Episode 776 - Roger Corman / G.J. Echternkamp
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:Whichever one you choose to be.
Marc:I am Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Thank you for being here.
Marc:Pretty big show today in terms of a lot of stuff.
Marc:My guest today is Roger Corman.
Marc:the filmmaker and film producer and mythic being in the history of motion pictures, primarily known for his incredibly low budgets, his B movies, his horror movies, his incredibly quick shooting schedule, but also for...
Marc:employing a great many of the you know prominent people in show business both as actors and directors Ron Howard Jack Nicholson Francis Ford Coppola Peter Bogdanovich people I've had on the show he's just Jonathan Demme Joe Dante Vincent Price I threw him on at the end but anyways Roger Corman has this film coming out it is
Marc:death race 2050 uh it's going to be available on dvd blu-ray and on demand on january 17th but i just wanted the opportunity uh to that i because i got it to to talk to this guy because so many of my guests have talked about him so that's coming up but we also have some support for that
Marc:a little support act uh a dude that i worked with gj ectern camp um he's a director he directed death race 2050 but i also have a relationship with him i'll explain it all to you in a second all right i just i'm just out of the gate i just want you to know there's a a nice loaded show ahead with a couple of people about a specific thing and also some clips from previous guests talking about the guests we have today exciting big show
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Big production.
Marc:And we did it under budget and very quickly.
Marc:Well, not that quickly.
Marc:Probably a little longer than we usually take.
Marc:But that aside, what's coming up on the show aside, how's everyone doing?
Marc:Are y'all right?
Marc:It was a very powerful farewell speech by our president, and then a very chaotic and disconcerting press conference by our incoming president.
Marc:And I don't feel great.
Marc:I feel the sort of...
Marc:irritating darkness of uh unpredictability persists waivers comes and goes i'm not i'm not feeling a lot of hope i would say i'm probably feeling the exact opposite of hope but but again i am uh you know living my life and trying to do what i can to uh to talk to people and to to listen to people and it's just what i do uh and i and i got a i got an email and
Marc:From someone that made me feel better for a few reasons, because sometimes, you know, I know that a lot of people enjoy this show.
Marc:I know I have a lot of types of people listening to show a lot of ages of people, a lot of people from different political points of view.
Marc:I know that.
Marc:And I know what I'm trying to do here as a human show.
Marc:I know that politics comes into it sometimes.
Marc:Obviously, I got to talk about how I feel at the time.
Marc:I'm in and out of complete terror.
Marc:And fear.
Marc:But that's where I'm at now.
Marc:So like the other day, like I do things like I got to go to the dentist.
Marc:So I went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned.
Marc:And there's part of me now that thinks like, what's the point?
Marc:What's the point of you're cleaning your teeth?
Marc:And I got this email, WTF, this subject line, WTF makes for great high school lesson.
Marc:Dear Mark Maron, I've been a fan of yours for quite some time.
Marc:I've read your book, Attempting Normal.
Marc:I watch your show on IFC.
Marc:Oh, can I remind people or announce it for the first time?
Marc:My show, Maron on IFC season four will be on Netflix starting January 13th.
Marc:That's this Friday.
Marc:Oh, fucking thank God I remembered that.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:That's just another reason I want to thank this fellow Matthew for writing this letter.
Marc:Reminded me tomorrow, Friday, Marin on IFC season four, finally on Netflix.
Marc:The reason I'm writing you this letter is because you've helped me in more ways than one.
Marc:I'm a high school English teacher and I'm trying to teach my students how to use persuasion in their writing through rhetorical appeals.
Marc:Now, this is an aside.
Marc:This is Mark talking.
Marc:I don't even know what that means.
Marc:Believe it or not, your podcast became a huge help to me.
Marc:I played the episode of WTF where you interview President Obama for my students and had them identify questions and answers and explain whether they used pathos, ethos, or logos.
Marc:Again, I'm interjecting here.
Marc:I would not be able to identify any of those.
Marc:But look, it's not on me how I'm interpreted.
Okay.
Marc:Back to the letter.
Marc:Your amazing interview skills, whether you realize it or not, helped me show my students how important it is to appeal to someone's emotions when speaking and writing.
Marc:That can go either way.
Marc:Although many of my students didn't know who you were when I told them you interviewed famous people in the comfort of your own garage, they realized how down to earth you might be and were extremely engaged.
Marc:You may not see this as a major success, but unless you've ever taught high school, you probably don't realize that getting a teenager interested in anything other than Snapchat is no easy task.
Marc:Thanks to you, Mark, my students will be able to write more persuasively through the art of rhetoric than ever before."
Marc:That just doesn't ring as a good thing to me, but I'm glad I helped the kids somehow.
Marc:I'm going to give them an assignment to write their own letters to either President Obama or President-elect Donald Trump.
Marc:Not only have you helped give these kids confidence to use pathos and vigor in their writing, but you've evened the playing field in a way.
Marc:If the leader of the free world is willing to go to a man's garage for an interview, the average citizen could certainly get a letter answered.
Marc:The WTF podcast has humanized so many people who we often put on pedestals, rock stars, movie stars, even the president of the United States.
Marc:Thank you for giving young people a clear view of the top and how it might not actually be that hard to reach.
Marc:Thanks for everything, Matt.
Marc:That was nice.
Marc:A lot of people use the podcast for sermons, teaching.
Marc:Look, I am glad to know that it can be used in proactive ways and that it is of comfort to you.
Marc:I am happy to know that.
Marc:As a matter of fact, it's one of the few things that I'm genuinely in my soul happy about.
Marc:And I had no idea that it would transpire.
Marc:If you want to listen,
Marc:to that podcast with president obama i can still say that for another week or so um it's always available it's not behind a paywall it's free it's right there at the front of wtfpod.com and that might be a little painful for you now it might be something you want to be nostalgic about or check in with but it's there for free forever or as long as everything lasts
Marc:See, why'd I have to?
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It's going to be okay.
Marc:So let me explain this.
Marc:I talked to you a little bit at the beginning about Roger Corman's history with young filmmakers.
Marc:And, you know, he really is credited by a lot of great people in this industry as being the one that gave them amazing opportunities.
Marc:Bogdanovich, Coppola, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron.
Marc:And, you know, as I said before, we've had guys on the show talk about what it was like to get their shot.
Marc:Their first shot at filmmaking with Roger Bogdanovich talked about it.
Marc:And so did Ron Howard and Joe Dante, who actually have similar stories.
Marc:And I'm going to going to give you a little bit of those stories.
Marc:Now, this is Ron Howard from episode 754 of WTF and Joe Dante from episode 720.
Marc:And these are these two guys, obviously huge directors talking about their experiences with Roger Corman.
Guest:I did Eat My Dust at the same time I was doing Happy Days and The Shootist.
Guest:So I kind of just wedged it in there.
Guest:On the weekends, I'd go be in this, out to, you know, the Saga Speedway or something and be in this crazy movie.
Guest:So Eat My Dust worked.
Guest:And he said, okay, let's develop a script.
Guest:I went in and pitched all kinds of arty ideas and a sci-fi thing.
Guest:And he said...
Guest:Ron, those are very interesting ideas, and I really enjoy having an actor tell me the stories.
Guest:However, when we were testing titles for Eat My Dust, there was a title that came in a very close second, Grand Theft Auto.
Guest:If you can fashion a car crash comedy, starring yourself, of course, that we can...
Guest:correctly entitled Grand Theft Auto, I'd probably make that picture.
Guest:My dad and I had an outline like 24 hours later.
Guest:We had a script a week later.
Guest:It was the fastest green light I've gotten in my entire career.
Guest:I learned so much.
Guest:You did, because you directed it.
Guest:Well, I directed it, and he was a great teacher.
Guest:How so?
Guest:Well, first, a lot of mechanical things about just managing your day.
Guest:He also forced the young directors to diagram, shot list, and really thoroughly prep.
Guest:So that was all really important.
Guest:To save money.
Guest:Yeah, to save money, to be efficient.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, you know, I'll be there the first day, and if you stay on schedule, that's the only time you'll see me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But if you're struggling, you'll see a hell of a lot of me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He also told me another story.
Guest:We were doing this car crash.
Guest:it wasn't a story it was a it was a an edict we're doing the this finale uh dem uh demolition derby uh scene in at the saga speedway and it's supposed to be this big riot and this kind of mad mad world kind of crazy thing and i'm only allowed 47 extras and i'm kept saying god i just don't know how to i can i can put them in a pie shape and try to stretch out the frame but i don't know you know and they just kept saying go in and ask roger
Guest:Go in and ask Roger, you can get more.
Guest:So I went in and I said, Roger, 100 would be helpful.
Guest:75 would even work.
Guest:But 47, I don't know how to make this big.
Guest:I kept arguing with him, arguing.
Guest:Because the movie was going pretty well.
Guest:And finally he put his hand on my shoulder and smiled.
Guest:He's a tall guy.
Guest:And he said, Ron, let me explain this to you.
Guest:If you do a good job for me on the rest of this picture, you'll never have to work for me again.
Guest:But you've only got 47 extras.
Guest:And I never did work for Roger again, but I gave him a cameo in Apollo 13 later, which is a lot of his directors like Jonathan Demme and others put him in the movie.
Guest:When you start working for this man who has had such a profound influence on so many filmmakers.
Guest:No, on me.
Guest:I was probably the biggest fan.
Guest:John and I were probably the biggest fans that Roger ever had.
Guest:So you knew his movies?
Guest:Oh, we knew his movies, yeah.
Guest:You liked that world of movies?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:He made those Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price, and he made The Wild Angels, he made The Trip.
Guest:I mean, these were movies that were au courant at the time.
Guest:The rubric at New World was that if you made a picture that wasn't terrible, you were probably worth looking at.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Because it was generally expected... By the big business.
Guest:Yeah, expected the movies wouldn't be any good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so if somebody showed any glimmer of talent, and they knew that you could make it cheaply because you had to already...
Guest:So they would get interested.
Guest:And Roger knew that.
Guest:And Roger knew that.
Guest:And Roger would say, you know, if you make two pictures for me and they're successful, you never have to work for me again.
Guest:Which he said to Ron Howard, I think, when he was making Grand Theft Auto.
Marc:Corman is a profound presence and impact on people's lives and careers.
Marc:in a very specific way.
Marc:So now I want to, you know, I want you to hear this conversation I had with G.J.
Marc:Echternkamp, who is a guy I know because he directed Frank and Cindy.
Marc:He cast me as his real father, who has since passed, in the movie Frank and Cindy with Oliver Platt and Rene Russo, which was a fictionalized version of a documentary he got sort of famous for.
Marc:So he, you know, out of nowhere, he found out that I was...
Marc:interviewing roger because his mother works for roger now and he told me directed death race 2050 so i said well come over he lives down the street so we talked about it and this was it's interesting that his experience working with roger corman is not unlike any director's experience who started with roger corman at any period in history had uh working for roger corman so this is me
Marc:And G.J.
Marc:Echternkamp talking about working with Roger Corman on the new film Death Race 2050.
Guest:So G.J.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:You and I go back because you directed me in a movie.
Marc:You cast me in the film Frank and Cindy based on the documentary that you made called Frank and Cindy about your mom and your stepdad-ish.
Guest:Were they married?
Guest:I have no idea.
Guest:They say they were, but I don't really believe them.
Marc:And I played your real dad, this desert rat who lived in a trailer.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And I didn't have you on at that time because I didn't know what the hell it was going to be like.
Marc:And you had no idea whether it was going to be released.
Marc:There was a lot of ifs and maybes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I ended up watching it and I talked about it on the show.
Marc:I liked the movie and I liked the doc, but I thought the movie was good.
Marc:And I ran into Renee Russo recently and she had a good time doing it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And that was your first feature, right?
Marc:sort of i actually did a movie a feature before that for roger corman actually so okay so death race 2050 yes is your second is your third feature film yeah and your second for roger corman correct going to be talking to later yeah uh so what was the first roger corman film you did
Guest:Jesus.
Guest:Well, so my mom, from Frank and Cindy, Cindy, if anyone who's seen the movie, she's got this massive feeling of guilt because she feels like she failed me as a mother because she wasn't there for me.
Guest:So she kept saying, I'm going to hook you up.
Guest:I'm going to help you out.
Guest:I'm going to get a job.
Guest:I'm going to work for a producer.
Guest:And you'll see.
Guest:You'll see.
Guest:And at the time, I was like, Mom, chill.
Guest:I'm good.
Guest:I'm fine.
Guest:I'm doing it on my own.
Guest:You don't have to put this pressure on yourself.
Guest:But so she calls me one day and she's like, I got this job working at this company called New Horizons.
Guest:And I'm like, I never heard of him.
Guest:And you know, in my mind, it's like, okay, so she's answering phones at some production company.
Guest:They're not going to hire her kid to make a film like bananas.
Guest:So then she calls me like a month later and she's like, I don't know this guy I'm working for.
Guest:His name is Roger Corman.
Guest:I think he's a legend.
Guest:You ever hear of him?
Guest:And I was like, wait, you actually got a job working for the one guy that would hire someone off the streets to make a movie.
Guest:Like Cindy, you did it.
Guest:So she laid low for a couple years, you know, and tried to build like a, you know, tried to gain trust.
Guest:And that sort of folded me into the conversation.
Guest:Well, you know, my son's a filmmaker, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:So he threw me this project out of nowhere.
Guest:The first one.
Guest:The first one.
Guest:He was like, I made 12 Vietnam action movies in the late 80s.
Guest:And we all shot them in the Philippines, and this was back when straight-to-DVD war movies were still a thing.
Guest:I don't know if it was coming off the hills of Platoon or whatever, but they would make these movies, and they had Jan Michael Vinson in them, and the guy who played the bad guy from Karate Kid.
Guest:It was these kind of terrible movies.
Guest:And in each one, they would recycle the same action from the previous one, so they would always blow up the same train.
Guest:They'd always blow up the same helicopter.
Guest:They'd just cut, you know, you'd have your new hero, he'd shoot, and then, you know, you'd cut to the same shot of the helicopter.
Marc:Now, but Roger Corman is legendary in that he's made these sort of B to C level movies for decades.
Marc:I mean, since like the late 60s, I think, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, if not earlier.
Guest:50s probably.
Guest:Probably, I think.
Marc:And he, I mean, I guess the legend is, is that so many people started or at least worked with him, both actors and directors.
Guest:Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard.
Guest:They all started.
Guest:Joe Dante.
Guest:Joe Dante.
Guest:I think Jonathan Demme.
Guest:Jonathan Demme, that's right.
Guest:He did Caged Heat.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:Like there was it was sort of like when I talked to Ron Howard and you talked to Joe Dante, it was sort of this hands on strange extension of film school where you're afforded the opportunity to do the best you can with what Roger offers you, which was the least amount of money humanly possible.
Guest:So to finish the story, basically, he said, can you shoot something in 10 days, new footage, and recycle all of the best action moments from these films I made in the 80s and intercut them?
Guest:And so I was like, that sounds awful.
Guest:I'd love to try it.
Guest:What was your experience with him?
Guest:That time, so that time it was awesome because I think it was such a crazy idea.
Guest:And I think he didn't really have much faith in it.
Guest:He gave me like a hundred grand and he set me out and was like, go do this thing.
Guest:And then I didn't hear from him.
Guest:Like he just let me go shoot it.
Guest:I spent all this time intercutting all these action scenes.
Guest:My mom submits it to Sundance.
Guest:I would never have submitted this to Sundance.
Guest:Thanks, mom.
Guest:It gets in.
Guest:It gets in.
Guest:It's the first Corman movie to ever go to Sundance.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because it was so crazy.
Guest:It was literally almost a tribute to his style of filmmaking.
Marc:Did it hold together?
Marc:How did you do it?
Marc:How did you approach it?
Marc:What was the new footage?
Guest:The new footage, so I came up with the idea in order to recycle the most amount of footage that they were in a video game.
Guest:From Vietnam era.
Guest:They were in a Call of Duty style video game.
Guest:So they could die and come back and I could still use even the same clips I had already used.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That was the idea.
Guest:That was the device.
Guest:That was the device.
Guest:They were stuck in a video game?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was sci-fi?
Guest:Yeah, they were like self-aware characters in a video game who are going through.
Guest:So they kind of start off real gung-ho and then they start to realize like, what?
Guest:why do we keep shooting the same guy like what's the meaning of this oh so it's sort of a comedy a satire yeah it's like a satire but he didn't really know that because see the thing about roger is he doesn't really make satire he doesn't intend his movies to be tongue-in-cheek yeah you know he thought it was going to be a straightforward gung-ho action film and he pretty much i don't think he ever watched it you know i came and told him it was sundance he was like cool great you know will i make a big sale uh-huh
Guest:So we go and I get slaughtered.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They, I don't think the whole point was he didn't want to tell anyone it was stock footage because he wanted it to sell for a ton of money.
Guest:So I had to like pretend it was this legitimate film the whole time.
Guest:All of the video game nerds go to see it and they're like, this movie is fucking terrible.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, what the hell is wrong with this director?
Guest:And it wasn't until after the fact that I could be like, well, you know, it was stock footage.
Guest:He wanted everyone to think it was a hard-hitting, action-packed, million-dollar film and try to sell it for as much money as possible.
Guest:What was it called?
Guest:Virtually Heroes.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So the reviews were terrible.
Guest:I went to Sundance.
Guest:I was so excited.
Guest:And then I left with my tail between my legs.
Guest:I'm like, I'm an awful filmmaker.
Guest:But they let it in.
Guest:Why'd they let it in?
Guest:Because it was stock footage.
Guest:And it was a funny idea.
Guest:Conceptually, I think it was a really cool idea.
Guest:So you think that the board at Sundance was in on it.
Guest:But the people, the bloggers were not.
Marc:And what was the response of Roger after the fact?
Guest:He wanted a ton of money up front, and all the deals that they were offering him at Sundance were all sort of back-end Netflix, Amazon.
Guest:And I think for him, he was just like, ah, that was a disappointment.
Guest:I didn't make any money off of that.
Guest:He didn't sell it.
Guest:It's just sitting on a shelf somewhere.
Guest:So what was your sense of him as I head into this conversation with him?
Guest:So he just... He doesn't care.
Guest:He just...
Guest:Like what was your sense of him that he just wants to make money?
Guest:No, he's a very interesting guy.
Marc:He must be self-aware of the fact of who he is.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So when he talks about his OVRA, and you'll see this, he's very humble about it.
Guest:He'll be like, eh, I don't know.
Guest:Maybe I've made one or two good films.
Guest:I guess those Edgar Allan Poe ones are all right.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I'm not like super proud of it, the stuff I've made.
Guest:But he didn't direct any?
Guest:No, he directed a lot of movies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Back in the day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He hasn't in a long time.
Guest:But his kind of thing, when you see Roger get excited, so this is like how he makes a film or how he's been doing it, I think, lately.
Guest:I'm not sure.
Guest:I can't speak to the past.
Guest:But he would, you know, I would be in his office all the time and he'd kind of come, he'd bring you in there and be like, it turns out there's a tank, an abandoned tank,
Guest:that is sitting in a field.
Guest:Can you write an entire script around a tank that doesn't move?
Guest:And then he's jazzed because he's like, I've got an opportunity to get high production value by spending the least amount of money.
Guest:And that's when he gets the most excited.
Guest:In his mind, he found a tank somewhere.
Guest:He found a tank.
Guest:He found an abandoned amusement park.
Guest:He's got, you know, stock footage he can use.
Guest:He found a school in Nevada, a film school where the entire class, the film class would work for free and be the crew.
Guest:It's like, for him, it's just, I think it's a matter of the opportunity to do something bigger for less money.
Guest:And then he's jazzed.
Guest:Like when they, when Sundance was, you know, toasting him and doing the panel, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:whatever i don't care really where's the free food yeah right it isn't to say that i don't think he cares about cinema i think he does but i i think for him the most exciting thing is seeing how much he can get for for little i think that's what appeals to him the most you know so now you get brought in now so they call me up they call me up and this is a big franchise for corman the death race franchise yeah so they call me up um i remember death race 2000
Guest:Yeah, actually, I rather like it.
Marc:David Carradine, right?
Guest:David Carradine.
Guest:And it wasn't supposed to be a comedy.
Guest:David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone were in it.
Guest:And originally, it was supposed to be a serious racing film because, again, that's what Roger does.
Guest:Yeah, serious film.
Guest:Serious film.
Guest:Well, serious in the sense of action, titties, whatever.
Guest:But he didn't want to- Raw.
Guest:Raw.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But Paul Bartel, the director, is the one who was... Isn't he famous now?
Guest:Bartel?
Guest:He's dead.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But didn't he do Eating Raoul?
Guest:Eating Raoul, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So, he was the one trying to make it into comedy.
Guest:Apparently, they fought and fought and fought.
Guest:About Death Race.
Guest:About Death Race 2000 because Roger didn't want it to be a comedy.
Guest:And, you know, I think he was like, you know, I don't do tongue-in-cheek.
Guest:When you try to do tongue-in-cheek on purpose, a la Sharknado, it sucks.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He didn't want to do that.
Guest:But the good thing was the film managed, I think, to be a good satire that worked.
Guest:And the film became probably Roger's most famous and most beloved projects.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I think after the fact, he came around to appreciating it.
Guest:But all the stories I've heard, when he went into it, he did not want it to be a comedy and was not happy with the results.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But Paul knew it all the time.
Guest:Yeah, but Paul knew what he was doing.
Guest:But Roger was different with this project.
Guest:With Death Race 2000, this was a legacy thing for him.
Guest:He had sold the rights of Death Race to Universal.
Guest:They made the Jason Statham remake in the 2000s, which were back to actually Roger's original vision.
Guest:They were like hardcore, serious action movies.
Guest:And I don't know who approached who.
Guest:It was something like somebody at Universal or Roger was like, Mad Max Hunger Games.
Guest:death race yeah right they made that connection and this was his opportunity to produce his own death race movie in the roger corman style and so he was very hands-on in the beginning like i was talking to him every single day we were going over this outline i he had me write this outline that was supposed to be four pages so many times it ended up being like 25 pages did he make money for the for the the big remakes yeah
Guest:okay yeah he did he's got a lot of properties that he franchises off for these remakes yeah even though he might not direct them or even produce them he still gets money he owns them he owns the rights to yeah all right so you're working with roger on the script he has you do outlines he had me do and he had all these ideas he was like one of the characters should be a terrorist called tammy tammy the terrorist there should be a robotic car and the driver of the car should have sex with the car yeah yeah
Guest:So he had all these kind of ideas he wanted me to incorporate.
Guest:And so I took as many of the ideas as he could.
Guest:And my friend and I wrote the script for it.
Guest:And he was pretty hands on during the casting process.
Marc:Did he like the script?
Guest:I think we took it too far.
Guest:Like in the beginning, there was like the idea that I had had, which was this idea, kind of the basic central premise for me of the script was this idea that jobs aren't going to exist anymore at some point.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I had this idea that, you know, like wealthy people used humans for sort of like as human furniture.
Guest:And that was like the best you could kind of job you could get.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's like in the chairman's palace, who was basically Donald Trump.
Guest:And two years ago when we wrote it, we never thought he'd become president.
Guest:So it seemed really funny at the time.
Guest:With McDowell.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Malcolm McDowell, like a great actor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the idea was in the chairman's office, the chairman of United Corporations of America, there would be all these sort of what I called secret servant agents.
Guest:And they would be doing these menial tasks.
Guest:Yeah, I saw that.
Guest:You know, like, it's a living, you know.
Guest:Toothbrushing the bottom of his shoe.
Guest:Toothbrushing the bottom of his shoe.
Guest:And then I was going to have him sitting on a throne of naked women, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was trying to go as far as I could, but he called me and he was like, the throne of naked women is not good.
Guest:I was like, okay, I'll dial it back.
Guest:But the funny thing is, is like right out of the gate, I've watched a bit of the movie.
Guest:You know, it plays as a satire.
Marc:There's no way, especially now.
Marc:And it seemed like it was sort of a hybrid of this kind of action, futuristic movie and idiocracy.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It's definitely a satire.
Guest:I don't want it to be like, here's the thing.
Guest:I mean, there's so many things I could say about this, but- Go ahead.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, first of all, Universal is the one that ultimately commissioned this, right?
Guest:And they wanted, because they have both franchises are running.
Guest:There's the Death Race franchise.
Guest:The Statham one is still going.
Guest:They're making another one.
Guest:It's called Death Race 4, and it's coming out, I think, sometime this year.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they wanted to be very clear that they were differentiating the comedy satire version from their non-comedy, more expensive, better action version.
Guest:So the fight kind of happened all over again, where Roger again was kind of pushing to really market the film in his traditional way as this blowout, Mad Max, blockbuster action film.
Guest:So he cut this trailer, and it was like all explosions.
Guest:And he sent it to Universal, and they're like, no, no, no, we want to make people aware this is a comedy.
Guest:Because, I mean, hell, if you go into it and you don't know it's a comedy, you're going to think it's the worst action movie you've ever seen.
Guest:It's going to be virtually heroes all over again for me.
Guest:You know, I don't want that.
Guest:So Roger wanted to shoot in Lima.
Guest:And I could not think of a worse place to shoot a racing movie on Earth.
Guest:Like, I mean.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Why do you want to shoot there?
Guest:I think originally he planned on shooting in Ireland.
Guest:There was a studio in Ireland, but then it was winter and he wanted to shoot right away and they couldn't shoot in the snow.
Guest:And then his friend, who was a producer in Lima, who happened to be the director of Anaconda, a guy named Lucho,
Guest:It's like, shoot it in Lima.
Guest:You know, we got it all here.
Guest:Lima's the shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the problem is, is that you can't close the streets down.
Guest:Like, it's this, you know, if you've been to Peru, it's like just these endless sort of shanty towns.
Guest:And I mean, it's like there's people everywhere.
Guest:There's building.
Guest:I mean, there's an old part that's nicer.
Guest:But most of it's sort of like this very chaotic environment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and there's no system in place where you can say, everyone get off the streets.
Guest:The cops come.
Guest:They run on their motorcycles.
Guest:Everyone clears out.
Guest:You could not shoot a scene in this movie without there being at least 30 people standing on the sidewalk.
Guest:And the whole point of this movie is that you're supposed to be hitting pedestrians for points.
Guest:So there can't be people around because otherwise you'd be hitting them.
Guest:So ultimately, like for every time they drove the cars, there was like maybe a split second where you didn't see people standing in the background.
Guest:And so I had to edit all of these racing scenes out of these split seconds where it looked like they were on empty streets, you know?
Guest:Corman loves a challenge.
Guest:And the cars were made out of styrofoam that was pasted onto old Volkswagen bodies.
Guest:So they stripped down these Volkswagens and they put like, imagine like the styrofoam that comes like in an Amazon package or something.
Guest:And they piled up the styrofoam and they shaved it down and then coated it in plexiglass.
Guest:So the cars basically were constantly falling apart.
Guest:You couldn't really run them over 20 miles an hour because as soon as they hit the ground, like the entire front end would just pop off.
Yeah.
Guest:So in a lot of ways, the action was very much like Virtually Heroes because it was like I was almost as if it was editing it like it was stock footage.
Guest:You know, I was like, here's the footage.
Guest:How do I tell the story out of it?
Guest:Rather than, you know, here's the story.
Guest:Let's go shoot it.
Guest:And so it was like one of the cars exploded at one point.
Guest:We were like two weeks into shooting and one of them caught on fire and just like burnt to a crisp within seconds.
Guest:And then I had to rewrite the whole script to not have the car anymore.
Guest:But now you have the benefit of CGI, right?
Guest:Yeah, but they hadn't budgeted for CGI.
Guest:You know, Roger didn't really see the need for it because he thought that we were going to go down there and have this amazing pulse pounding.
Marc:But just for...
Marc:For crowd shots, for the arena shots.
Guest:Yeah, so like on the last day, and this was kind of sad, Malcolm McDowell comes out for his big final scene, and he's the president, he's the chairman, he's standing on the podium, and they've built these huge rafters on each side, and they're setting up, setting up, setting up.
Guest:The day's getting longer and longer and longer.
Guest:Malcolm's sitting in his car with the air conditioning on because it's like 10,000 degrees.
Guest:Finally, we bring him out there, and they send down the extras, and no joke, there was 15 people.
Guest:There was like these humongous bleachers and just, I mean, a person like every 20 feet sitting from the other person.
Guest:I was like, where is the rest of the people?
Guest:And they're like, I don't know.
Guest:They didn't show up.
Guest:And so he's like, this is my big scene.
Guest:I'm like, look, I don't know.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:It wasn't me.
Guest:I don't know what happened.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And then we were able to painstakingly create a crowd in there, you know, after the fact.
Guest:I mean, Roger was pissed we had to spend more money.
Guest:But like, yeah, so there were ways we could trick the camera.
Guest:There was a few times we were able to create a CGI car scene.
Guest:We could afford to do it, like, twice, so we did it, like, twice.
Guest:Well, it definitely feels raw, but it also has that weird feeling of those 70s movies where, you know, you don't really know most of the actors, and they're clearly, you know, people that want to be acting, and some of them are better than others, but they all hold their own.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And then you got Malcolm, who I have to assume, I don't know, but, you know, what was his big movie?
Marc:Not Clockwork Orange, Lucky Man, is it Lucky?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And he's been in other stuff since.
Marc:He was a very recognizable, very efficient and good actor, can play a heavy, can play a lot of different things.
Marc:I have to assume that working with him in this context is not his brightest hour.
Guest:no he was on vacation oh he was you know it was like yeah i mean he thought a lot of heavy lifting no he was like he called me up you know and we talked about he's like this is fun this is you know big stupid bad guy role you know how'd you get him uh i think they sent they they were trying to find people to play this role but i think the script was like too fucked up and no one wanted to touch it yeah but i think it actually appealed to him yeah you know caligula yeah yeah
Guest:And he calls me up and he's like, yeah, this is just, you know, this is fun.
Guest:Chew the scenery, go to Lima, stay in a nice hotel, check out the beach, hang out.
Guest:You know, I think for him, I think he doesn't need to prove anything to anybody that he's a good actor.
Guest:So he doesn't mind doing the occasional bit of garbage if it's like a fun experience.
Guest:And that was the vibe I got from him.
Guest:I've met a lot of famous people.
Guest:And he didn't have that weird, like, I'm going to be polite, but keep you at a distance thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was inviting everybody to have drinks at his place every night.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you had a good time.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, he did.
Guest:And I was always apologizing for how shitty everything was.
Guest:But I'm really interested to see what happens because here's the thing.
Guest:I guess, and this is the thing that's so interesting to me about this movie.
Guest:It's like there are movies now that are low budget and good.
Guest:You can make a good low budget movie with the technology that exists.
Marc:How much money do you have?
Guest:I have no idea.
Guest:Whatever Roger says he spent, he probably spent less.
Guest:We're in Lima, so I don't know the value of anything down there.
Guest:But you knew when you were going over, you knew that there was a limit.
Guest:Well, I knew that Universal was going to buy the film from him for $2 million.
Guest:So anything he didn't spend, he gets to keep.
Guest:So does he spend $2 million?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:So who knows how much?
Guest:If you ask him, he'll be like, oh, I spent $5 million on it.
Guest:So Universal is $2 million all in.
Guest:All in, and then whatever he saves is his own money, right?
Guest:But the thing is, you can make a good horror movie on a low budget.
Guest:You can make a good drama on a low budget.
Guest:You can't really make a good action movie on a low budget.
Guest:So what those movies have become have become these movies like Sharknado, where it's just...
Guest:intentionally awful and the only reason why people watch it is because the acting's bad, the writing's bad, the effects are bad.
Guest:There isn't really that middle ground anymore like the 70s cult movies where there's no money but the people are sincerely trying the best they can.
Guest:They're trying to write good dialogue.
Guest:They're trying to hire good actors.
Guest:I went into it and I was like I'm not going to hire bad actors that we're going to laugh at.
Guest:I'm going to try to hire actors that are actually good.
Guest:And so it's like, I don't know if this movie has a place in this world anymore.
Guest:Like, I don't know if it makes sense anymore to make a try to do a sincere low budget action movie.
Guest:I guess you're going to find out.
Guest:I'm going to find out.
Guest:And I can tell you right now, it's split.
Guest:It's like half the people are like, what is this piece of shit?
Guest:Worst movie I've ever seen.
Guest:And the other are like, well, excuse me, you don't understand.
Marc:It's based on Death Race 2000, which is, you know, so it's already kind of bad.
Marc:In a good way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What did you take away from the experience?
Guest:I mean, you took the opportunity.
Guest:You knew what you were getting into to some degree.
Guest:I did know.
Guest:Yeah, I did know.
Guest:What did you take away?
Marc:I mean, did you build some new muscles, get some new tools for operating in adverse situations that weren't emotional like your family?
Guest:I definitely had to solve a lot of problems very quickly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I guess, you know, it was the first time I've ever directed anything like action, you know.
Guest:So it was action-like, and there were some action moments that were cool.
Guest:They did blow a lot of shit up.
Guest:In Peru, they didn't have a lot of gore, but they could blow anything up at any time.
Guest:You know, right now, Universal wants me to do another movie, another straight-to-video movie, and this is one that's all about vehicular manslaughter again.
Guest:And it's kind of a tough call for me because it's like I did Frank and Cindy, which was sort of a real film with real actors, you know, like pretty serious, straightforward kind of story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I did Death Race.
Guest:And now it's like, do I go down this rabbit hole of doing these like stupid, like B movies that are fun?
Guest:Or do I hold out to do something that's more artistically interesting to me?
Guest:I don't think I can afford to hold out for the artistically interesting thing.
Guest:Well, once you do something that you could get paid for.
Guest:They'll pay me, it's just not a lot.
Guest:What, Universal?
Guest:Yeah, it's not a lot.
Guest:It's not living the dream.
Guest:If I'm going to sell out, I'd rather be like selling out.
Marc:Yeah, but are you really selling out?
Guest:No, no, it's just... It seems like with directing especially that, you know, if you do eventually do something good, they forgive your training.
Guest:Yeah, but I've also heard that if you do tons of straight-to-video stuff, you're seen as like a straight-to-video guy.
Guest:I know I'm going to take you seriously as a legitimate director.
Guest:But then again, this is the thing people don't realize.
Guest:It's like when you choose to do a movie, I'm not sitting on a fucking savings account full of money where I can sit around for seven years and wait for the perfect thing to come along.
Guest:If I direct this movie, I mean...
Guest:project do my dream project i might direct the movie because i need to feed myself and pay my rent you know and it may or may not be good i mean look i've done the roger thing twice and it's a lot of stress you get blamed for the lack of resources people don't know what goes into making a film right they don't know they assume that every decision on screen is something that you wanted to be there they don't understand how many compromises and how many things go wrong so it's like i don't know if i can keep beating myself up trying to make something as good as i can when the when the best you can accomplish is a c plus anyway you know right you can't really promote
Guest:movie by saying this is the best we can do with what we had exactly and that's i've done it twice now i'd rather just you know i'd rather feel like i'm going into something with all the resources and think about roger if he feels like you're confident he knows he's giving you too much money uh-huh you know right if you're like yeah i think it's going to be great this kid's not freaked out he's not freaked out enough what did i do wrong all right good talking to you right
Marc:Well, I tell you, talking to G.J., it's definitely a hands-on, flying by the seat of your pants, improvising type of situation when you work at the budget with the amount of time and what's allotted, what's given to you.
Marc:It's interesting he talks about these styrofoam cars because Roger, in the interview you'll hear, says something about the, what's the word I want to use?
Marc:The inventiveness.
Marc:of James Cameron when he worked for him.
Marc:But, uh, so that was me and GJ Acton camp.
Marc:All right, here we go.
Marc:We're going to go through it as best I can being familiar with his work, but not, I, you know, I, I know who Roger Corman is, but you know, the guy's done over, he's been involved with like, like 200 or more films, uh,
Marc:But I wanted to do it.
Marc:I wanted to get the overview.
Marc:I wanted to get into it.
Marc:And he's 90 years old, sharp as a tack, with an amazing memory, some good stories in here, very interesting and unique, certainly at the time he was doing an approach to filmmaking.
Marc:So this is me and Roger Corman.
Marc:So thank you for coming, Mr. Corman.
Marc:Oh, call me Roger.
Marc:Roger Corman.
Marc:Everybody knows your name.
Marc:Everybody knows who you are.
Marc:Everybody in the world knows who you are.
Marc:And I was trying to do some research on you, but we don't have time to go through every movie.
Marc:I've got all day.
Marc:I'm okay.
Marc:I think that would take probably a week.
Marc:We'd have to set up a tent.
Marc:I'd have to set up the room for you.
Marc:What sort of interests me initially was that at some point, because you didn't choose to be, it was not your goal as a young man to be a movie director initially.
Guest:Initially, right.
Guest:So you went into another profession.
Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:What happened was my father was an engineer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought I would be an engineer.
Guest:Did you know what that entailed?
Guest:Well, he was a civil engineer, so I knew what his branch of engineering entailed.
Guest:I went into electrical and industrial.
Guest:And what happened, I was writing for the Stanford Daily school I was going to.
Guest:Good school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:them and uh with a fairly good football team as a matter of fact that's what i hear that's what i hear surprisingly enough but and i found out that the film critics for the daily got free passes to the theaters in palo alto and i thought well i could be a film critic so i wrote a couple of reviews and they took me on and then i started to
Guest:really take the films more seriously.
Guest:Up until then, it was entertainment.
Marc:Well, what compelled you to do that?
Marc:I mean, seriously, in what way?
Marc:Do you remember what your first reviews were?
Guest:I remember one of the first was a Western by John Ford.
Guest:It might have been my darling Clementine.
Guest:And now that I had to write about it, I had to analyze it, I had to think about it.
Guest:And I started to realize, okay, this is a shoot-em-up Western.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But there are a number of thoughts behind this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there is what we later came to call a subtext.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:There's, I'd never heard of the word.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was a subtext there.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And also, I was aware of thinking more of the photography.
Guest:It was a time when most films were made in color, but there were still a number of black and white.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a very crisp film.
Guest:black and white shot on location.
Guest:And I think it was in his usual place, Monument Valley in Utah.
Guest:And I started to think about all of those things and I became fascinated by all the aspects of filmmaking.
Marc:Yeah, because there was a lot there.
Marc:And it was probably a lot more than or at least more exciting than electrical engineering.
Guest:It was clearly more exciting.
Guest:Also, you didn't have to solve any equations.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:But everything was hands on.
Marc:You did have to solve some equations as you grew to learn budget, length of time shooting.
Marc:You know, there were those equations.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:What you just said is right because it makes me think.
Guest:I really was solving the equation.
Marc:Of course you were.
Marc:And it seemed like that the outcome was always the shortest possible and the cheapest possible.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:But you did take a job.
Marc:Like, was there a moment where you started your job and you were like, no.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I tried to get into the motion picture business.
Guest:And at that time... As an engineer?
Guest:No, just anything.
Guest:I couldn't get a job anywhere.
Guest:And I finally thought, okay, this isn't going to work out.
Guest:I got a job at U.S.
Guest:Electrical Motors.
Guest:And I started on Monday.
Guest:And on Thursday, I went into the...
Guest:office of somebody there, and I said, this is not working out.
Guest:I have to quit.
Guest:Four days in.
Guest:Four days in.
Guest:And the guy said, Roger, this is Thursday.
Guest:Work through Friday, think about it over the weekend, and make your decision Monday.
Guest:And I said, you know, I really cannot come back tomorrow
Guest:And so I figure, okay, four years to get a degree.
Guest:I work four days.
Guest:That seems fair.
Guest:That's a reasonable equation.
Marc:It's perfect for you.
Marc:Short.
Marc:You know, you did it in four days.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You wrapped it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, but you must have like, I imagine those four days just gave you a sort of a long, like in that moment, you realize that this would be my life.
Marc:It must be one of those jobs where once you engage with it, you realize like, it's not going to get any better than this.
Marc:This is it.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I was in this kind of dirty factory and I just looked around and I thought, I was thinking just what you said.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I got to spend my life in these crummy factory and so forth.
Guest:And you probably saw the one or two old guys that look like.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:That they've been there for 40, 50 years.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No, can't do it.
Marc:And then what did you do?
Marc:You went back to school or no?
Guest:No.
Guest:No, I still wandered around trying to get something.
Guest:Up by Stanford.
Guest:No, I finally got a job as a messenger.
Guest:I would say that the entire Stanford engineering class, I was the failure of the class.
Guest:I got the worst possible job.
Marc:Well, it's good to be good at something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I knew how to ride a bike and that was my job.
Guest:I rode a bike around the lot delivering messages.
Guest:Which studio?
Guest:This was Fox.
Guest:And you grew up here in L.A.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you were familiar with it all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Actually, that may have been part of my thinking because I grew up and a lot of kids I went to school with, their parents were in films.
Guest:So maybe there was something in the unconscious somewhere.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:It was a local industry.
Marc:I mean, it is, if any, at a very basic level, it is what this town makes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And so did you know any, when you were in school, did you know any kids of big actors and directors?
Guest:No, but one executive.
Guest:I remember we were playing one day, and a bunch of us, and at that time, all the studios had back lots.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Where they had big buildings or a western set or something like that.
Guest:On a Saturday, we climbed...
Guest:the wall of the back lot at Fox, as a matter of fact.
Guest:And we're just wandering around playing.
Guest:And the cop of the security chased us.
Guest:And we got away from him.
Guest:And one of the guys, his name was Peter Frank.
Guest:Peter said, what are we doing?
Guest:My father's a vice president here.
Guest:We could just walk in.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:There must have been that moment where the cop came up and you thought, that's not a real cop.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you had sort of a fascination with it.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And you're running around the lot, you're delivering stuff.
Marc:So how do you move from that to inward into the business?
Guest:At that time, production was six days a week, and the studio offices were open five days a week.
Guest:So I volunteered to work for nothing on Saturday if I could work on a set and just sort of be a gopher on the set.
Guest:And they said yes, and that brought me attention to some people, which is actually part of my plan.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But at that time, so this was still the studio system was still in place.
Marc:They were churning out movies, some successful, some not successful, but all of them saw the screen.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So, I mean, that must have had some impact on you, you know, in terms of your output that that, you know, there were plenty of movies that were made that nobody knows about that weren't big hits.
Marc:It was the business.
Marc:And, you know, if it ran for a little while or it just everything got out and they were making hundreds of films a year.
Guest:That is one of the major changes in motion pictures.
Guest:I think of motion pictures as an art and a business.
Guest:And from the business standpoint, any picture when I started that had any minor degree of merit
Guest:got a full theatrical release.
Guest:Today, because of the $100 and $200 million pictures and one thing and another, the low-budget pictures are frozen out of distribution.
Guest:Every now and then, one does come in.
Guest:But essentially, it's DVD and then on to streaming, Netflix, whatever the multiple platforms are.
Guest:That, I think, is...
Marc:one of the worst things that has happened but it's a result it's a result of the business you just have to face it right but there are also fewer screens you know like the the the notion of going to the movies sort of started to diminish a bit years ago you know when video came out right yes so we you know and it seems like a lot of people on your side of the business started to to think in terms of well we'll we'll accommodate these new delivery systems yes exactly
Marc:So but at that time, it seemed in terms of art that, you know, the studios were not that concerned with art.
Marc:It happened occasionally.
Marc:And then I guess you get people like Thalberg, wherever he was, that started to elevate the medium.
Marc:So there was some intellectual and creative merit to some things.
Marc:And they obviously engaged a lot of smart and creative people, but they weren't in the business of making art.
Marc:It just seemed like if it happened, well, great.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I remember on one of the Poe pictures, Vincent Price and I were sitting around while they were lighting the set, and he had just done an interview.
Guest:And he had talked, and I thought what he said really described what we were doing.
Guest:He said, I...
Guest:I told the interviewer, we are craftsmen.
Guest:We are working as craftsmen.
Guest:And if occasionally the craft rises to the level of art, that's great.
Guest:But essentially, we're craftsmen.
Marc:And also entertainers.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:So you're on set as a messenger, and you're getting the hang of things.
Marc:So how do you eventually begin to get the confidence and the skill set to start making movies?
Marc:Where did that start?
Guest:They offered me a job as a story analyst, which is a fancy way of just saying reader.
Guest:Script reader.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So I was reading these scripts, and the story editor, after a couple of months, called me in,
Guest:I said, Roger, you have never given a good review to anything you've ever read.
Guest:You've knocked everything we've given you.
Guest:And I said, that's because I'm the youngest guy.
Guest:You give me all the rotten stuff.
Guest:Give me something that's decent, and I'll give it a decent review.
Marc:How did you judge, though?
Marc:It was funny that when you talked about reviewing the John Ford film, your first impulse was, well, you knew it was a shoot-em-up.
Guest:Right, yes.
Marc:Which seems to be something that you carried with you on some level.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:So when you're looking at these scripts as a young man, how were you judging them?
Guest:Was it story?
Guest:I had always been a big reader.
Guest:I studied a few classes in English in school, but it was simply the background as a reader.
Guest:I would say, I don't believe this plot.
Guest:The characters are not consistent.
Guest:Things like that.
Guest:There was just a judgment from my own reading of books.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you upset the old guys.
Marc:What are we going to do?
Marc:Did they make any of those movies that you knocked down?
Guest:No.
Guest:When I said no, they figured if this kid doesn't think it's any good, it'll go no farther.
Guest:Actually, that was part of the idea.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we use it in my little company.
Guest:We use the same thing.
Guest:Any script that comes in, somebody reads it, they have the right to turn it down cold, and nobody ever looks at it.
Guest:They then recommend it.
Guest:And actually, we're not that big.
Guest:If they recommend it, then I read it.
Guest:So I will read only the scripts or treatments or books or whatever that has been recommended by somebody on our staff.
Guest:Are they usually younger people?
Guest:Yes, they're always because we've got...
Guest:And we were a very young company.
Guest:Since I'm not young anymore, some of us have grown older.
Guest:And I make a point, really, of bringing guys and girls straight out of college because I don't reflect anymore anymore.
Guest:the youthful culture.
Guest:And I want these people to come in who do reflect that culture.
Guest:So we have sort of an age gap in the company where I and my wife who works with me and a number of other people are older.
Guest:And then we've got, for instance,
Guest:Joe Remlinger just came out of the creative writing department at UCLA.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's been writing publicity and actually cut the trailer for my new picture, Death Race 2050 for Universal.
Guest:And he cut that trailer and found music.
Guest:in a new and fast-paced way, and he was far better equipped to find the music than I was because it was contemporary music.
Guest:And trailers are very important to your business.
Guest:Yeah, because Joe Dante cut trailers for you.
Guest:Joe Dante, together with Alan Arkish, they were our two greatest trailer editors.
Guest:Joe was famous for the, you may have heard the story, Joe was famous for the exploding helicopter shot.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also for for losing the real in a manhole.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But, you know, it's interesting is that with younger people now is that, you know, you're fortunate in your your stature in the business is that I would imagine a lot of people that are interested in doing movies.
Marc:They see you as the rites of passage, that if they could just get under your tutelage for a couple of years or in the operation, they can at least put that on their resume that they were cormand, that they they they've been trained.
Marc:They've been through the system.
Guest:That actually has been heavily responsible for what success we've had.
Guest:So many young guys and girls come to us, not only from here, from around the world.
Guest:For instance, one time, I know the film school in Poland is Woj.
Guest:I visited it.
Guest:There must have been, and this is when it was under the communist regime, there must have been a note attached to a bulletin board saying, when you graduate, sneak out of the Iron Curtain and go see Roger.
Guest:We had three consecutive cameramen who had come out of the Woj region.
Guest:Film school and done exactly that.
Guest:And I think two of them became Academy Award winners.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, we I mean, we'll talk about that a little bit in terms of the people that were under your your I don't know if it's if you your mentorship, but you certainly gave them opportunities.
Guest:Yes, that was the thing was they had the ability.
Guest:I mean, it was their ability.
Guest:If they had never met me, I believe they still would have been successful.
Guest:It might have taken them a little longer.
Guest:I may have taught them a little bit, but what I really did, I gave them the opportunity.
Guest:To work under extreme circumstances.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:With little money and little time.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:An example of that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:is Jim Cameron, who when he did Titanic, it was the most expensive movie ever made.
Guest:Then he broke his own record.
Guest:I think Titanic was 100 million.
Guest:He broke his own record at 200 million.
Guest:With Avatar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But when he was designing spaceships and special effects for us, I remember there was one one picture in which I was at the our offices in Brentwood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Studio is in Venice and I would be down at Venice looking at the sets.
Guest:as they were proceeding.
Guest:And the night before we were shooting, I was going over the set of this spaceship with Jim.
Guest:And there was one wall in the spaceship that was a flat wall.
Guest:And I said, Jim, the ship looks great.
Guest:I said, but I really have always liked
Guest:what's the word, articulation of the surface.
Guest:I like to break up this wall.
Guest:Can you do anything to give us texture and make it look more technical?
Guest:He said, it'll be done when we start tomorrow morning.
Guest:Came in the next morning, the wall looked great with all kinds of protuberances and gauges and instruments.
Guest:And I said, Jim, what did you do, Jim?
Guest:He said, I went to McDonald's
Guest:And I bought a lot of cartons, hamburger cartons, one thing and another.
Guest:I glued them to the wall and then I painted them.
Guest:I spent most of the night doing this.
Guest:I painted them and drew things on them and everything.
Guest:And I said, well, it's great.
Guest:And he said, I know we're a little bit over budget.
Guest:I knew we didn't have a lot of money, but I was able to do it for $12.
Guest:And I really think the talent that he was able to do this for $12 is the same talent that makes him able to do a $200 million picture that looks like a $400 million picture.
Marc:Those are amazing numbers.
Marc:Well, that's good for him.
Marc:Good for him.
Marc:Did you tell him the 12 bucks was coming out of his pocket?
Guest:No, I thought I'd pick that up.
Marc:Good for you.
Marc:So when you got in, though, you didn't have this.
Marc:Did you have the business sense or did you just want to direct pictures?
Guest:I wasn't even that much aware of what everybody did.
Guest:I soon realized the various differences.
Guest:And actually, I thought of being a writer.
Guest:And what started was I sold a script.
Guest:And just as when I was a messenger said I'd do this other job for nothing, I said to the producer, it was a low-budget picture.
Guest:What was it?
Guest:It was a picture.
Guest:I called it The House in the Sea because the climax was the gunfight in a flooded house at the Salton Sea.
Guest:I'd been vacationing at the Salton Sea and saw that the sea was rising.
Guest:And a lot of old vacation houses were abandoned.
Guest:and were flooded by the sea and i thought that would be a great location so it was a chase across the desert and a gunfight in this flooded house yeah and uh i call i called it the house in the sea yeah uh it came out as highway dragnet because dragnet was a successful tv show yeah and i said to the producer when i sold him the script yeah i will work for nothing
Guest:if I can be your assistant, and if I can have an associate producer credit.
Guest:And he said, yes, why not?
Guest:So therefore, what I was doing, because I was already aware that credits were important.
Guest:When the picture was finished, I was able to say, I am, it's up there on the screen, I am a writer-producer.
Guest:The fact that it was an associate producer, still, you fudge these words.
Guest:You're up there, it's your name.
Guest:Yeah, and we fudge these words a little bit.
Guest:And it was as a writer-producer that I was able to raise a little money, actually $12,000, and make my first film.
Guest:Which was?
Guest:Which, again, they changed the title.
Guest:This was...
Guest:as usual as we all know when the atomic bomb goes off yeah the radiation creates a monster sure and the monster is mort saul yeah one said when i came into a club where he was uh where he was uh giving a performance as i came in the door he looked and he said hey roger there's a question i always wanted to ask you yeah how come every we know that uh radiation creates monsters
Guest:But why do these monsters always hate the Golden Gate Bridge?
Marc:He did that in front of you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Why's it got to be the Golden Gate Bridge?
Guest:That was his question, not mine.
Guest:But anyway, so I created this.
Guest:And I made this little picture, and I called it It Stalked the Ocean Floor.
Guest:And I sold it, and it was successful.
Guest:That's what really got me started.
Guest:And they changed the title to Monster from the Ocean Floor on the basis It Stalked the Ocean Floor was too arty.
Guest:I didn't see anything arty about it, stalk the ocean floor at all, but I figured they gave me the check.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Well, they were thinking poetically.
Marc:That could be a state of mind.
Marc:That is true.
Marc:Everybody is creative.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So right from the get-go, you were gravitating towards these spectacular movies that were science fiction or horror or at least sort of like something you couldn't deny.
Marc:This is a monster movie.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And was that because you had a certain passion for that or represented something to you philosophically or just because it was money?
Guest:All of the above.
Guest:Also, I love science fiction.
Guest:I was a big reader of science fiction.
Guest:Yeah, who are your guys?
Guest:Well, I liked a couple of them.
Guest:Asimov particularly, I thought, was very good.
Guest:What was it about science fiction that compelled you?
Guest:It was very, the imagination, and again, what I was talking about earlier, the thought behind it.
Guest:You were, science fiction gave you an opportunity to do something fantastic and interesting, other worlds and so forth.
Guest:But there would be a thought, a concept behind it.
Guest:For instance, at a later date, when I was involved with some Russian science fiction films,
Guest:I realized that the Russians, we were making low-budget science fiction films.
Guest:The Russians were making big, beautiful science fiction films.
Guest:What year is we talking?
Guest:This was the 1960s.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right at the beginning of the 60s.
Guest:Which films do you remember?
Guest:I remember...
Guest:I've forgotten the Russian titles, but the first one was Battle Beyond the Sun was the first one, and Voyage of Planet of Storms or something.
Guest:Anyway, what happened, I was in my... I found out...
Guest:that what they were doing, because science fiction was popular, the writers, the producers, and the directors were using science fiction to make comments on Russian society that they could not do directly.
Guest:But anyway, I bought these things, and I thought they were so much better than ours that I could do very well.
Guest:But if we had anti-American propaganda,
Guest:They had the worst.
Guest:We had anti-Russian propaganda.
Guest:They had the worst anti-American propaganda you could think of.
Guest:And I was talking to the head of distribution at Mosfilm in Moscow.
Guest:And I said, and I didn't know, I wanted to phrase this carefully because I didn't want to offend him.
Guest:I said, you know, there are some sequences in these pictures that might not play well in the United States.
Guest:And he laughed.
Guest:And he said, we know.
Guest:You're going to cut them out.
Guest:And Francis Coppola's first job.
Guest:was cutting the anti-American propaganda out of Russian science fiction films.
Guest:That you were releasing here.
Guest:Yes, right.
Marc:That was Francis' job?
Marc:That he come out of UCLA and you've got him working for you?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And you just dropped some reels on him and said, you know, see where it is.
Marc:You know, I don't know where all of it is, but take out the anti-American propaganda.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:What I did, I called the UCLA Film School and I said, who are your best graduates who's graduating in editing?
Guest:And they sent two guys over and it was Francis and Jack Hill.
Guest:And I chose Francis to do the job, but I ended up having Jack Hill direct.
Guest:So both Francis and Jack ended up directing for us.
Marc:And Francis gave you roles in a couple of his movies, or at least one, right?
Marc:You were a senator.
Guest:You were on a committee.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:What it was, was this.
Guest:I was on the Senate Crime Committee.
Guest:Godfather II.
Guest:In Godfather II.
Guest:And as I looked around, and everybody else on the committee looked around, every one of us was a writer, producer, or director.
Guest:And we thought, why not actors?
Guest:How come there isn't...
Guest:There was one actor who was a running role in the picture.
Guest:But everybody else... The guy from Nevada.
Guest:Yes, that's right.
Guest:The senator from Nevada.
Guest:But everybody else was a writer, producer, director.
Guest:And Francis took us all to lunch the first day.
Guest:And Bill Bowers, a good comedy writer, asked the question we all wanted to ask.
Guest:How did you pick us?
Guest:And I still remember what Francis said.
Guest:Francis said he'd been watching a Senate committee on television.
Guest:And he said...
Guest:all of the senators spoke intelligently.
Guest:They knew what they were doing.
Guest:And we sort of sat up as a clear compliment.
Guest:And he said, they all look good.
Guest:They all looked senatorial.
Guest:We sat up a little more.
Guest:And then he said, and they were all a little awkward on camera.
Guest:Which of course took away some of the praise.
Guest:And then I thought,
Guest:That is brilliant casting.
Guest:He knew that we knew our way around the set because we were writer, producer, directors.
Guest:But we'd always been behind the camera.
Guest:So our knowledge carried us when we were before the camera, but also since we'd never been before the camera before, we were a little awkward.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Of course, right, naturally.
Guest:Yes, right.
Marc:You're not movie stars.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You're behind the camera for a reason.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Let the actors do that.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:Well, that is genius, and that's a sensitivity.
Marc:Like, you know, he had an amazing sort of sensitivity to every element in a frame, that guy.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:He has been at various times writer, director, producer, cameraman, assistant director.
Guest:This is partially when he was working with me.
Guest:Also, grip and various other.
Guest:He has the most thorough grounding of anybody I know because he did every job there was to do when he was working with me.
Marc:And he had a lot of manic energy, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Tremendous energy.
Marc:And he's really bright and talented.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, when you see somebody like him come into your fold, when you take him out of UCLA, do you have – is there part of your brain that goes like, well, this guy's not going to hang around long.
Marc:He's really got something.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I take people who I think are talented and good and can work their way up.
Guest:For instance, Francis started by –
Guest:cutting russian film yeah then he became an editor then he was an assistant director and then he went from direct and each job he was brilliant and he went from that to being a director and i assume that they are going to what we say graduate they will be with us
Guest:maybe a couple of years and they will go on to other things i remember one on uh grand theft auto yeah it was ron howard's first picture yeah as a director uh there was one scene where he wanted more extras and i said yeah he told me this he told you guys you go let's
Guest:I'll hear your side of it.
Guest:Okay, my side is simply this.
Guest:I said, Ron, there's just no more money.
Guest:You're going to have to go with fewer extras.
Guest:But if you do a good job on this picture, you're never going to work for me again.
Marc:Yeah, Joe Dante said something along the lines of that.
Guest:You'll do two pictures and then you're out.
Guest:Well, that was the idea.
Guest:We expect them.
Guest:I mentioned that Stanford has a pretty good football team.
Guest:If you graduate from Stanford or any university, you are expected to move on and do something.
Guest:So I would say we are loosely like a university.
Marc:Well, you were also running a very exciting business in the sense that you don't do it in the normal way.
Marc:You have a lot going on at all times.
Marc:There's deals everywhere.
Marc:There's a lot of different angles that you're working.
Marc:So I imagine for somebody who, not unlike yourself, walked into an engineering firm and said, I'm not going to sit at that desk for 50 years, coming into the Roger Corman operation, you're like, well, there's never going to be a dull moment here.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Right?
Yeah.
Marc:so i mean that's that's exciting and i imagine it was exciting for you so let's talk about then like going back in terms of like working with because you were there at the you know towards the end of the studio system and you started making movies and producing movies towards the end of the studio system and you know you you did these
Marc:handful of movies with vincent price which became uh elevated intellectual by intellectuals or film intellectuals around the world so in some ways i felt in reading the the bit that i read that you were sort of poised as somebody that was doing something not only an independent film but you know something vital for film in general at that time after those poe movies now
Marc:What I wanted to know outside of working with some of those older actors from that time is that was there a point where you had to really decide which direction you wanted to go with how you were making film?
Marc:Because it seems that to continue to gain the respect of film intellectuals, you don't really necessarily make money.
Yeah.
Marc:Did you have that moment or was it a fluke that you got this recognition?
Guest:I had that moment.
Guest:I was getting a little bit of recognition.
Guest:As a matter of fact, what was it?
Guest:It was sort of a funny reputation.
Guest:Penelope Houston, who was the editor of Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, wrote, Roger Corman has become, if not the darling of the critics, at least their mascots.
Guest:So it was that kind of recognition.
Guest:But what happened was I had certain theories about Poe, particularly that he was working with the unconscious mind.
Guest:And I felt the unconscious mind get this information from the eyes, ears, and so forth, but doesn't see the world directly.
Guest:I want to shoot everything except maybe an occasional shot.
Guest:a shot outside i want to shoot everything in a studio where i can create an artificial world uh for poe right and i remember if he wanted me to do uh another poe picture and i said essentially i've done it i'm starting to repeat myself i want to go exactly in the opposite direction
Guest:I want to get out of the studio.
Guest:I want to get into the streets.
Guest:And I want to photograph what is going on now.
Guest:Now, this was the 60s, which was the beginning of the chaotic 60s, the counterculture.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:I was in my 30s.
Guest:So you felt it.
Guest:Yeah, I felt it.
Guest:I was sort of the one of the older of the young guys.
Marc:But you also, like in the 50s, you tapped into teen culture.
Marc:You understood that rock and roll was a vital thing, that there was something unleashed in the culture that made people nervous.
Marc:And it seems that at least in one or two pictures, you kind of had that as a backdrop, that there was this new teen craze that was making the middle class and older people uncomfortable.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And you kind of liked that juice.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So when the 60s happened, I imagine it was a far bigger disruption.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And I felt what was happening was important.
Guest:And so AIP said, okay, what would you like to do?
Guest:Because we've been successful.
Guest:We'll back you in something.
Guest:The Hell's Angels were getting a lot of notoriety for their violence, the motorcycles.
Guest:This is mid-60s, not the late 60s, right?
Guest:Yeah, this was around 64, 65.
Guest:Right, so it was before the major catharsis that you helped happen.
Guest:That behind all of this, they did represent something.
Guest:I felt this is kind of a revolution of the lower working class.
Guest:The guys who knew they weren't going anywhere in our society, so they created their own society.
Guest:It's happening now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As a matter of fact, the similarities between the 60s and what is happening now are truly amazing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How so exactly?
Guest:Well, I think there is what there was in the 60s.
Guest:There was a growing distrust of the government.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A growing distrust of the institutions, a belief.
Guest:For instance, you can say Bernie Sanders on one side, Donald Trump.
Guest:on another.
Guest:Representing working class anger.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were both at the extremes of the left and right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they were both tapping in to this discontent with the establishment as is.
Guest:And that was a major thought of the 60s, at least the way I interpreted it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I think that's it.
Guest:So I felt the angels represented a working class revolt.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And the film did...
Guest:incredibly well and which film was this this was the wild angel yeah first hell's angels picture yeah it was actually the opening night film of the venice film festival which nobody thought we were going to do with this little 15-day picture and the state department protested that it was not a portrayal a true portrayal of all american life and i was delighted i
Guest:I thought I could not have gotten better publicity than the State Department attacking my film.
Guest:You tapped in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You were a threat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They considered it to be that.
Guest:Well, yeah, and that kept evolving throughout the 60s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then it did so well.
Guest:He said, do you have any ideas?
Guest:For another one, I started to think about other things going on, and I thought, okay, if the Angels represent this working class counterculture, LSD was becoming a big thing, but it was more a middle class and upper class thing.
Guest:The working guys weren't doing it.
Marc:Right, because Leary was running around with Owsley turning on bands and rich people.
Guest:Small parties thinking that this is going to free our minds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He'd been a professor at Harvard.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he represented a different level of society.
Guest:So I said, I want to do LSD.
Guest:And I did the trip with an interesting group of people.
Guest:I'll tell you their names and you know how they went on.
Guest:the script was written by Jack Nicholson, who was a very good writer.
Guest:If he had not been such a good actor, he would have had a career as a writer.
Marc:But you worked with him on The Raven.
Marc:Was he in The Raven?
Guest:Yes, right.
Marc:And he was a young man.
Marc:It must have been one of his first few pictures.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, not unlike Coppola, I imagine, did you sense that there was a talent in him that was above and beyond most people?
Guest:Yes, as a matter of fact, the question was, and he mentioned it one time, we did, I don't know, I don't know how many films together, and he said, how come you're the only guy who's hiring me?
Guest:I said, I'm the only guy who knows how good you are, but they will find out, and they did, and they found out in a strange way.
Guest:He wrote The Trip.
Guest:The Trip starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
Guest:This is years before Easy Rider.
Guest:This is 60, what, seven?
Guest:And the trip, again, did very well.
Guest:Bruce Dern, too, right?
Guest:Bruce Dern was in it.
Guest:The picture was successful, and it was the only American film that year invited to the Cannes Film Festival.
Guest:So suddenly we were hitting film festivals.
Guest:We were hitting a nerve, is what it was.
Guest:So as a result of that,
Guest:We had essentially Peter, Dennis, Jack, and so forth.
Guest:And Peter and Dennis came to me with this idea for Easy Rider.
Guest:And it was all set up.
Guest:They wanted me to executive produce it.
Guest:Because they didn't know about that.
Guest:But the idea was Peter and Dennis were going to write it.
Guest:And then...
Guest:Dennis would direct it.
Guest:Peter would be the producer.
Guest:I would be the executive producer.
Guest:It was all set to go.
Guest:And in a meeting at American International, Dennis had not a good reputation, but he had worked perfectly with me.
Marc:What was his reputation?
Guest:His reputation was...
Guest:a little bit wild and not dependable and so forth.
Guest:But with me, he was a 100% professional.
Guest:We had an excellent relationship.
Guest:You probably gave him more freedom than other people wanted to.
Guest:Yes, and also he understood that he was not working for a major studio.
Guest:He was working with another young guy with a limited amount of money and we were, this is a key thing, we were all in it together.
Guest:And he responded to that.
Guest:But the executive of AIP still knew his reputation and said they wanted the right, if he fell behind schedule by more than a day, to replace him.
Guest:And I could see the expression on Peter and Dennis' face.
Guest:Knowing their lifestyle, they were like, this might happen.
Guest:And they left, and I stayed, and I said, you have made really a bad statement, because I know these guys.
Guest:I remember working with them.
Guest:They might fall back a little bit, but everything is going to be all right.
Guest:As a result, the picture went somewhere else.
Marc:But the interesting thing to me is that, you know, the trip was years before Easy Rider.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like two or three years.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And it was, you know, ahead of the curve.
Marc:And the fact that it was, where'd it go?
Marc:They went to Venice or Cannes?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:With both of those pictures that you discussed that you were on the pulse of a really a new American cinema, which is talked about by by Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, all those guys that, you know, what I was getting at before was interesting to me is that, you know, you were kind of making your bones as the studio system was falling apart and you were using these old actors that were willing to work.
Marc:Because they weren't working anymore, like Vincent and Karloff and I guess Basil Rathbone and all these people that were popular in the 30s and the 40s were still around and you were using them.
Marc:And you sort of kind of utilized the end of that system and then kind of were on the pulse just by nature of going outside of Poe into the streets and tapping into what was going on with these young directors.
Marc:And this became mainstream, but years later.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:The studios finally... I wasn't the only one.
Guest:Obviously, there were many guys doing this.
Guest:John Cassavetes, a number of directors in Hollywood.
Marc:But I didn't think Cassavetes was looking to make money.
Marc:I think Cassavetes had a vision, but he was a real auteur that was going to let the people come to him eventually, which they did.
Right.
Guest:But there were a whole group of us, and it really was a movement, and it was a movement away from the studios.
Guest:It was a movement of anti-establishment, as it were, and it was with young people.
Guest:Now, many of them went on to be studio stars, I mean, people.
Guest:Coppola, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard.
Guest:Jonathan Demme was with you too, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:How many pictures did he do with you?
Guest:He did.
Guest:Well, he started as a writer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he wrote a couple of pictures, and then he directed, I think, three pictures, and then he went on.
Marc:Well, Bogdanovich is interesting because, you know, he really sets out to set himself apart from that, even though he was around at that time, that he sees himself as somebody that respected the old ways and that, you know, he wasn't looking to be anti-establishment and that he, you know, was working at the same time.
Marc:But, you know, he really wanted to make, you know, pictures that, you know, were part of a tradition.
Marc:And it was interesting.
Marc:The story he told me about you was that around targets,
Marc:which was that you had Karloff contracted for two days, and he had all this old footage that he had written a script around, but he needed Karloff for five days, and he said that he might be the only one that got you to shill out a little more money to keep Boris Karloff.
Guest:That's correct.
Guest:I did.
Guest:But you're right when you say Peter, every one of these guys had great knowledge of film.
Guest:But Peter had a specific respect and admiration, particularly for the films of the 30s.
Guest:So he was less of the counter-revolutionary.
Guest:He was more thinking of adapting and bringing up to date the great films of particularly the 30s.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:He's a real intellect and an interesting guy.
Marc:Stubborn guy, but very articulate.
Marc:I enjoy talking to him.
Marc:And Joe Dante, too, was here, but he said that he was probably one of the few guys that worked for you that was a complete fan of...
Marc:of all Roger Coyle.
Marc:He wanted to take the legacy of the B-movie and the Grindhouse film and just continue on with it.
Marc:And he was such a huge fan of yours, and he kind of worked within that genre and maybe elevated it a little bit, but you were really his template for how he saw film.
Guest:Well, eventually, the major studios realized what we were doing and did big, I remember when Jaws came out,
Guest:The critic for the New York Times wrote, what is Jaws but a big budget Roger Corman film?
Guest:He was right, except one other thing.
Guest:It was not only a big budget, it was a better film.
Guest:And Jaws was instrumental in taking what I and other people were doing and making them big budget film.
Marc:And it's today.
Marc:It holds today.
Marc:I mean, the fact that Fast and the Furious was like a movie you made in the 50s, right?
Guest:I sold that title to Universal.
Guest:Neither Universal or I or Neil Moritz, with whom I had lunch, and he was a good guy who produced it, who said they wanted to buy the title.
Guest:None of us had any idea how valuable that title was going to be.
Guest:It's a huge franchise for them.
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:I thought I just sold the title.
Guest:Sure, I know, yeah.
Guest:You can't predict everything.
Marc:No, I know, but I don't know that people know that that was your title.
Marc:It was sort of an extension in terms of concept of the Death Race movies.
Guest:A little bit.
Guest:Yes, the idea of a picture built around a certain amount of characterization and fast cars and car crashes.
Guest:But it was instrumental in the original Death Race and the new Death Race 2050.
Guest:and the Fast and the Furious, that there was attention paid to the characters.
Guest:So it wasn't just cards.
Guest:You were looking at people, and death race represents a certain concept of a future society.
Guest:And the Fast and the Furious, at least in the first few,
Guest:really did portray a kind of youth society.
Guest:It's become more and more stunt-oriented, but there were real thoughts behind the Fast and the Furious.
Marc:Sure, and yeah, I mean, it seems like you thought, you know, philosophically through a lot of these things that, you know, especially the game changers, and certainly in the 60s, and then early on with the post stuff that got a lot of credit, and then, you know, but how do you feel that, you know, even Star Wars to some degree, Star Wars, Jaws,
Marc:That they are the biggest budget of movies now outside of comic book movies.
Marc:The ones that are huge box office are really extensions of the oeuvre that you created.
Guest:What you said is pretty much right.
Guest:The only thing I would say, it wasn't just me.
Guest:It was me and a number of other people.
Guest:But you picked the two films.
Guest:When I saw Jaws, I thought, this is going to be a problem for us.
Guest:Because they're making big budget versions of what we're doing.
Guest:And Star Wars, when I saw that, matter of fact, I went back to Battle Beyond the Sun, the Russian film.
Guest:But I had done that type of film also.
Guest:And I thought, with Jaws and Star Wars, we are all in trouble.
Guest:Okay, so what was your solution?
Guest:The solution was first to make a couple of films in a similar style.
Guest:But the long term, it was a way to move immediately.
Guest:The longer term was to...
Guest:do films that had a certain surface, such as Death Race, an action picture.
Guest:And underneath it, the idea of killing pedestrians, because Death Race is how fast you can drive and how many pedestrians you can kill.
Guest:The killing of pedestrians came in after the first draft.
Guest:The first draft was just the straight cars hitting each other.
Guest:And I thought there's something...
Guest:missing here, and I started thinking of the role of violence in society and the way violence is used to entertain and sedate, to a certain extent, the lower classes, going back to the gladiatorial games, bread and circuses for the Romans, and my thought was, how can I integrate
Guest:the public into the picture.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the idea came to be... Kill him.
Guest:Kill him.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:But I think it's interesting that you saw in light of the extreme success of these box office movies that cost millions of dollars, which I think it seems like a lot of your career was... You were driven by...
Marc:by you know doing the opposite of that actually yes in other words there's no way there's no way to do a low budget version of a 200 million dollar but you you had no it seemingly no desire you know as a producer for you know you know 50 60 years now to to even you know you know step up to that crap table
Guest:I financed my own pictures because it gives me complete control, and I simply don't have that much money.
Guest:But theoretically, at some point, you could have tried to get that much money.
Guest:I probably could have, but these films are years in development.
Guest:It's what's called a development hell.
Marc:Sure, and you like the immediacy of like, let's go.
Marc:Where are we going?
Marc:We got a broken boat.
Marc:Let's go shoot there.
Marc:Make me a script.
Marc:It takes place on a broken boat.
Marc:And maybe we can do two films there.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But it's just it's really interesting to me that you knew your market and that you knew that once the Jaws happened, all this stuff happened, that you weren't necessarily you didn't have the.
Marc:the wherewithal or the desire to change how you produce movies and what you spent on movies.
Marc:There seemed to be a compulsion within you that may have been partially business, but also you seem to like the challenge of bringing these movies way under budget, doing them quickly.
Marc:And I think because of that, you get this rawness that I think is mocked sometimes, but there is immediacy to it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:you feel it and also there's a radical thought to the films i felt we really have to be uh radical we have to be different we can't just say we're doing an ordinary film there has to be something different that separates it from other films because
Guest:You can solve a problem with money or you can think about it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Now, your awareness of marketing to the people that may have liked gladiator fights.
Marc:I'm thinking also of professional wrestling and the working class in terms of whatever disenfranchisement that they may feel, that you saw that as your audience.
Right.
Marc:And that, did you feel that you sacrificed anything by focusing on that audience?
Marc:Was that a money thing?
Marc:I guess the question is that fighting the way the picture's being made financially, because at some point you had an experience where you realized that they're spending too much money.
Marc:This is stupid.
Marc:We can do this for a lot cheaper.
Marc:Did you ever think, outside of you were obviously creating your own style of production and direction and process,
Marc:that you were diminishing what you may have done?
Guest:There's a possibility.
Guest:I sometimes think that some of the films we did earlier were better because we were more original.
Guest:Because what we did then...
Guest:Anything I wanted to do, I would do.
Guest:So I could take a chance on a Death Race or on a Target or something like that.
Guest:Today, the market is so poor for low-budget films, the only way to really guarantee them is to have them pre-sold.
Guest:For instance, Death Race 2050 is pre-sold to Universal, which means I can't be quite as radical
Guest:because I must satisfy the distributor or something.
Guest:But it's interesting when you talk about professional wrestling.
Guest:When martial arts was first coming in, I hired Don the Dragon Wilson.
Guest:who was the world's champion.
Guest:I wanted to do a kickboxing film, but since I didn't have any money for stars, I thought the way to have stars is to get a real champion.
Guest:So we brought a number of champions in.
Guest:But Don was kind of okay.
Guest:And so I said to Don,
Guest:I'm going to sign you.
Guest:You can do Blood Fist, which was a film.
Guest:But I'm also enrolling you in an acting school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you're going to take a lot of lessons fast.
Guest:And Don became fairly good.
Guest:And we talk about all of this and the thing taking advantage.
Guest:We went with my staff to see one of Don's fights.
Guest:And on the preliminary schedule, there were two women.
Guest:kickboxers yeah and uh the next day we were meeting yeah and people were saying okay when do we do the woman kickboxer film right and i maybe i chickened out or something i said we're not going to do it you know i really didn't like that i just didn't like to see these women beating each other up but now
Guest:Women are beating each other up.
Guest:I think this is also a change in the culture and in the environment where the level of violence is rising, not only here, but around the world.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know if it's good.
Marc:It's bad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I don't know.
Marc:When you think of making violent movies, do you see that as hopefully sating those impulses?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:It would be nice to say that I put violence in my films in order to eliminate violence in society.
Guest:But that is not necessarily a true statement.
Marc:So with New World, you were sort of on the cutting edge of bringing a lot of foreign films into this country.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And that was done, but it was sort of piecemeal.
Marc:And it seemed like that was an agenda of New World.
Guest:It wasn't originally an agenda.
Guest:New World started out making the types of films, because I was backing this thing with my own money, the types of films that I felt had been successful.
Guest:We brought them up to date.
Guest:For instance, our first film was The Student Nurses,
Guest:who get involved in a certain amount of counterculture, and it is a slightly radical, but frankly, exploitation film.
Guest:It was very successful.
Guest:We then did a woman in prison picture, which introduced our great star, a black girl, Pam Greer.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Who was very big.
Guest:at that time and Pam did a number of films for us and there was maybe a little thought about behind the women in prison but these were pictures to make money and to get my company started yeah now we really grew to the point where we might have been
Guest:the biggest independent at that time.
Guest:And I had always loved the work of the auteurs, Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Curaçao, and so forth.
Guest:And I felt they were not being well distributed in the United States.
Guest:The majors are brilliant distributors, but they're brilliant distributors for a certain kind of film.
Guest:And when they would distribute one of these films,
Guest:they didn't really do it right.
Guest:And the other distributors who were distributing them were little companies that were really sort of aficionados who didn't have the power.
Guest:We had really the power, I'm overstating a power, we had a little bit of power to force slightly films into theaters and get the right terms, the right bookings and so forth.
Guest:And I felt...
Guest:we can help these film get an audience yeah i simply wanted to expand the range of new world but also i wanted i wanted people to see these films introduced uh yeah it wasn't charity i didn't know no of course not but you were introducing these the work of bergman and kurosawa to a much bigger audience yes
Guest:And it worked.
Guest:And I think there was one period of something like six or seven years where we won more Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film than all the other companies combined.
Guest:So you were actually producing these films?
Guest:Well, we were co-producing, which wasn't much.
Guest:For instance, we did a picture...
Guest:Fitzcarraldo with Bernard Hertz.
Guest:I talked to him.
Guest:He talked to you.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:It was a strange.
Guest:Again, I don't want to waste your time.
Guest:I'll make it very fast.
Guest:I put up a certain amount of money for the American rights, and I was co-producer.
Guest:Once more, the co-producer was sort of a friendly gesture.
Guest:But a credit.
Guest:A credit, yes.
Guest:I read the script and gave him a few notes, and that was it.
Guest:The original cast,
Guest:was Jason Robards, Mick Jagger, and Claudia Cardinelli.
Guest:And I put up my money on that basis.
Guest:On Fitzcarraldo.
Guest:Yeah, on Fitzcarraldo.
Guest:Weirdly enough, when we talked, I had shot on the Amazon and on the entire...
Guest:multi-thousand length of the Amazon, I had picked one town, Iquitos, in Peru, near the headquarters of the Amazon.
Guest:I said, where are you going to shoot, Werner?
Guest:He said, I've scouted.
Guest:I'm going to Iquitos.
Guest:This is incredible.
Guest:What did you shoot there?
Guest:Fire on the Amazon.
Guest:The first...
Guest:First picture that Sandra Bullock starred in.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anyway, so they were shooting.
Guest:Jason got ill and had to go back to New York.
Guest:I know Jason.
Guest:I've worked with him.
Guest:And his doctor said that he couldn't go back to Brazil.
Guest:In my own mind, I know Aikidos.
Guest:I know the Amazon.
Guest:And I think Jason was saying, I'm not going back there.
Guest:Not with Werner.
Guest:So they lost Jason.
Guest:Meanwhile Mick Jagger had a stop date because he was going on a concert tour.
Guest:So they lost Mick Jagger and the whole picture collapsed.
Guest:And Werner came to town, and he asked me to have lunch with him, and we had lunch.
Guest:He said, great news.
Guest:I've rewritten the picture, and I've combined Jason's and Mick's part into one, and Klaus Kinski is going to play that, and that's such great news that
Guest:My German partner is giving me more money.
Guest:And I said, Werner, replacing Jason and Mick with Klaus Kinski may be big news in Germany.
Guest:It is not big news in the United States.
Guest:And I will not give you more money, but I'll stay with the original deal.
Guest:And he said, okay.
Guest:And so we made the picture starring Klaus Kinski.
Guest:And Kinski was actually very good.
Guest:Not only very good, he was brilliant in the film.
Marc:Yeah, I just rewatched it.
Marc:It's amazing.
Marc:But I think you did, it wasn't charity, but you did do an amazing thing for the film community of the United States by introducing us all to some of these movies.
Guest:And what we did, the way you distribute those films is pretty standard.
Guest:You open in New York and Los Angeles to get the reviews.
Guest:and then you play the other major cities, and you always play the college towns.
Guest:Because there's an audience.
Guest:For instance, if you play San Francisco, you will also play Berkeley and Palo Alto.
Guest:If you play Boston, you're going to play Cambridge, and so forth.
Guest:So we did that.
Guest:We went through the complete distribution of the picture, and it was fall.
Guest:And I knew from our other films that played in drive-ins that drive-ins had difficulty booking films in the fall because the weather was turning back.
Guest:And I got the idea of why don't we take Bergman's picture and put it in the drive-in.
Guest:In the fall?
Guest:People said, you know, an Ingmar Bergman picture in a drive-in?
Guest:And the drive-in owner said, why not?
Guest:We're not doing any business now anyway.
Guest:We're going to be closing for the season in a couple of weeks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were all waiting to see what would happen.
Guest:We did average business.
Guest:Nobody was more delighted to do average business than we were.
Guest:And I got a letter from Bergman thanking me for bringing his film to an audience he had never anticipated.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:Cries and Whispers.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:At the drive-in.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We did average business.
Guest:Nothing wrong with that.
Marc:Well, average business in the fall at a drive-in.
Marc:I imagine with that title, there was other things going on in that car.
Marc:That may well be.
Marc:Yeah, got to keep warm.
Guest:well what is your business model now primarily the business model now is very difficult these are the toughest times i've ever seen for medium budget and low budget films because as i said when i started we got full theatrical distribution then as that started to fade with the first year of hbo yeah we were their number one number one suppliers
Guest:We were into the cable business.
Guest:In the 70s?
Guest:Yes, 70s, yes.
Guest:Late 70s, early 80s.
Guest:And then as they started to move to major films, home video came up, which became, of course, DVD.
Guest:Now we're seeing DVD start to fade.
Guest:And previously, each time one method of distribution has faded, another one has come up.
Guest:I see nothing coming up.
Guest:I've actually been on panel discussions on this in which I predicted that the Internet will be...
Guest:the new medium, it will come up to replace.
Guest:The problem is it's doing it, but there's very little money in it.
Guest:So it's not replacing in a monetary situation.
Guest:Just an access situation.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So these are very difficult times.
Marc:So I guess the final question is now in, you know, having talked to, we didn't even talk about Scorsese.
Marc:He produced a couple of his films, right?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:The first Hollywood film he made was Boxcar Bertha.
Guest:Boxcar Bertha, yeah.
Guest:I had made a picture called Bloody Mama about the Ma Barker gang.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:a southern farm woman in the Depression who was dispossessed of her farm, and she and her sons went on a crime spree.
Guest:Shelly Winters played Ma Barker.
Guest:And AIP wanted me to make another one, but I had started New World, and I said, well, I've got my own company.
Guest:I'm not going to direct for you guys, but I'll produce it.
Guest:So I produced it, developed a script, and just looked around, and I remembered having met Marty and talked with him.
Guest:And I thought, again, here is a very bright young guy.
Guest:He had made a black and white underground film in New York, but that was the only thing he had done.
Guest:So I asked him if he'd like to shoot this film in Arkansas, and he said yes.
Guest:And there was a certain amount of criticism.
Guest:They said, he's a New York boy.
Guest:He doesn't know anything about Arkansas.
Guest:I said, that may be true, but he's a good director.
Guest:A good director can make anything.
Guest:Now, you may specialize, Vincent Minnelli specialized in dance films.
Guest:But he was a good director.
Guest:He could have directed anything.
Guest:So I said, I'm going with Marty just because he's a good director.
Guest:And he was.
Guest:Bachar Bertha was an excellent film.
Marc:And is that the last film he made for you?
Guest:Yes, he just made the one film.
Marc:So, and which films did Demi make for you?
Guest:He did a woman in prison picture called Cade Seat.
Guest:Oh, and here's another.
Guest:I've known a number of directors who've taken a job to do a little picture.
Guest:And they said, well, it's a crummy little film.
Guest:I'll just toss it off because I need the money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I've known other guys, and Jonathan Demme is an example, when I said, here is a woman's prison picture.
Guest:He said, I will make the best woman's prison picture ever made.
Guest:The guys who said, I will toss this off, are no longer in the film business.
Guest:But the guys like Jonathan, who said, I will take this commercial thing,
Marc:yeah but i will do the best i can with it yeah they are the ones who've been successful yeah now when you look back at uh you know your entire career and you have all these guys that speak highly of you jonathan put you in one of his movies you were in philadelphia as well that do you feel do you feel that you have made this amazing contribution to film i've made a contribution i don't know but it's amazing
Marc:But just by having these guys who respect you and giving them the opportunity.
Guest:Yeah, it's been very good.
Guest:But as I may have said, they were all good filmmakers.
Guest:They would have been successful if they'd never met me.
Guest:All I can say is I found them.
Guest:Maybe I taught them a little bit.
Guest:But basically, I gave them the opportunity.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's a big deal.
Guest:And that's very humble.
Guest:And it was great talking to you.
Guest:Very good, Mark.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Bye.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:That guy, I mean, I can only hope not only to live to 90, sometimes I think that, but I hope all of us have nice long lives.
Marc:But to be that clear and to be that cogent and on top of it, it was just great talking to him.
Marc:And I thought it was a pretty thorough conversation.
Marc:I enjoyed it.
Marc:Also, my show, Marin Season 4 on Netflix starting tomorrow, January 13th.
Marc:And go to WTFPod.com slash tour for all my upcoming dates and all those places starting in Tallahassee.
Marc:And a lot of dates coming up throughout February and March.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Sorry.
Marc:No guitar playing here because my finger's not ready yet.
Marc:And I don't want to do the three-finger guitar playing.
Marc:It's good for me for practice, but I don't... You know, it's already dicey.
Marc:All right?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Oh God.
Marc:Boomer lives!