From horror to sci-fi to movies about women behind bars, there was no genre or exploitation trend that Roger Corman failed to embrace. He also kick-started the careers of talents like Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Jack Nicholson, as Chris Nashawaty details in his outrageously entertaining oral history Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, In this excerpt, some famous voices tell the stories behind two Corman flicks from the 1970s.<\/p>\n
Bruce Dern (actor; post-Corman credits include Silent Running, Family Plot, and Big Love): \u201cIn 1970, I worked with Roger again, on Bloody Mama, starring Shelley Winters. I don\u2019t think Roger was ready for Shelley. She had been around the Actors Studio, and Bobby De Niro was under her wing. And Bobby was young, but obviously very, very good. Shelley was a handful. I don\u2019t know how much Shelley respected Roger at first, but she respected him quite a bit by the end of the movie. He handled it beautifully. He\u2019s just a good guy. I mean, I never heard him say a swear word in his life. Anyway, what I remember most about De Niro was that he was in love with a girl who drove a little blue Volkswagen, whose dad was a publisher of a small New Mexico newspaper. They drove out from New York to Arkansas. I\u2019ve only seen Bobby maybe four times since that movie. And I brought that up to him one day, and he got the biggest kick out of it, that I would even remember her. I remember his earnestness. If he [screwed] up in the middle of a take, he\u2019d [swear]. Which is actually a lot more clever than you\u2019d think, because that take wouldn\u2019t be printed. I just remember that he was destined to do something. He was a whiz kid. You could tell he was it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Robert De Niro (actor; post-Corman credits include Taxi Driver, The Godfather Part II, and Raging Bull): \u201cI was starting at the Actors Studio, and I came in and met Roger with Shelley Winters. You would hear stories about how fast his movies were made, but it didn\u2019t seem that fast to me. We shot it in Arkansas, and I think we had five weeks. I don\u2019t remember what I got paid on Bloody Mama. Maybe $3,500\u2014that number sticks in my head for some reason. I didn\u2019t <\/p>\n
Martin Scorsese (director; post-Corman credits include Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas): \u201cI came in after Francis Coppola and Monte Hellman and Jack Hill. Roger was moving away from AIP with New World Pictures, which was the place to be if you were trying to get into the business. Around the time I went to work for him, I was trying to finish my film Who\u2019s That Knocking at My Door. Not a great title, I never liked that title. My agent got me to meet Roger when I went out to L.A. to edit a film called Medicine Ball Caravan. I got that job by being an editor on Woodstock. So I met Roger at the New World building on Sunset\u2014you know, with the glass elevator and everything. And I was surprised by what an elegant man he was. Judging from the kinds of films he made, I expected him to be more like Sam Arkoff, with a big cigar and everything. Anyway, he asked if I would like to direct a sequel to Bloody Mama. I said I would like to very much. He said, \u2018Fine, we\u2019ll be calling you.\u2019 \u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Julie Corman (producer): \u201cRoger had already done Bloody Mama with Shelley Winters and then wanted to make another gangster picture. I started researching women gangsters, and they were hard to come by. Then I found this book, which was based on a true story. It was the story of Boxcar Bertha, and I thought it was a good story. Everyone who came to the project had a different reason that it was their project. Roger was making the next Bloody Mama, and I saw it as a kind of statement for women\u2019s rights. She was a free spirit, she wasn\u2019t constrained by the things that women who were even behind the women\u2019s lib movement were. She just got on a boxcar when she wanted to go somewhere, and then along the way, some crime developed.\u201d
\nStill from ‘Boxcar Bertha,’ directed by Martin Scorsese. Bernie Casey, Barbara Hershey, and Barry Primus hitch a ride on a freight train bound for oblivion.<\/p>\n
Martin Scorsese: \u201cWhile I was waiting to hear back from Roger, I started to work on Medicine Ball Caravan at Warner Bros. Brian De Palma befriended me and took me around to meet everybody. George Lucas was there. It my first time really being on my own, and I had to learn how to drive. John Cassavetes took me in as a sound effects editor on Minnie and Moskowitz. And basically I was just observing. Then Roger finally called me back in and said, \u2018You have Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, and twenty-four days to shoot it in Arkansas.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Roger Corman: \u201cWhen the script was finished we brought Marty in. Marty went to Arkansas ahead of everybody to scout locations. And when we arrived, we found that he had sketched all of the shots and tacked them to the walls of his motel room. It was the most complete preparation of a picture I had ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Julie Corman: \u201cIt was extremely impressive. And maybe not what we expected\u2014that much detail. Marty understood immediately how Roger was able to extend the shooting time of the picture by using a second unit. So Marty sketched all of those shots, too. At the end of the day, it\u2019s a Marty Scorsese picture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still from ‘Boxcar Bertha.’ Barbara Hershey and David Carradine ride the rails between bursts of gunfire … and hay-rolling passion.<\/p>\n
Martin Scorsese: \u201cI think we shot it in the fall of \u201971. Julie was the day-to-day producer, and she was wonderful. I remember Roger came down one day and he looked at the crew and scowled. Everything was fine. But when the crew saw him scowling, they moved even faster! That\u2019s pretty clever. I think I got paid scale, but it didn\u2019t matter, because basically you were getting the chance to learn how to make a film. That changed everything for me. From him, I learned how to put a picture together. He was like a great professor. He also taught you about the realities of the marketplace: There has to be a chase scene here; there has to be a touch of nudity there. He didn\u2019t apologize for that. This is what we do\u2014every fifteen pages in the script, there should be a suggestion of nudity. You have to embrace that if you\u2019re going to make a movie for him. I didn\u2019t mind embracing that Corman formula. You can\u2019t close yourself off to a certain genre because some people think it\u2019s d\u00e9class\u00e9.\u201d