Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman

By Chris Nashawaty and John Landis

“Delightful . . . an engrossing oral history . . . As an enthusiastic ode to colorful, seat-of-your-pants filmmaking, this one’s hard to beat.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Fantastic—a treasure.” —Stephen King

Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses is an outrageously rollicking account of the life and career of Roger Corman—one of the most prolific and successful independent producers, directors, and writers of all time, and self-proclaimed king of the B movie. As told by Corman himself and graduates of “The Corman Film School,” including Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, and Martin Scorsese, this comprehensive oral history takes readers behind the scenes of more than six decades of American cinema, as now-legendary directors and actors candidly unspool recollections of working with Corman, continually one-upping one another with tales of the years before their big breaks.

Crab Monsters is supplemented with dozens of full-color reproductions of classic Corman movie posters; behind-the-scenes photographs and ephemera (many taken from Corman’s personal archive); and critical essays on Corman’s most daring films—including The Intruder, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Big Doll House—that make the case for Corman as an artist like no other.

“This new coffee table book, brimming with outrageous stills from many of Corman’s hundreds of films, looks at the wild career of the starmaker who was largely responsible for so much of the Hollywood we know today.” —New York Post

“Vividly illustrated.” —People

“It includes in-depth aesthetic appreciations of ten of Corman’s movies, which, taken together, make a compelling case for Corman as an artist.” —Hollywood.com

“Outrageously entertaining.” —Parade

“Endlessly fascinating.” —PopMatters

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Dec 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781613129814

Chris Nashawaty

Chris Nashawaty is a writer, editor, and former Entertainment Weekly film critic. He is the author of Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story and his work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Vanity Fair. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Book preview

PREFACE

In 1977, Ron Howard was nervously pacing on the set of his directorial debut, a $600,000 car-crash romp called Grand Theft Auto. Despite a successful career as a freckle-faced young actor on The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, the twenty-three-year-old had always wanted to work behind the camera rather than in front of it. A year earlier, he’d reluctantly agreed to star in the similarly themed girls-and-hot-rods cheapie Eat My Dust on the condition that the film’s producer, Roger Corman, would let him direct a movie of his own when it was over. Corman was notoriously thrifty—some would say cheap—but he was also a man of his word.

So there was Howard, standing on the set, facing the same frustrations that so many of Corman’s directors had faced countless times before him: The shooting schedule was too rushed, the crew was too small, and the money he needed to hire several hundred extras for a crowd scene was nonexistent. Just then, Corman arrived on the set of Grand Theft Auto and noticed that Howard was anxious about the B-movie producer’s refusal to pay for more faces in the crowd. Corman put his hand on the young director’s shoulder, smiled, and said, Ron, I’m not going to give you more extras. But know this: If you do a good job for me on this picture, you’ll never have to work for me again.

Howard never did work for Corman again. Instead, he graduated to making big-budget movies like Splash, Apollo 13, and A Beautiful Mind. But to this day, Howard insists that he never would have gotten the chance to work for the major studios had it not been for his apprenticeship at The University of Corman. He’s not alone. The list of directors, screenwriters, cameramen, producers, and actors who got their starts at Corman’s subversive celluloid prep school reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s A-list: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jonathan Demme, Charles Bronson, Joe Dante, John Sayles, Peter Bogdanovich, the list goes on. …

Ron Howard with one of his four-wheeled costars on the set of Eat My Dust (1976), directed by Charles B. Griffith. The Happy Days star was frustrated with his television career when he met with Corman and made a gutsy proposal: He would star in Eat My Dust only if Corman would give him the chance to direct a picture of his own. A rare Hollywood deal that worked out for both sides.

Lobby cards for Teenage Caveman (1958), directed by Roger Corman.

If Roger Corman’s legacy began and ended with the star-studded careers he kick-started, his story wouldn’t be nearly as compelling as it is. Since the 1950s, Corman has directed fifty movies and produced four hundred—movies with screaming titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Beast with a Million Eyes, and Creature from the Haunted Sea. He spun wild tales of Teenage Cavemen, T-Bird Gangs, and Slumber Party Massacres. And he packed drive-ins with the steamy, R-rated exploits of Candy Stripe Nurses, Women in Cages, and Wild Angels. Beyond the films themselves, Corman’s career may be the closest thing there is to a through-line of the past sixty years in Hollywood. He revolutionized independent cinema, he was the first person to recognize a previously untapped teen audience and then exploit the hell out of it, and he brought a Barnumesque huckster’s flair for showmanship to the marketing of his movies, hyping them with eye-popping posters and rat-a-tat trailers. He also distributed art house imports by foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman when no one else dared to, helping to broaden the palate of American moviegoers. In short, there is, was, and never shall be another Hollywood character like Roger Corman—something the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences finally acknowledged in 2009, when it handed him a lifetime achievement Oscar statuette.

In 2009, when I first spoke to Ron Howard about his years at the University of Corman, he told me, When you’re among the graduates of the Roger Corman School of Popular Cinema, the war stories fly. Eager to hear more, I interviewed more than sixty Corman alumni and let them recount their battle-scarred tales. …

Lobby cards for Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), directed by Roger Corman.

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1

DRIVE-IN DEMENTIA

Detail from the U.S. poster for House of Usher (1960), directed by Roger Corman.

ROGER WILLIAM CORMAN was born on April 5, 1926, in Detroit. The first of two sons born to William and Anne Corman, Roger spent his early years devouring Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of terror, building balsa-wood model airplanes in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother, Gene, and sneaking off to the movies to imagine himself as Clark Gable’s Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty. During those early years, at the height of the Great Depression, Corman’s father found steady work as an engineer, designing roads, bridges, and dams for McCray Steel. Even though the Cormans were solidly middle class, with a home on a shady, tree-lined street in the city’s Six Mile Road neighborhood, they weren’t immune to the economic hardships that were hitting most Americans. No one was. William never lost his job, but his salary was reduced in order to cut costs at the company. Frugality became a virtue in the Corman household—and was a lesson that young Roger would never forget.

In 1940, when Roger was fourteen, his family moved to Beverly Hills, after a doctor told his father that he had a serious and possibly fatal heart condition. California was like a sun-kissed alien planet to Roger. When he enrolled at Beverly Hills High School, it was the first time he remembers socializing with the sons and daughters of wealth and privilege, many of whom were the children of well-known and well-off movie studio executives. After graduation, Roger was accepted to Stanford University in Palo Alto—three hundred and fifty miles to the north of Los Angeles. There he studied industrial engineering in large part to make his father proud. The subject appealed to Corman’s methodical, problem-solving mind. But after he began reviewing movies for the Stanford Daily, math and science couldn’t compete with Marlene Dietrich and Spencer Tracy.

When Corman graduated from Stanford in 1947, the war was already over and even though he had enrolled in a Navy officer training program, his service was complete. Now he saw the career path laid out before him and shuddered. Engineering was a lucrative and respectable profession, but it wasn’t his passion. His passion was back in the pages of Poe and the hushed darkness of the matinee. Through a family connection, Corman landed a job as a messenger in the 20th Century Fox mail room, earning $32.50 a week. He had finally stepped inside the Hollywood Dream Factory, walking on the same hallowed ground as Tyrone Power, Betty Grable, and studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Corman knew that he would never pick up a slide rule again. Soon, he was promoted to the position of story analyst; he would synopsize lousy novels and even lousier spec scripts and give his notes, suggesting which properties deserved to go before the camera. One of the few stories that got his attention was a Western called The Big Gun, which was later made into 1950’s The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck as a reformed gunslinger who can’t outrun his notorious past. Corman had found the story and had given notes to make it better. And even though his suggestions were used in the finished film, Corman didn’t receive the credit he thought he was due. Instead, his boss got a juicy bonus. If this was how the studio game was played, he wanted out.

Corman left Fox and enrolled at Oxford on the GI Bill, studying English literature. But after six months, he gave up the ivy-covered campus and headed for Paris, where he lived off of his government stipend while hitting jazz clubs with his fellow expats. When his funds ran out, Corman returned to California in 1952 and found steady work at a string of literary agencies. On the side, he began writing a screenplay of his own about a Korean War vet who’s wrongly accused of killing a woman. He called it The House in the Sea, and it sold for $4,500 to Allied Artists, who rewrote the thriller and renamed it Highway Dragnet, to cash in on Jack Webb’s hit TV show. It was hardly an auspicious debut, but it was a debut nonetheless. Corman received his first professional credits, as cowriter and associate producer on the film.

Distraught at how his script had been butchered, Corman started his own company, Palo Alto Productions, with his brother Gene. They didn’t have enough money for a secretary, but they had an address. The shoestring operation was run out of a claustrophobic shared office above the Cock ’n Bull pub on the neon-lit Sunset Strip. Palo Alto’s inaugural film was 1954’s Monster from the Ocean Floor, a ridiculous cheapie about a preposterous one-eyed sea creature. It was shot in six days for $12,000, and it was a success. Just like that, Corman was a successful Hollywood producer. For his follow-up, he chose The Fast and the Furious—a high-speed chase film about an escaped con who kidnaps a young woman and hightails it across the Mexican border. The film got the attention of Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson, who were about to start a new company of their own: American International Pictures (AIP). Arkoff was a bigger-than-life, cigar-chomping cartoon of a producer, and he struck a deal with Corman, providing financing for a slate of future movies. At the time, the big studios were still reeling from the one-two punch of television’s encroachment on ticket buyers and the government’s recent anti-trust crackdown, which forced the majors to relinquish their vise-like grip on the theater chains they owned. It was the perfect time to get into business with a ballsy independent like AIP.

AIP quickly found itself in hot demand to fill the exploding number of drive-in theaters with B pictures to unspool before the studios’ ritzier A films. It wouldn’t take long for Arkoff and Nicholson’s company to become the biggest—and brashest—independent distributors in Hollywood. And Corman, fueled by ambition and a Herculean work ethic, became AIP’s star director, cranking out as many as twelve pictures a year. He made them fast and cheap, with an eye on the bottom line and an ear for lurid titles that were like catnip for teenage audiences—It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and Teenage Caveman. Corman had always had a sweet tooth for science fiction, but the businessman in him knew that these were also the sorts of movies that would click with the growing teenage audience. Corman wasn’t much of a stylist at first. He was working too quickly for that to even be a consideration. But one way he thought he could get better was to start sitting in on acting classes, where he might cross paths with young actors and actresses who couldn’t get their feet in the doors of the big studios—anonymous wannabes with vanilla names like Jack Nicholson, for example.

By the end of the fifties, the bleary-eyed Corman had somehow managed to direct a staggering twenty-four movies. He was making money hand over fist for AIP, but he wasn’t getting rich himself. So he decided to go into the distribution business, putting Palo Alto aside and creating a company called Filmgroup. Roger was working fast and furious now. And on a bet, he proved just how speedily he could work, shooting Filmgroup’s first feature—a subversive, bruise-black comedy called The Little Shop of Horrors—in just two and a half days on a budget of $28,000. It was a remarkable feat. More remarkable still was just how assured Corman had become behind the camera by the time the curtain fell on the decade. He was starting to develop a personal style. His camera set-ups were getting more ambitious. The scripts were funnier. Young, hip audiences were no longer laughing at him, but with him. Soon the critics would discover that Corman was more than just a quickie conveyer-belt filmmaker—especially after he reached back into his past and conjured the macabre stories that haunted his childhood in a series of indelible and incredible Edgar Allan Poe films.

Publicity shot of Corman from the early 1960s. The son of a successful engineer, Corman was a gifted student who attended Stanford and Oxford. But beneath his buttoned-down exterior raged the mind of a maverick who would turn lurid tales of monsters, murder, and teenage rebellion into drive-in gold.

ROGER CORMAN (director, producer): "I was always interested in the movies. I went to Stanford as an engineering major because my father was an engineer and I thought I would follow in his footsteps. But then I started writing for the Stanford Daily and found out that the paper’s film critics got free passes to all of the movie theaters in Palo Alto. That’s when I started looking at pictures in a different way. Rather than just entertainment, I began to analyze them and became more and more fascinated."

GENE CORMAN (producer): "I remember one afternoon at my fraternity house at Stanford, I read an article in the New Yorker magazine about a motion picture agent who played tennis all day and centered his career around the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. I thought, Holy shit, what a life! He had every girl in town, went to every party. I had no interest in a real career, so when I graduated in 1948, I decided I’d like to be an agent like that guy. Charlie Feldman was one of the most important and powerful agents at the time, and his partner, Ralph Blum, was opening a new office. I went in and the receptionist said, ‘We might actually have something for you.’ I think I got $25 a week. In the meantime, Roger had started life as an engineer, and he was not happy about that. Our father knew that Roger was very frustrated and didn’t want to go into engineering. And like every father, you want your children to be successful and happy."

ROGER CORMAN: "My first job in Hollywood was in the 20th Century Fox mail room. I delivered interoffice memos on a bicycle. I was the failure of the Stanford engineering class because I got the worst job of anybody. I was making $32.50 a week. At that time, production on the studio lot was six days a week. I volunteered to work for nothing on Saturday if I could work on a film set. That’s when I began to understand my real purpose, which was to learn a little bit about how films were made and also to let them know I was a hard worker. The head of personnel said there was an opening in the story department for an analyst. Basically, you would read scripts and stories that were submitted to the studio for possible purchase. My salary nearly doubled! One day, the story editor called me in and said, ‘Roger, you’ve turned down every single script you’ve been sent. Don’t you like anything?’ I said, ‘I’m the youngest guy here, so you give me all the worst stuff. Give me something that’s worth commenting on!’ And shortly afterward they sent me a Western script called The Big Gun, which I thought was really good. I gave my notes, and it became The Gunfighter with Gregory Peck. The story editor got the praise for my notes. That was frustrating. So with some time I had left on the GI Bill after my time in the Naval Training Program, I went to Oxford to study English literature. I was just there for two quarters, then I left for Paris and had all of my mail forwarded to the American Express office there, including my subsistence checks on the GI Bill. I figured if I spent a couple of months in Paris before coming home, who’s going to check that these checks were cashed in Paris? When I came home, I started working at the Richard Hyland Agency and wrote a script called The House in the Sea. It was the first script I’d ever written. And when I sold it, I offered to go along for nothing if I could get a credit as an associate producer. Even then, I understood that credits were important. They changed the title to Highway Dragnet because Dragnet was a popular TV series at the time. I took the $4,500 I made from that sale and borrowed money from some of my more successful college classmates and made Monster from the Ocean Floor—a monster film about a mutation created from atomic explosions."

U.S. poster for The Gunfighter (1950), directed by Henry King. Corman was working as a young story analyst at 20th Century Fox when he read and recommended a Western script called The Big Gun, which later became The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck. Someone else got the credit for his keen eye. The snub stung and helped push Corman to go into business for himself.

JONATHAN HAZE (actor in more than a dozen Corman films, including The Little Shop of Horrors): "I was working in a gasoline station on Santa Monica Boulevard called Tide Oil, and a little funny guy kept coming in named Wyott Ordung. He kept telling me he was a writer and was going to direct a movie and he would put me in the movie. One night he came in and said, ‘Listen, I want you to go see Roger Corman. He’s doing this movie called Monster from the Ocean Floor, and there are some parts in it you might be able to get.’ So I went to see Roger, and he hired me to play a Mexican deep-sea diver. It was low-budget but a lot of fun. I was happy to be working. I got fired from the gas station because I grew a mustache for Monster from the Ocean Floor, and the owner of the gas station came in one night and saw the mustache and said, ‘What’s that thing on your face?’ I told him I was growing it for a movie. And he said, ‘Either the mustache goes or you go.’ So I went."

U.S. poster for Highway Dragnet (1954), directed by Nathan Juran. Hugely ambitious and convinced that he could do better than the scripts that were landing on his desk at the Richard Hyland Agency, Corman penned a thriller called The House in the Sea. He was paid $4,500, and it was retitled Highway Dragnet to cash in on the popular Jack Webb TV show.

Lobby card for Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), directed by Wyott Ordung. Corman hit up a few of his former Stanford classmates to help bankroll this low-budget quickie (it was shot in Malibu in six days) that toyed with Atomic Age anxieties. Their investments paid off: The film grossed five times its budget. Still, the most memorable thing about the film remains its title.

U.S. poster for The Fast and the Furious (1955), directed by John Ireland and Edward Sampson. The high-speed hostage thriller (produced by Corman) got the attention of American International Pictures—the fledgling independent exploitation studio that would become Corman’s on-and-off backer for more than a decade. Proving that even early on he knew how to find actors on the cheap, Corman cast himself as a state trooper. Four and a half decades later, the title would be recycled for a big-budget franchise starring Vin Diesel.

GENE CORMAN: "Roger drove the truck and did almost everything on Monster from the Ocean Floor. As an agent, I represented the film, and I sold it to Bob Lippert, who had an independent distribution company at the time. I think I sold it for something like $150,000, and the picture cost maybe $30,000. Roger did very well, and that began his run as an independent producer."

ROGER CORMAN: "Next, I made The Fast and the Furious—a little film starring John Ireland as a wrongly accused man who breaks out of jail and heads to Mexico with a female hostage in a sports car. I had offers from a number of smaller studios because it was a good little picture. But I could see the trap for an independent low-budget producer like myself. If you made a film and you didn’t have much money, you had to wait for the film to be released and earn its money back before you could make the next film. I had offers from Republic and Universal to distribute my films, but Jim Nicholson

Reviews for Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses

[seschend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars and an eye-opening read in terms of how many folks now respected in Hollywood got their starts with Corman, whom Hollywood has rarely respected (save in a bottom line sense).