Chris Nashawaty, author of a new book on film legend Roger Corman talks about the director\/producer\/actor\u2019s role in kickstarting the golden age of cinema and his knack for identifying market opportunities and making lots and lots of movies.<\/p>\n
Roger Corman\u2019s oeuvre contains the following movies: Teenage Cave Man, Women in Cages, The Slumber Party Massacre, and Carnosaur 2. That\u2019s only a small sampling of the hundreds of films that the classic B-movie purveyor has produced in his 60 years in the entertainment business. Those incredibly goofy yet appealing titles don\u2019t do justice to Corman\u2019s true genius. But here are a couple of names that might: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, and James Cameron. According to Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Nashawaty, the author of Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman, King of the B Movie, Corman\u2019s most enduring Hollywood achievement is the staggering number of A-listers he plucked from obscurity.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one in Hollywood has ever had that same sense for young talent,\u201d Nashawaty says. \u201cCorman\u2019s greatest legacy was the hugely talented people he discovered and put to work.\u201d Though Corman has a reputation for producing mountains of schlock on a tight budget in just a few days (in 1957 alone he directed and produced 9 movies), some of the films he made, like Little Shop of Horrors, are still worth watching.<\/p>\n
More importantly, Corman is the unofficial Godfather of the golden age of 70s films, since he was the one who gave its auteurs (the aforementioned Scorsese and Coppola) their start. He was also instrumental in getting the classic 1969 film Easy Rider off the ground.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not just artistically that Corman has been influential, according to Nashawaty. We can also learn from his business acumen, and his ability to exploit markets that were previously untapped. Here, Chris Nashawaty tells us how Corman revolutionized the movie industry.
\nMaking Movies Smarter, Faster and Cheaper<\/p>\n
Back in the 50s when Corman started making movies he started making them on total shoestrings. He couldn\u2019t really compete with the big studios but he found out how to do it faster and cheaper. He was making movies for $10,000 in two days. And over the years he\u2019s been really smart in finding cheaper and cheaper ways to make movies. If you go to Sundance now you see movies that are made on iPhones, and you can use digital cameras, you can make movies for really really cheap amounts. It comes out of Corman\u2019s whole mentality: if you can\u2019t join \u2018em, beat \u2018em. You can always find a way to make movies faster and cheaper and quicker.
\nCover Topics Ignored By the Mainstream<\/p>\n
Corman is the unofficial godfather of the great movies of the 70s. Around that time he stopped directing movies himself, and all the people he brought up\u2014Scorsese, Coppola, [Chinatown screenwriter] Robert Towne\u2014defined that golden age of American cinema. Without Corman they wouldn\u2019t exist. And he was also tapping into, before that golden age happened, tapping into counter culture topics that the big studios weren\u2019t. When teens were interested in sex, drugs and rock and roll, the studios were still making Mary Poppins But Corman was making movies about LSD and bikers.<\/p>\n
Exploit Underserved Markets<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s important to point out just how brilliant a businessman Corman has been. When he was starting off in the 50s, there was a teen audience that wasn\u2019t being served, and he recognized that, and he put monster movies at the drive-in. In the 60s, he was the first to serve the counter-culture, as I alluded to before. In the 70s he started his own indie, New World, which was the first hit indie studio\u2014three decades before Miramax. In the 80s, when Hollywood started making the movies he had always made but on a bigger scale, he knew he couldn\u2019t compete, so he recognized before the big studios did, that there\u2019s an ancillary market in cable and VHS. He made movies that directly to video. All those new video shops needed product. He cranked out cheapies and made a mint, which is also what he\u2019s doing with his SyFy movies today [Corman is behind movies like Piranhaconda and Sharktopus which air on the Syfy network]. In every case the movie studios eventually caught on, but he\u2019s always been really sharp.
\nWhen Following Formulas Gets Results<\/p>\n
There are some years when Corman directed 9 movies. He was always ambitious and hungry and hardworking, you can\u2019t fault him for that. Because Roger was trained as an engineer, he saw these movies as formula–a little bit of violence, a car chase, some topless women–that\u2019s a formula for a hit movie. It had to have those things, and you were guaranteed to double your money. There was one time he was really precious about a movie, The Intruder, which was about race, which was an issue he really cared about. He tried to make an \u201cimportant film,\u201d and it was the one time he lost money. That\u2019s when he realized, follow the formula and give the viewers what they wan