The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), one of Roger Corman’s most popular Z-movies, shot in under three days for $27,000, featured a talking, carnivorous plant called Audrey Junior, which keeps screaming “Feed Me!” The voice was supplied by Charles B Griffith, who also played a couple of small roles, directed the exteriors and wrote the script. In a way, Corman kept screaming “Feed Me!” to Griffith, who supplied his producer-director with a flow of more than 25 witty, bizarre, fast-paced and often subversive screenplays between 1956 and 1980, directing six of them himself.
“Chuck” Griffith, who has died aged 77, was Corman’s acknowledged principal writer, seldom working for anyone else. “I was lazy,” he once confessed. “Instead of trying to write an A-picture and sell it on the market, I’d just go back and get another assignment from Roger.” These included quickies with titles such as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Teenage Doll (1957), Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961).
Born in Chicago, Griffith was the grandson of Myrtle Vail, a vaudeville performer who devised The Story of Myrt and Marge, a 1930s and 40s radio soap opera for herself and her daughter, Charles’s mother, Donna Damerel. Griffith was introduced to Corman after the actor Jonathan Haze, who would later play the florist hero of The Little Shop of Horrors, had given Corman a pile of Griffith’s scripts. The first to be produced was It Conquered the World (1956), which had the most unlikely of monsters. Supposed to be a Venusian, it resembled an ice-cream cone, with arms, horns and lots of teeth.
The following year, Griffith wrote seven scripts for Corman. “I got into the habit of writing very quickly without realising it and, because I was raised in a radio family, I didn’t know that you were supposed to take a long time to write a film script.” Among them was Attack of the Crab Monsters, for which Corman told Griffith: “All I want is suspense or action in every scene. Period.” This is exactly what Griffith delivered, as well as directing the underwater sequences. “I’d be down at the bottom of the tank at Marineland trying to get actors to do something while [director of photography] Floyd Crosby was hammering at the glass window trying to get them to do something else. It was all pretty silly.”
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Griffith originally wrote The Undead (1957), about the reincarnation of a medieval witch as a 1950s prostitute, in iambic pentameters. However, “I had to rewrite it after it was ready to shoot because somebody told Roger that they didn’t understand it. Roger would give it to anybody to read or anybody out on the street. And then get panicky and change everything. So this gradually became a sore point with me.”
A Bucket of Blood (1959) was a beatnik horror comedy in which a nerdish coffee-bar worker (Dick Miller) is hailed as a genius hip sculptor by covering dead bodies with plaster. As the hero says, in a line worthy of Jack Kerouac: “Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.”
The Wild Angels (1966), which deified the Hells Angels, kick-started a whole cycle of stoned biker movies in which Griffith gave super-cool Peter Fonda the following tirade: “We wanna be free to do what we wanna do! We wanna be free to ride! We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man! And we wanna get loaded! And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we are gonna do. We are gonna have a good time. We are gonna have a party!”
In the 1970s, when Corman came to the conclusion that “sex was out, car crashes were in”, he got Paul Bartel to direct and Griffith to write Death Race 2000 (1975), a campy sci-fi comedy which, like the best of comic books, caricatured the horrors of contemporary society. The race is one in which the winner is the driver who has the highest body count among pedestrians in order to keep the population down. According to Griffith: “Corman tried to make it serious. He was enraged with me for trying to make it funny, but he took me to see the cars and they were all goofy looking with decal eyes and rubber teeth. I said, ‘You can’t be serious,’ and he tells me, ‘Chuck, this is a hard-hitting serious picture!’ Obviously, Bartel didn’t think so either.”
Among the better films Griffith directed was Eat My Dust (1976), another Corman production aimed at the drive-in market. Ron Howard plays a teenage stock-car racer who destroys half the small mid-western town of Puckerbush after being told, rather cryptically, that “race driving is for outlaws, in-laws and assholes”.
In 1982 – when The Little Shop of Horrors was turned into a Broadway musical, subsequently adapted into a film in 1986 – Griffith, who had received $800 from Corman for the original screenplay, and had no rights agreement, tried to sue the theatre producers and then Warner Bros. He eventually got “one-fourth of one per cent”.
The last film Griffith directed for Corman was Dr Heckyl and Mr Hype (1980), a slapstick version of the Robert Louis Stevenson story with Oliver Reed in the title roles. In 1988, he retired and went to live in Australia for a few years. But he was not forgotten. When Quentin Tarantino was once asked who his influences were, he mentioned Griffith, to whom his most recent picture, Death Proof (2007), is dedicated. When asked if he had any advice for aspiring screenwriters, Griffith, who never took his work too seriously, typically replied: “Yes, take your hat and your cat, and get the hell out!”
He is survived by his second wife and a daughter.
ยท Charles B Griffith, screenwriter and director, born September 23 1930; died September 28 2007
