Over at the Outfield Excursions podcast, Marshal Latham and I have reviewed a handful of movies, but there has been one director we've gone back to again and again, and that is Roger Corman. Corman, often known as the King of the B-s, was one of the greats of the 20th Century, directing, then producing more films than we could ever possibly review (although we never did get to WASP WOMAN, Corman's 1959 "hit").
Corman died this week, at the ripe age of 98.
You know who Corman was, right? Director of the Vincent Price Poe Cycle of movies, the man who gave a start to Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Joe Dante, Dennis Hopper, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron. The man who produced more schlock than, jeez, anybody I can think of.
But I appreciate schlock myself.
I'm reminded of the summer between my Junior and Senior years at college, when those of us in the Film program who weren't getting married that summer, volunteered to be interns in Los Angeles, to be placed (at random) at a variety of different companies and businesses, to get experience, make contacts, and in my case, run a Xerox machine for hours at a time.
I was placed with a low- to mid-level talent agency, which I do not disparage (at the end of the summer, they offered me a full-time job there, and I always wonder what would've happened had I taken it, instead of coming back the next year and being told they had no position for me or even memory of my time there). But the point is, one of our group (not me, unfortunately) was placed with Roger Corman's company, Concorde/New Horizons. At the end of our days/weeks, the group of interns would get together and talk about what sorts of things we had done that week, and Erik, that one guy, told mind-boggling stories of Corman's company making him work on actual productions, doing whatever had to be done, including playing a henchman who had to tie Michelle Lintell to a chair. Poor guy absolutely hated that.*
Anyhoo, the man died, and I should have written more . . . except I never met the man, and he was finished directing movies by the time I was an adult who could recognize any director's body of work other than Spielberg (and Hitchcock, I suppose). But he made a huge mark, and to my surprise, he got an honorary Oscar in 2009, for his mark on cinema and encouraging filmmakers who went on to much greater things.
Like Jim Wynorski, famed director of SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE 2 and 3 (which are the same movie, just in different locations). Oh, and a remake of WASP WOMAN. Hmmm.
*Am I exaggerating? No, if anything, I'm underselling it. He bitched about working on an actual set (as an unpaid P.A., sure, but still), with lights and makeup and fight choreography and everything, while the rest of us had to learn how to get coffee and replace toner cartridges in copy machines.
