The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
What I Learned From Roger Corman: Whatever You Do, Don’t Be Late
The author of a definitive oral history of the late director’s career remembers their many conversations — and what it was like to upset him: ‘Like a reprimand from God’
M“He was not someone who was used to not being in control.”
y first meeting with Roger Corman did not go well. It was 2012, and I was working on a book-length oral history about Corman’s career in Hollywood.
I’d already spoken with dozens of A-list actors and directors — Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, Dennis Hopper, John Sayles, Sylvester Stallone, Pam Grier and Robert Towne, to name a few — who had come up through his hardscrabble farm system in the ’60s and ’70s, paying their dues on disreputable naughty nurse pictures and down-with-the-man biker cheapies. Now all I needed to fill in the gaps was an audience with the man himself.
It seemed to me that Corman was slightly uneasy with the fact that I was writing a book about him, especially one in which his former employees would be swapping stories. No doubt part of him liked the idea of seeing what they all would have to say — it played to his vanity, which was not insignificant. But he also seemed slightly nervous. Mainly, I think, because he didn’t have any control over the project. And Corman was not someone who was used to not being in control.
New Yorker that I was, I arrived a halfhour late for our interview at his workplace on San Vicente in Brentwood. And when his longtime assistant, Cynthia, escorted me into his office, he sat behind his desk visibly displeased. He then proceeded to lecture me on the importance of punctuality. It was like a reprimand from God.
Jonathan Demme once described Roger Corman to me as “this weird contradiction. He comes off like some well-educated professor, but he also produces these insane movies about women getting into catfights in jungle prisons. It just doesn’t add up.” That seemed about right. Dressed in a V-neck sweater over a crisp white dress shirt, Corman looked every bit like the senator he played in The Godfather: Part II. His office was bright and roomy and filled with worn mod furniture that looked like it had been there since his 1967 LSD freakout The Trip was in theaters.
Pro that he was, Corman quickly moved past his disappointment in me and proceeded to tour-guide me through his career. With his soft, foghorn-deep voice, he unspooled stories about his days writing movie reviews for The Stanford Daily and delivering memos by bicycle on the Fox lot while making $32.50 a week in the mailroom. About meeting an unknown actor named Jack Nicholson in Jeff Corey’s
acting class in 1957 and wooing Vincent Price
for his extraordinary cycle of Edgar Allan Poe
adaptations in the ’60s.
Corman had just turned 86 when we met that first time. But his recall of the tiniest events, smallest contractual details and box office grosses in this or that foreign territory was astounding. By all accounts, this was still the case up until his death on May 9 at his Santa Monica home at age 98. In the weeks since his death, people have asked me what Corman movies they should watch if they want to get a handle on his career. It’s an impossible question to answer because he produced so many different sorts of pictures — nearly 400, from Atomic Age monster movies to slumber-party massacres.
The truth is that Corman is the closest thing American cinema has to a throughline for the second half of the 20th century. And it’s impossible to overstate his influence on the movie business. Long before the studios, he recognized an underserved teen market and exploited the hell out of it at the drive-in. He created his own hit indie studio decades before Miramax. He was one of the earliest Hollywood players to bet on home video. And, of course, he was an uncanny spotter of talent.
After our inauspicious first meeting, Corman and I conversed several times. And while I’d like to say we never had another tense moment, it’s not quite true. The last time we spoke, shortly before the book came out, he asked what my title was. I replied Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman — King of the B Movie. There was a long silence on the other end of the line. He did not care for it. I could feel his disappointment from 3,000 miles away, and we ended the conversation with me unsure where I stood with him.
Then, several months after the book came out and I still hadn’t heard good or bad from him, someone sent me a YouTube video of Corman in a store signing copies of my book. He was surrounded by fans, and he had a giant smile on his face. For the first time since
I’d been late to his office, I felt a lightness. I finally had the only review that mattered.