Mr. Corman, thank you. Call me Roger.
Roger, thank you so much for for letting me come
here today and sharing your time with me.
It's an honor to talk to you.
How did you become known as The King of B
Pictures?
It's partially because of what I did and partially because
of the circumstances shortly before I started making films.
Actually, when I was still in school,
the major studios were faced with a monopoly suit because
they owned the means of production,
they owned distribution, and they owned the theaters.
They agreed to spin off their theaters
by the time I came of age to make pictures,
the fact that they had spun off their theaters meant
there was greater room for the independence to move in.
So I moved in with a number of other people,
of course. So it was partially that and partially
the way I make pictures,
which is fairly complicated. But
in a simple statement, I was making medium budget and
low budget films very efficiently and keying them to a
teenage audience.
I was aware of the fact that the theaters and
particularly the drive in theaters were appealing to the youth
market.
The young people were going to the theaters.
The major studios who had money invested in their stars
were using their stars.
But who? A 50 year old leading man making love
to a 40 year old leading lady was not what
the 18 and 19 year olds wanted to do.
So I deliberately made pictures for the teenage market.
What are some of these pictures,
some some key examples of these types of films that
you aimed at at that demographic and and how were
they received?
Well, one comes to mind immediately because it was so
direct.
When Ford brought out the Thunderbird,
it was called the T Bird.
It was a huge success.
I made a picture called T Bird Gang.
When rock'n'roll first appeared, I made a picture called Rock
All Night.
In other words, I was aware at that time of
the youth culture because I was young myself and I
knew what the kids were talking about and I geared
the pictures to that market.
How at that time were you able to
stay so in touch with the zeitgeist
at the time in a way that allows you to
to channel that knowledge
about what the kids wanted into this product that you
wanted to make?
It was partially myself being a little bit older than
that,
but still being young enough to understand and also doing
some research I had.
We had a bigger company then because we had theatrical
distribution and I would have
some of our younger people go to high schools and
just conduct surveys.
What are you thinking about now?
What's, what's going on? What?
What's happening today? Wow. OK.
So you actually went out and talked to these kids
to see,
and then you would have meetings and turn that into
ideas for movies.
Yes.
Well, I want you to.
You mentioned that your method of production is complicated,
and it's a very unique method.
You have sort of you revolutionized the way that that
movies could be made.
And I want you. I would love for you to
expand on that.
How? How does Roger Corman make a movie?
All right,
it's changed a little bit,
as all things do over time.
But I probably shouldn't have said complicated.
Complicated probably meant the whole,
the whole concept. But the concept of the way I
made films is I put huge emphasis on preproduction planning.
My average shooting schedule at that time was 10 days,
although I shot a few in less than that and
the average budget was around
$50,000 for a black and white picture and
65 or 70 for color.
Now, my background, I have a degree in engineering,
so maybe the engineering comes into this,
but my thought was this.
If I'm shooting a picture in 10 days,
I do not want to make major decisions on the
set.
I want to make all the major decisions I can
before shooting.
And as you know, a number of people have gone
on
and they still remember that point.
They've been, they've been quoted on it,
the emphasis of planning every possible thing you can before
shooting.
But no, you'll never follow your plan exactly.
You have to be a little bit loose.
You might get a better idea on the set,
or maybe something won't work.
I once told Ron Howard
if you're getting late in the day and you're shooting
a scene,
I told him
a scene I once shot
where there was a hill,
the sun was going behind the hill.
I got the long shot of two people on the
side of the hill
and as the sun went down I moved the crew
up on the neck on another hill.
So we were in light.
So each time it got dark we moved higher up
the film and Ron said that's a great idea when
you're making low budget films.
He was making something like an $80 million film.
He told me he was in trouble.
He moved the crew up the side of the hill
with the light,
so the rules still still pertain.
Can you put it in perspective in terms of
OK, you said that you're spending 50 to
$65,000 for these budgets and these shoot schedules were no
longer than 10 days.
Put it in perspective for me,
what were other motion pictures being?
What were their budgets and shooting schedules at that time?
Well, the major studios were spending
10 to $20 million or so.
Inflation has taken place and
the cost of special effects has grown
so much, so they were going 10 to $20 million.
The first picture I made for a major studio was
the Secret Invasion for United Artists,
which was a World War 2 picture.
A picture cost 600,000 which for them it was the
cheapest picture of the year for me.
I was in the big time
back in the the 60s and 70s.
What what are some some techniques
cost cutting techniques that that come to mind.
Some of the the just examples of you know,
using car headlights to light the scene or what you're
saying like trying to you know,
moving around to to try and get as much as
you can out of the natural light.
What are some examples of of these types of techniques
that became synonymous with your your method?
Well, first, I think the first rule is
write your script in relationship to your budget.
If you know you have
$50,000, don't write. In some scene that alone will cost
$50,000. Be aware when writing the script that it must
be able to fit your budget.
Then the same thing in scheduling.
For instance, it takes several hours for a crew to
move from one location to another.
I tried to only make one move
during the day and that would be during lunchtime
when I would give the crew and half an hour
lunch
and the cast an hour lunch so the crew could
be moving during moving the the equipment during that time.
I did not want to do it more than once
a day,
as the same thing to a lesser extent with sets.
I didn't want to make too many moves from one
set to another.
Oh, that's a simpler proposition.
So
how you know you figured out this model in this
approach?
How did that
affect the business model? Did you find that you had
a a business model that really worked and was profitable
for you?
Talk about the business side that resulted because of this
approach to the art itself.
First, from the art itself.
It helped because I was able to spend more time
shooting in 10 days than you normally spent,
but also helped, and from the business standpoint,
because I was able to get a bigger looking picture,
the time was spent shooting,
not moving from one place to another or
not
not having to rehearse the cast thoroughly.
Every day I rehearse the cast before shooting,
so the discussions between the director and the actors on
the major motivations and so forth were all done before
shooting.
So there was none of this.
Stop shooting in the middle of the day for an
hour while the director and the actors work out a
problem.
Those problems are worked out in advance.
So the director is still
directing the actors, but on the details of a scene
because the overall character arc has been determined before shooting.
How did you figure out how and when did you
figure out
the the way, a way to
produce films and make money doing it and be successful
at doing it?
I think actually it was right from the beginning.
It was the fact that I had very little money,
actually. I had $12,000 in cash and a lab deferment
and
I had to say what can I do for
$12,000? Where can I get a location?
What is the limitation on cast
limitations in other ways and how can I spend the
time shooting?
For instance what I would do.
I was the truck driver.
I would drive the truck to the location before the
crew and cast arrived.
I would unload the light equipment from the truck before
the crew arrived.
The crew would then unload the heavy equipment That I
couldn't do.
At the end of the day,
the crew would load back the heavy equipment into the
truck.
I would stay on and load the light equipment back
on,
drive the truck back and do the same thing.
The 3rd or 4th day.
A representative from the Teamsters came to me
as a producer and they said,
who's driving the truck? And I said I am.
And the Teamsters are known for being tough guys.
This is an amiable guy,
he laughed. I told him what I was doing.
He said, all right Rodger,
we're going to make you an honorary Teamster for this
picture.
But on the next picture you're going to sign with
the Teamsters.
I said absolutely. What was motivating you to do that,
To get in early and do manual labor that produce
like Sam Spiegel and David Lee and didn't get together,
you know, before the crew got there and unloaded the
lighting stands.
You know what was motivating you to do that while
you were doing it?
It was simply an attempt to work efficiently and make
a small amount of money
into a picture that looked like a bigger picture.
When when do you start making money?
In your early in your career?
In the 60s? When you figured this out?
When does when and how does that money start rolling
in and how?
How much do you do you invest some of it?
Keep some of it? How?
How did you handle your money when it started to
roll in?
The first picture was successful.
Matter of fact, the 1st 17 pictures were all successful
until I did a picture that I believed in very
greatly.
The Intruder about racial segregation in the South.
The Intruder got wonderful reviews,
won a couple of minor film festivals,
and a new young actor unknown,
Bill Shatner won a couple of awards for playing the
lead.
It was the first picture I ever made that lost
money,
and I realized that I had forgotten on that one
picture
that a film should be entertaining.
And if you're going to have a message or a
theme or a thought,
it should be subtextual. The audience should come to see
an entertainment,
and if you want to give them some thought,
it should be beneath the surface.
So underneath the action and the laughs are
points that are important to me,
but I'm make a real
effort to let the audience know those,
but to keep it to such a low level it
never interferes with the entertainment,
the intruder. I know you're proud of that film.
And I think, do you think that there's any aspect
of the the themes of the intruder that
are are poignant today in our society that you think
would make people want to watch that movie and rediscover
it or for new audiences to discover it?
Times are a little bit better on the racial front
today than they were in
1960 when I made the picture.
But the problems are still there,
they're just eased a little bit and I've had an
offer to re release the picture for that reason.
Yeah, I think it would be,
I think it would be
great to run it on like TCM or something.
I think that would get a lot of people talking
it,
but hopefully that happens.
So I wanted to ask you,
what is the biggest mistake you feel like you've ever
made in your career,
and what did you learn from that and apply later
after making it?
I would put two mistakes.
One
would be the intruder itself,
the fact that I was essentially lecturing to the audience
rather than entertaining them.
That would be the first mistake.
The second mistake was on a picture I made that
was very successful called Black Scorpion.
Black Scorpion was, what was it?
Police Lieutenant by day, Black Scorpion by night.
She became a superhero with a souped up car and
the picture was
extremely successful. So successful that in particularly in Europe,
in both France and Germany,
when it played on television,
it got the highest rating in both countries of the
year for a television program.
At that time of night,
I had an offer from a German company to make
ATV series out of it and I thought,
well, I really think Black Scorpion is in Los Angeles.
It's hard to think of Black Scorpion in Berlin.
And I thought why don't I make ATV series myself.
And there was a mistake in regard to budget.
Since I financed my pictures myself,
I don't have that much money.
So
I spent too little on the TV series.
It ran for a year and got sort of OK
ratings and so forth,
but it wasn't really a big enough series to compete.
I had misjudged the economics.
So you say you said
multiple pictures. It was very successful.
How do you and how did you measure success?
What makes a picture successful?
Are there 2 levels of success?
First is the level artistically?
How good is the picture?
That is something that's important primarily to me.
The other
more universal measure of success is how much did the
picture make.
I'm trying to get good reviews and
make money in general. Almost all
of our pictures have been successful.
I want to ask you about
in the 90s you produced a Fantastic Four film.
Now, now, so this is a Marvel property.
Marvel didn't become the multi billion dollar business that it
is now until like
2008 with Iron Man. Talk about that experience of of
making that film and what was the result.
The Fantastic Four was one of the weirdest experience experiences
I've ever had.
It started when Burt Eichenger,
a German producer who was a friend of mine,
came to me in late October of one year and
said I have a problem that maybe we can solve
together.
Then he explained what it was.
He said I have an option on the comic book
The Fantastic Four,
but it expires December 31st.
If I haven't started shooting,
I have a script and I have a budget and
I don't have the money for the budget.
And I said, well, Bert,
I don't think there's any way I can help you
there.
He says there's another way.
I said, OK, what's the budget?
And he said $30 million.
And I said, how much money do you have,
$1 million.
What I'd like to do
is go into partnership with you.
I'll put up the $1,000,000
and you make the picture
for $1,000,000. And I said,
well that's cutting a budget
fairly drastically from 30 million to 1,000,000.
Without having read the script,
I will tell you we can't make that script exactly,
but this was on a Friday.
Let me send it down to the boys at the
studio,
let them work on it over the weekend.
I'll go over it myself over the weekend and we'll
meet Monday morning and tell you if we can do
it,
and we did. We met Monday morning and said
we'll go ahead and I said but this is late
October,
we're going to have to do a slight rewrite of
the script.
We can save the dialogue and so forth,
but the big action scenes have to be modified.
People don't work on December 31st,
but I suggest we start shooting December 30th because we
need every day we can get for pre production.
And Burnt said if we start shooting on December 30th
they'll know what we're doing.
I think we should start shooting on December 26th.
I said Burnt, they're going to know what we're doing.
Either way it doesn't make any difference.
I think we compromised and started shooting on December
28th and
I had all kinds of things.
I had the ability to distribute it and he would
put up all the money for prints and advertising and
this was a time when low budget pictures were starting
to fade theatrically and I thought this might be an
interesting gamble to see if I can take something like
this and do well,
he said. But I think he had,
I think it was 90 days,
he had 90 days to buy it away from me
and give me a very nice profit.
Almost the whole 90 days went by.
We've got somewhere in the back here,
the poster, we we prepared a really nice poster,
we prepared the trailer, the TBTV spots,
we were ready to go and Bert came to me
just before
with a check and said here's the check,
I'm buying the picture. So
we never had a chance to release the picture.
Now I think it was 20th Century Fox and Burnt
and here it's a little confusing,
but as I understand this is what happened because partially
Burnt told me this much.
I said, well what are you going to do with
the $1 million picture?
He said I will release it after and the budget
then had gone to 60 million.
I'll release it after the $60 billion picture.
Call it the prequel and I'll make more money off
the $1 million picture.
Then I will off the $60 million picture.
I don't know exactly what happened,
but Fox put a clause in his contract that he
couldn't release the $1 million picture,
so he lost that opportunity.
But you made money on the movie.
Yes, we we did. We did very nicely.
But it was one of the few times when I
actually would have liked not to have made that money.
To me it was an important experiment because as I
say,
the box office for low budget pictures was fading away
and I thought this might be the start of a
different way to go.
But unfortunately I never had the chance to run the
experiment.
The movie has a positive cult following.
I looked at some reviews last night and it's hard
to find negative reviews.
Like people say. It's just a lot of fun.
It feels like a comic book.
What do you think of the movie and how it
turned out?
I think for $1,000,000 it's a pretty good film.
I think people think of it affectionately.
That's as if
you've got one son who graduated from the top university
in the world and is now a billionaire.
You've got another son who's an idiot.
You love the idiot.
So to talk about your deal,
you know you in a way are responsible for the
Fast and the Furious franchise.
Talk about why that is and the deal that you
made going back to your original film from from the
50s.
Neil Moritz had produced a car racing film and he
didn't like the title.
He they had already finished shooting.
They were in post production and he was trying to
find a different title and he was having dinner with
his father,
Milt Moritz. Milt was the advertising manager for American International.
And Milt said, well, if you've got a car racing
picture,
you know, Roger made a picture
in the 1950s called the Fast and the Furious.
What do you think of that title?
And Neil said, that's a good time.
I like that title. So
Neil and I had lunch
and I said, fine, I'll sell you the title.
And their legal department, it was.
This was interesting from a legal standpoint
for once a major studio legal department was fair.
They said to me, and they were right,
your picture is copyrighted. But
if your title has not become famous,
like Gone with the Wind or something like that,
after a certain number of years it sort of becomes
dormant and somebody else can use the title.
For instance, my picture, the intruder,
somebody made a picture called The Intruder a few years
ago.
They said we could
take the title The Fast and the Furious and you
could sue us and you would probably lose,
but it would be a big mess.
What we like to do,
we want to be fair.
We'll pay a little bit of money and buy the
title.
And I was aware of all of this and I
said sure.
So neither they nor I
knew what was going to happen with that title.
Were you happy with that deal?
I mean, what kind of what?
I'm just curious if you're willing to share,
like what kind of a figure?
I'll just say it wasn't much,
but one thing. It was
the money wasn't much. But there's something that I've done
before with major studios when negotiating.
They have stock footage and their stock footage library consists
of huge scenes from multi
$1,000,000 pictures. I did this once previously with Warner Brothers
and I said to Universal,
OK I'll take a small amount of money but I
would like to have free access to your stock footage
library and I will pay the lab costs of making
a dupe negative from your negative for the scenes I
want.
So it will not cost you a penny and it's
worth something to me.
And they agreed and I did indeed use that stock
footage and got a very big looking picture
out of it. So that was for the Fast and
the Furious.
That was part of that deal.
So in addition to the,
they also paid you a figure.
Yeah, it was also access to what?
Just go in and get what?
Take whatever you wanted. Take anything I want.
Now stock footage.
Normally you don't have close-ups of a big star in
stock footage,
which is not what I wanted anyway.
What you do have is big scenes.
What I did, I took the stock footage from their
TV series Spartacus,
in which said ancient Rome,
an arena with thousands of people.
And I knew where that set was,
where they shot Spartacus, because I've shot the on that
studio myself.
It's in,
it's in Sofia in Bulgaria.
So I took the stock footage,
all the big shots from Spartacus,
went into the same sets where Spartacus was shot and
shot all my
close-ups and medium shots and cut them together with a
long shots for a picture called Cyclops,
which I made for the sci-fi Channel.
And I got a letter from Tom Vitale,
the head of the sci-fi Channel,
saying Cyclops is the biggest and best picture anybody has
ever made for sci-fi,
courtesy of The Fast and the Furious.
That's an amazing story that really is has has using
recycled footage,
it's stock footage been a part of your method over
the years or is that just something that you started
to exploit later?
It started on my second or third film.
I was I was barely aware that there was such
a thing as stock footage.
But I knew somewhere and I actually looked up in
the phone book and found a company that was selling
stock footage.
And I went over and they had a catalog and
I just went through the catalog and picked some shots
that I thought fit.
And from then the the idea built.
Who are some of the great
notable names in Hollywood who have been some of the
most successful film makers that that whose careers you sort
of
helped to, to launch or usher in to reality?
Well, from a director's standpoint,
I think more Academy award-winning directors have started with me
than anybody else.
The first one was Francis Coppola,
then well, I don't know him in order.
Francis Coppola, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme,
Marty Scorsese, maybe somebody else.
But then we've had actors,
Roducers,
Cinematograhers, a large number of cinematograhers,
also film editors, oh, and composers.
When we had our studio,
what we were doing, we were hiring what we thought
were the best young guys and girls.
Gale Anne Hurd, who does The Walking Dead,
was my assistant for a number of years
and she came out of my old school,
Stanford, with a Phi Beta Kappa key.
I hired her simply because she was right.
It's like a football coach with a winning team.
You say he's a great coach and then you find
out for the last five years in a row,
he's had the number one recruiting class in the country.
These people would have been great if they'd never met
me.
I just helped him a little bit.
Would it be fair to say you're the Nick Saban
of Hollywood
more or less.
We'll go back back to the directors.
Why do you think that their experiences here
led to the careers in filmographies that we've seen?
What was it that they experienced here and took from
working with you
that that helped them become the legends that they eventually
became?
It was. It's partially because I was a director myself.
I directed around 60 films,
so I was able to talk to them as an
older director.
Whereas most producers have come up from other
other areas, very few directors become producers.
I became a producer just because I got older and
I thought,
I don't want to work that hard.
I'll be a producer now instead of a director.
So I was able to talk to them saying things
like I did to Ron Howard.
This is something I did when there was a change
of light and I'm able to talk to them from
a director standpoint.
For instance, with Ron Howard,
I was talking about pre production planning and I said
what you do not want to do is walk in
to walk on the set on the first day of
shooting and stand there and think where am I going
to put the camera?
You walk on the set having known
in advance where you're putting the camera.
And I remember Ron did this better than anybody I've
ever seen.
We were shooting in the house in Brentwood and in
the living room.
He came in and he said the camera goes on
a Dolly here.
It's got a 30 lens
of the woman who played his mother.
In happy days I've forgotten.
Her name will come through that door as she moves
to the couch.
The camera is going to Dolly from this point here,
to this point here, dolling and panting to that point.
She will sit down At that point we will cut
and we'll go in for a close up.
I'm going to get a cup of coffee.
Let me know when you're ready.
And I thought, brilliant. Ron has done a couple of
things.
He's let him know he knows what he's doing,
but he also did it
cleanly and pleasantly. He wasn't pushing orders or doing anything,
but he wasn't saying I'm a beginner help me,
he says. I'm a beginner as a director,
but I know what I'm doing.
When you look at that list of names you just
mentioned,
you know, you have James Cameron,
Scorsese Colts. Oh, I forgot Jim Cameron,
His Academy Award. I mean you're these are these are
the the Titans of the industry and how does it
make you feel
you know looking back on that,
on that legacy of being there
for these guys hiring them early in their careers.
What does what emotion does that inspire in you?
I'm very pleased.
I'm happy for them. I've remained on good
terms with them. We're all friends you know we our
paths go different ways.
I'm still very close friends with some of them and
just vaguely friends with others,
and I'm totally delighted with the success they've had.
What advice would you give to your 20 year old
self?
All right? If I were 20 and starting,
I would try to go to a film school.
I and most of my contemporaries learned on the job.
It's best to learn in a film school.
You learn so much technically
that it would be my first choice If you can't
go to a film school,
and this is one of the ways the industry has
changed.
There are so many little pictures being made with
$2000 budgets where everybody chips in and has a piece
of the picture.
It's easy to get a job on one of those
pictures.
You get a job on one of those pictures and
you're doing two things.
You're doing your job, but secondly,
you are looking around at what everybody else is doing
and you're learning on the set at the same time
you're doing the job.
Is there anybody out there now
that you see
that is sort of reminds you of yourself
in terms of their approach to production and distribution and
marketing?
The business has changed so much that I couldn't be
me.
In other words, what I was able to do at
the in the late 50s when I started,
I couldn't do today because the business is different from
the late 50s.
But in regard to the business changing,
I would say probably Jason Blum.
Jason has been very successful doing things similar to me.
I've met him in
he's he's a nice guy and he's very bright and
he's done the low budget films.
He's going to continue with the low budget films.
But he did Whiplash a couple of years ago and
he's doing some big films as well.
Why is producing horror? It seems to be the most
solid business model in terms of being able to turn
a large profit on the small budget.
Why horror? There is always a market for horror films.
Now these things work cyclically.
Somebody has a big success with a horror film and
everybody rushes in to make horror films.
They make too many of them.
The public gets tired of them and the cycle turns
down,
but then somebody else will come along and make a
brilliant one and it'll move back up.
So horror is always there,
whether it's a hot commodity or let us say,
a cooler commodity. Also, it's something that is not dependent
upon stars,
so many films, you really need a name to sell
it for a horror film.
If the film is really horrific,
the film sells itself. Why are horror films
easily to make cheaply? Easy to make cheaply.
Very often you're in a haunted house,
you're in a small studio and you build three sets
and that's your picture.
Or you rent a house.
So the production problems are not great unless you choose
to make them bigger to enlarge the film.
And that's a matter of judgment as to how much
bigger I will make it.
But it's a film that can be made easily.
Talk about how, how, what's your advice in your sort
of take away from the
environment we're in now with YouTube and streaming,
all the different streaming platforms
would you be able to have done?
Obviously it's changed so much from when you started,
but how do you see this impacting the business of
film and and the business of trying to be a
filmmaker
in that area? I am
not giving advice. I'm looking for advice because neither I
nor anybody else to my knowledge,
really understands it. It's changing so fast that
as we speak, somebody out there somewhere is inventing a
new way
to distribute and exhibit films.
It is much more complicated because it used to be
really pretty simple.
You put your film in a theater and then you
sold it to television and that was it.
Now it's a matter of somebody I know in distribution
said I used to sell a picture for a dollar.
Now I sell it for 20 nickels,
meaning just that he's got to sell it in 20
different places to get the same amount of money that
he could get selling it in one,
in one place or two places.
How do you feel about your legacy as it stands
now,
as it continues? And what do you want it to
be?
Well, I think really in the history of Hollywood,
I will be a footnote.
But I would say I'm a filmmaker.
I I started as a writer that became a director,
then became a producer, and I had a distribution company
at one time.
I mentored or taught people who've gone on.
So just I worked in films.
That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the
time.
This has just been a a privilege and an honor
to talk to you.
And I know that our audience is going to is
going to really enjoy this.
So thank you so much,
Roger. Thank you.
OK,
that's taking it enough. Great.
Thank you so much. You're a good actor,
too.