Forgotten Heroes

[Originally published on April 5, 2006]

Today is a blogging birthday bash for the brilliant Roger Corman: director, writer, producer, actor, and all around cool guy. Who else do you know that’s gonna drop acid as research for a movie about hippies? Point to the sane man who thinks he can direct a coherent feature length movie in two days. Forget the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, how about the six degrees of Corman? This cat has hired and/or worked with the best in the biz: Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Peter Fonda, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Peter Bogdanovich, Ray Milland, Bruce Dern, Robert Towne, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and too many others to even mention. Genres? Oh yeah. He’s had a hand in everything from monster drive-in classics, artistic literary adaptations, foreign imports, westerns, gangsters, modern musicals and almost anything else in between. The trick is that he didn’t really think he was cool or an artist. He just did what stimulated him intellectually.

And today he’s a spry 80 years old.

As you may or may not know, I manage a mall-based corporate DVD store. In honor of Roger Corman’s birthday today, I did a pull together of titles we had in stock. Sadly, it wasn’t enormous, but there were some of his directorial classics: Little Shop of Horrors, I, Mobster, Wasp Woman, Last Woman on Earth, A Bucket of Blood, Creature from the Haunted Sea. I also found a few Corman productions: Dementia 13, Boxcar Bertha, Caged Heat, and Rock and Roll High School. Sadly, we had none of his great Edgar Allan Poe films or the 1960s counterculture flicks. When customers would wander in to the store, I’d point out the display and explain that it was in honor of Corman’s birthday. A few would stop and stare for a moment and then stagger off in search of Married with Children box sets or The Chronicles of Narnia. One person actually picked up Rock and Roll High School, pondering a purchase, but went for the new Flaming Lips CD instead of punk rock Ramones. Mostly I got blank looks and indifference.

In his book, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Corman was able to add visionary to his list of professional credits. He wrote, “The trick with theatrical exhibition nowadays is no longer to make big money on rentals as in the 1970s. Instead, you make some money theatrically, but use the release as advertising so you can get the video profits” (p. 228). How true that statement has become. While most of my customers couldn’t be bothered by his body of work, they were reaping the benefits of his business philosophy. DVD sales are the backbone of the new Hollywood with more money made on some films found in stores like mine rather than in the local megaplex. Ultimately, only movie geeks like me and historians will really care about his body of work because film is pop culture. Fads come and go and film fades into celluloid dreams. And Roger Corman was once their king.

Happy Birthday!