Roger’s Retrospective: 13 Of Corman’s Producing And Distribution Favorites

For this proto-gore film, Corman hired Francis (The Godfather) Coppola, his assistant on The Young Racers, to make his directorial debut. The made-in-Ireland shocker almost went out with a shorter moniker, however. 

“We liked the title Dementia, but after we made the picture, we found out there was a little picture called Dementia that used the name,” Corman remembered. “So I was trying to think of what could I do to stay with the title Dementia, and then I thought, ‘What about Dementia 13? It’s an unlucky number.’ So, I called Francis and told him the situation and said, ‘Is there anything you can put in during looping, a line or something, that the crazed killer had something happen to him when he was 13 years old and that’s what set him up on this path?’ Francis said, ‘Sure I can do that.’ So that’s how Dementia became Dementia 13.’”

Corman also presented an ideal opportunity to another young employee, Peter Bogdanovich, who later garnered raves and award nominations for directing The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. 

“On The Raven,” Corman explained, “there was a situation with Boris Karloff involving his contract in which he may or may not have owed me a couple of extra days of shooting. We worked something out where I would pay him a little bit of money, and he would give me a few extra days of shooting [scenes which became The Terror]. [A few years later], Peter Bogdanovich was my assistant, so I talked to Peter and he came up with a really good idea. Boris would play a horror picture star, and we would use some of the footage from The Terror for that, and then his character gets involved in a real-life horror situation [a sniper massacre]. It was a very, very good script and a good picture. Targets was Peter’s first picture and really demonstrated his ability. I did that independently, and I sold it to Paramount.”

For this H.P. Lovecraft adaptation toplining a pre-Quantum Leap Dean Stockwell, Corman promoted one of his key creative people. “American International Pictures wanted me to do another of the Poe-type films,” said Corman, who previously helmed eight such movies for AIP. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll produce one for you, but I don’t want to direct.’ So I asked Danny Haller, who had been my art director on all the Poe films and who I thought was very good, to direct the film. We shot it in Mendocino in Northern California, and Danny did a really good job.”

In 1970, Corman established his own distribution outfit, New World Pictures. The company later scored one of its hugest hits with this Paul Bartel-directed drive-in staple, which co-starred novice actor Sylvester Stallone. 

“Death Race won a poll as the greatest B picture of all time,” Corman said proudly. “The thing got wonderful reviews and was a big success. George Miller, who did Mad Max: Fury Road, saw Death Race in Australia and said, ‘I can make one of those,’ and he made [the first] Mad Max, which frankly was a better picture. There’s been some comment that The Hunger Games has been taken from Death Race, and I agree. These ideas are sort of in the air, but the storyline of The Hunger Games is startlingly similar to Death Race 2000.”

While heading New World, Corman acquired numerous easily marketed genre flicks, such as this horror/sci-fi hybrid, written and directed by It’s Alive’s Larry Cohen. 

“We didn’t finance it,” Corman said of God Told Me To, which features Andy Kaufman (yes, that Andy Kaufman!) as a psychotically possessed policeman in a small role. “Larry Cohen made it himself, and we picked it up as a straight distribution deal. Larry is a much underrated writer/director. I remember looking at God Told Me To and thinking, ‘For a low-budget film, this is really superior to most low-budget films.’ I picked it up simply on that basis.”

Likewise, Corman’s company took a shine to this Canadian acquisition, an early effort from one of the genre’s most distinctive auteurs. “David Cronenberg came in, and we had a meeting,” Corman remembered. “We talked with [lead actress] Marilyn Chambers, and I knew she was a porn star, but I didn’t know what to expect. She came in rather demurely dressed and spoke very nicely and very intelligently; I was just surprised by her persona. The film was very good and a major success for us.”

Steven Spielberg rates Piranha as his preferred Jaws rip-off. “A Japanese woman, Chako van Leeuwen, came to me with the script, and she had half the financing,” Corman recalled of the film’s genesis. “She asked me if I would produce it with her, and then I would release it through New World. I really didn’t like the script, so I brought in John Sayles to rewrite it and Joe Dante to direct. It was Joe’s first film that he directed by himself. I’ve always liked Piranha because it had a lot of humor in it and the right amount of horror. It was a big success for New World, and it led to I don’t know how many Piranhas have been done since.”

Two years after Rabid struck a bloody nerve with audiences, New World unleashed one more smart but gruesome Cronenberg film in the U.S., this one about a scientist’s rage experiments which spawn deadly mutant children. 

“The Brood was another film [Cronenberg] had done himself, and I did the distribution,” Corman noted. “Once again, it was clear that David was a major talent, and the work was just above what you expect on low-budget films. [As distributors] we were constantly looking for that, looking for the film or the person or something that lifted it above the normal type of film.”

Never one to discriminate, Corman hired a woman, Barbara Peeters, to direct one of the era’s most notorious grindhouse movies. 

“[Producer Martin B. Cohen] had a script and half the money and suggested that I put up the other half, co-produce it and distribute it,” Corman remembered of this racy monster movie. “In this case, it was a good script we didn’t have to rewrite. We shot in this old town in Mendocino in Northern California. I told the director, ‘Barbara, remember, the theme of this is very simple: The humanoids kill the men and rape the women.’ And she said, ‘Got it, they kill men and rape the women.’ She shot the killing of the men in the goriest possible way, but for the raping of the women, she had shadows on the rocks [simulating] movement. I said, ‘Barbara, the killing of the men is so gory it’s almost an X, but there’s nothing here for the raping of the women.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought it was more artistic that way.’ So we had the second unit director go back and shoot additional footage of the women.”

Before he became “King of the World” with Terminator, Aliens, Titanic and Avatar, James Cameron worked in the New World Pictures art department on the likes of Battle Beyond the Stars and this Alien clone, another prime example of typical Corman recycling. 

“We had built a really good spaceship for Battle Beyond the Stars, and the spaceship was so good I had the script for Galaxy of Terror written to fit that spaceship,” said Corman of the film, whose eclectic cast included Happy Days’ Erin Moran, My Favorite Martian’s Ray Walston and a young Robert Englund. “Actually, I think we used it three times!”

The producer indulged his feminist streak once more with his hirees on this “sleazefest with a brain.” 

“That film was written by a woman, novelist Rita Mae Brown, and Amy Jones directed it,” noted Corman. “The idea was it was going to be a girls’ slasher movie, but we didn’t want it to be exploitation of the slasher movie genre. They created a very intelligent film with humor in it. It had all the elements of that type of film, but was superior to it simply because of the two of them. For a low-budget horror film, Slumber Party Massacre was one of the best. I got a little bit of a reputation for hiring so many women in key spots. It wasn’t really an attempt to foster the women’s movement; it was to say, ‘I want the best available person and I don’t care whether it’s a man or a woman.’”

Corman’s subsequent Concorde-New Horizons shingle provided an endless stream of action, horror and sci-fi movies to satiate the growing VHS and cable TV demands of the late ’80s and ’90s. This doomed pregnancy chiller, starring Brooke Adams, Kathy Griffin (!) and Friends’ Lisa Kudrow (!!), rose above the litter. 

“Again, I took one of my story assistants, Rodman Flender, and [gave him] his first film as a director,” Corman said. “I’ve always thought The Unborn is a much underrated film. It was very successful for us. It didn’t get as much attention as some of the others, but it started Rodman on a good career as a director.”

Corman later settled into a comfortable home at Syfy, producing a plethora of Saturday night creature features for the cable channel. “The first ones all started with me,” explained Corman, who won an honorary Academy Award in 2010 for his “rich engendering of films and filmmakers.” 

“They began with Dinocroc, then Supergator and then Dinoshark. Syfy called me one time and said, ‘Roger, you’ve come up with every title, we’ve got one for you.’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ And they said, ‘Sharktopus, and do you want to make it?’ And I said, ‘No!’ And they said, ‘What do you mean you don’t want to make it?!’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a theory, which is that you can go up to a certain limit of insanity with these titles and the audience is with you, but if you go over what I might call the acceptable level of insanity, then they turn on you.’ Sharktopus maybe went over the acceptable level of insanity, but one thing led to another, and I made the picture. It had the biggest rating of the year for Syfy.”

For more Corman love, read our celebration of The Little Shop of Horrors, the film that perhaps best encapsulates the genre giant's maverick approach, cultural impact, and sense of humor.