his own films and went on to
say that it was the epitome of “Guerrilla film making,†as most scenes were shot when and where they
could, often despite run-ins with hostile locals. The film’s stance against
racial and religious prejudice led to some rather unpleasant moments for the
crew as well as death threats to both its director and star. It became apparent
that the crowd had come to primarily see The
Intruder rather than the oft-screened Poe adaptation that boasts Nicholas
Roeg’s beautiful cinematography. In fact, Roeg’s work on Masque has been hugely influential on other directors’ work, from
David Lynch to Peter Greenway. Corman’s influence on American film is
undisputed and the talent he nurtured has become known as “The Roger Corman School Of Filmmakingâ€. The
noted alumni includes Francis Ford Coppola, Martin
Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter
Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Donald G.
Jackson, Gale Anne Hurd, Joe Dante,
James Cameron,
John Sayles,
Monte Hellman
and Jack Hill, all of whom started their careers with Corman. As an example, Corman
confirmed that in the movie The Terror,
directorial duties were shared by himself, Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) and Jack Nicholson! Supposedly the film was
broken up into several shoots on free days but overall took less than a week to
film. That’s an epic by Corman standards: The
Little Shop Of Horrors took two days to shoot!
It’s Corman’s black
and white films of the 1950s that I still have a soft spot for. Despite miniscule budgets, they are chock full of
great ideas, a good example being Beast
With A Million Eyes. These were the days when films were made produced around
a poster and productions were given the green light on the strength of the
title alone! Obviously, the Beast with a
Million Eyes is a classic title but how on earth would the wonderful
monster maker Paul Blaisdell come up with a creature to match the title that producer
Samuel Z Arkoff so craved? With
characteristic innovativeness, Corman simply came up with the concept that,
when the alien spaceship (or detergent bottle, in this case) lands, the
creatures aboard take over the bodies of the local animal population and view
the surrounding area through their eyes. The
Day the World Ended and Not Of This
Earth, made in the same period, were vastly superior efforts and hold up
reasonably well today, as does the wonderful Teenage Cavemen that starred future Man From U.N.C.L.E. Robert
Vaughn.
My own
introduction to Corman was the drive-in classic Attack cf the Crab Monsters, the poster for which adorns a wall in
my home to this day. It was the early 1980s and I’d been given a school project
to look into the history of our hometown of Newcastle during WW2, specifically the area
in which I lived. I found that, due to its shipyards and ammunitions factories,
Newcastle had been left virtually intact by the Luftwaffe
as Hitler wanted to use it as a base if his planned invasion of England had
been successful. The only reported heavy bombing was in the street next to ours
and by chance the elderly lady next door to us at the time had a clipping on
the incident, which she gave me for my research. After reading the article, I
turned over the yellowed newspaper clipping to find cinema listings from the
time (1957) and my eyes were drawn to a double bill that ignited my
imagination: Corman’s Attack Of The Crab
Monsters paired with Vadim’s And God Created Woman! It actually took me
until the 1990s to catch up with the Corman movie and since then, I’ve made a
hobby of collecting posters pertaining to his work. Among my prized
possessions, gems such as The Wasp Woman
(“A Beautiful Woman By Day, a Lusting Queen Wasp By Night!â€) and The Saga of the Viking Women and
Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. Who else
would attempt to fit that on a theatre marquee?
The first film that ever truly frightened me was another
Corman classic, X- The Man With The X-Ray Eyes and one of
the first X certs I ever saw at the cinema had a Corman connection Monster: Humanoids From The Deep, whose
poster I “borrowed†from the local flea pit wall. When I went to adorn my
parent’s bath with it, I found about ten other posters of more recent vintage
beneath it including Nightwing and The Incredible Melting Man.
A great find, but one almost compromised by my own personal horror story
that occurred when my father slipped on the residue left by my work in the
bath.
With all these memories, it was obviously a great pleasure
to finally meet Roger Corman, who confirmed to those gathered that the Masque Of The Red Death was indeed
filmed on sets left over from another production (Becket), thus giving it that A picture look on a B picture budget. It
was a wonderful experience to photograph and meet one of the greats of the
cinema. Those of you who may doubt that, simply remember that without Roger
Corman, we may never have witnessed the groundbreaking careers of Jack
Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern,
Dennis Hopper,
and Robert De
Niro! Corman’s influence extended well into the 1970s, with films
such as Death Race 2000 and Piranha. This is one filmmaker of whom
it is accurate to say, “They don’t make ‘em like that any more!â€
(Thanks to Simon,
Xavier and the Staff of The Curzon, Soho, London.)
For information on the Curzon Soho Cinema, click here