Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, 1970-1983: An Oral History, Vol. 2

Preface

This project arose out of our shared affection for several low-budget films made for New World Pictures when Roger Corman owned the company, a period that stretched from 1970 to 1983. We approached numerous individuals who worked with Corman, including writers, composers, costume designers, production designers, directors, editors, actors and producers. So expansive and enthusiastic was the response that we decided, with support from our very patient publisher, to present this oral history in two volumes. Many, many, many people have given their precious time to helping us; they are Roger Corman, Julie Corman, Barbara Boyle, Lisa Reeve, Terry Finn, Jane Ruhm, Frances Doel, Cynthia Brown, Jesse Vint, Steve Carver, Allan Arkush, Joe Dante, Kent Beyda, Mark Helfrich, Jack Hill, Jon Davison, Jonathan Kaplan, Dick Miller, Lainie Miller, Michael Pressman, Paul Chihara, Barry Schrader, Alex Hadju, Joseph McBride, Linda Spheeris, Lewis Teague, John Sayles, Sandy Carey, Belinda Balaski, Mark Goldblatt, Durinda Wood, Sid Haig, Larry Bock, Grace Zabriskie, Allan Holzman, Susan Justin, Aaron Lipstadt, Robert Englund, Martin Kove, The Production Booth, Mike White, Rob St. Mary, April VeVea, Leslie Twitchell, Dixie State University College of Humanities & Social Sciences, Jenn Stewart, Stephen Lee, Dixie State University Library & Learning Services, Dianne Aldrich, Katie Armstrong, Lynzee Horsley, Autumn Nuzman, Megan Hill and Shon Beaumont. Special thanks to Shalece Garff for reviewing content in this volume.

THE EDITORS

Interviews

JULIE CORMAN

Interview by Stephen B. Armstrong

Stephen B. Armstrong: How did New World Pictures get started?

Julie Corman: Well, it was Roger’s idea to have a distribution company. It certainly wasn’t mine. His idea, as he explained it to me then, was that he wanted to start a distribution company that would make low-budget films and that we would grow to a point where the company could finance films that he would direct because he didn’t like the studios telling him what to do. Now directors have more control, but in those days they didn’t. The studios had made some changes that he didn’t really like in his films. A couple of things happened soon after New World’s start, which were very successful. Kind of by a fluke, Roger got the rights to Ingmar Bergman’s Cries & Whispers (1972). Everybody knew that Roger and New World made "those kinds of films," but then here was Bergman. And then Fellini, Truffaut, Kurosawa. I think that those directors were comfortable with Roger distributing their films because he was a director. They thought that he would take care of their work, and I think he did. He was very respectful.

SA: As Roger pursued these great films from Europe and Asia, Frank Moreno was acting as the purchasing representative?

JC: He was the sales manager.

SA: Who was it, then, who was out there looking at high-end films and saying I’ve seen this film, let’s go get it?

JC: Mostly Roger, though in the beginning it was Paul Kohner who came to him and said, "I want you to think about distributing Cries & Whispers." Subsequent to this, other directors and producers got to Roger with their films.

SA: Roger also was picking up films that had been produced stateside during that period. He released Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetbback’s Badasssss Song (1971). He also did some Larry Cohen films and a couple David Cronenberg pictures. The Melvin Van Peebles picture is often left off the New World filmographies.

JC: I think you’ll have to ask Roger about that.

SA: You started working with Roger as a UCLA graduate?

JC: I was given a job referral to be Roger’s assistant, but I didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t understand the job and found something else, and he hired someone else for that position. I had been an English major, so I was more involved with literature and not so much in film. I really got into film later. I stopped in Ireland on my way to Europe, and there were some problems with the picture Roger was doing, which was Von Richthofen and Brown (1971), and he asked if I would help. There were some major things that were difficult that I’d like to think I helped with.

SA: There was a pilot who got killed.

JC: Yes. Somebody took the plane up, illegally, and crashed. The Irish Air Corps was very upset. Anyway, then Roger said he wanted to do a gangster story. I said, Oh, I’ll look for something. I found The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, and then that became Boxcar Bertha (1972).

SA: —which is one of those films that people think is a New World release but isn’t.

JC: It was AIP. It was in production at the time New World started, but it was an AIP picture.

SA: You’d been an English major, but you moved into motion picture production. What happened?

JC: Well, I ended up working on Boxcar Bertha. To some extent, I was an associate producer. I found the project, worked on developing the script and worked all the way through production. But I wasn’t really headed to be a producer. That wasn’t my intention. Roger was starting the distribution company, and now we had all our assets in it. He said his idea was to pick up films and distribute them, but he couldn’t find enough to buy. That’s when New World started motion picture production. He asked me, "Look, I have too much going on, will you watch the money on this one, Night Call Nurses (1972)? I said, Yeah, okay. Roger went on, Now you need a director. And I said, Oh, well, I’ll call Marty Scorsese from Boxcar Bertha and see if he can recommend someone out of NYU. Marty recommended Jonathan Kaplan. Then Roger said, Well, now you need a production manager. I said, Oh, okay. I’ll call Gary Kurtz. Gary said, I’d really like to do that for you, but some friends of mine out of USC are making a movie, and I told them that if they got their money, I’d be their production manager." They did get their money, and that was American Graffiti (1973). Then Roger said, Well, you need a cameraman. He was sort of backing me into it. He was off making three films. I said, I can’t do this. I don’t really know how to produce. He said, I’ll be here if anything goes wrong. And then he was not available. I was kind of flying blind, but there were a lot of people around to help. There were production managers who were experienced. The director wasn’t–it was his first-time film. Then I went to the vendors, and I said, I don’t really know much about this, and I don’t think I’m ever going to do this again, but I am Roger’s wife, and I just want you to be sure that these people are not asking for things they don’t really need. And they said, Okay. That’s how I went at each stage.

Night Call Nurses turned out very successful. Roger said, Well, you need to do another one. He paired me with the same director for The Student Teachers (1973) because he thought we did a good job. I said, No. I’m never doing this again. This was too terrifying. What I realized, at the end of the day, was that anything could ruin a picture, even a bad prop. It just seemed too difficult to get any control. But I got talked into it. I still wasn’t comfortable. Then, for the third picture, Frances Doel’s husband, Clinton Kimbrough, wanted to direct. They were good friends of ours. Clinton Kimbrough was a really good actor; he did some things with Alfred Hitchcock that were amazing. I said, Well, I’d do that. I forget what the fourth one was, but I had some reason I wanted to do it. And by then, it was kind of what I did. It wasn’t until the ninth picture, which might have been Saturday the 14th (1981), where I thought I will always finish the movie.

SA: What was the film with Frances’s husband?

JC: The Young Nurses (1973).

SA: During the company’s earliest days, where did people work in advance of shooting? Steve Carver told me that he would edit at home on a machine that he borrowed from Francis Coppola. Was pre-production sort of scattered, and then people more or less convened when the cameras started rolling?

JC: In the beginning, we were over at smaller offices on Sunset. The production people would be in there if they had to be. I think we moved here into the Brentwood building in 1975. Then we built a studio—it actually had been a lumberyard—in Venice. Then there was plenty of room for everybody to spread out. The editing took place in various places. We had a screening room and an editing room here in this building and also at the studio. We were making, sometimes, fifteen movies a year.

SA: Stephanie Rothman did one of the first pictures for the company, The Student Nurses (1970). A lot of other enormously talented women were attached to New World Pictures, too.

JC: Stephanie took the job working as Roger’s assistant that I didn’t take. Actually, it didn’t come to the point of offering because I took a different job.

SA: There was also Barbara Peeters.

JC: Barbara Peeters was the production manager for Night Call Nurses. She also wrote Summer School Teachers (1974). She wrote my favorite feminist line of all time. This girl is talking to the coach, and she says: I don’t want to watch, I want to play. I really loved that. It was good to be involved in this period when women were beginning to make new ground. Roger’s lawyer before New World started, Barbara Boyle, was a woman. He has always felt that you could get women who are better and smarter for less money.

I really wanted to use women directors. But it was difficult in those days. Where would you find them? Where would you go? For example, I decided that Crazy Mama (1975) was going to be directed by a woman. I went to the AFI; they had a women’s directing program. Lee Grant had just been through it. Well, you know, from an actor to a director I think is a natural move. I knew Lee, and I loved her. Her whole history with the McCarthy hearings and her being the last person taken off the blacklist and what that meant for her career… It’s astonishing what Lee Grant did. She said, Yes, that she would direct it. Then she got a part in a TV series and did that instead.

Jonathan Demme ended up directing Crazy Mama, but not before I tried to get Shirley Clarke. That was really one of the more unfortunate things to happen because Shirley Clarke was brilliant. I loved Shirley Clarke, and I’m really sorry she’s not here anymore. But she was totally bamboozled by fast production. You know: We’re going to have a fifteen-day shoot. You’ve got to make all these decisions with the locations and all of that. People on the crew started coming and saying We can’t get answers out of Shirley, and we don’t know what to do about it. Everyone was really kind of struggling with her work. There’s a perception that I fired her. That’s not really what happened. I called her in and said, Shirley, you seem really uncomfortable and really unhappy here. And she said, Yeah, it’s not what I do.

SA: With The Lady in Red (1979), you had another strong story about women and with a female lead character, which was unusual for a low-budget gangster picture. Lewis Teague directed.

JC: We also had John Sayles for that one. John Sayles is a very intense student of history. He put things in that film that were astonishing, like the sadistic head of the factory workroom, how he treats the women and so on. Lewis Teague was a good director to take John Sayles’s work and do that.

FRANCES DOEL

Interview by Stephen B. Armstrong

Stephen B. Armstrong: There’s a story about Roger Corman coming to Oxford University and asking for the brightest student to work for him in America, and that was you.

Frances Doel: Yes. In 1964, I had graduated from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where I had a scholarship to read English language and literature. I was looking for a job, and I saw a notice on the appointments board saying: American producer wants assistant. I had no idea, quite honestly, what a producer was. I had no prior experience related to movies at all. In fact, I was more interested in the theater at that time. I’d seen only a handful of movies in my life. I don’t know why. I think it was a generational thing. My mother loved movies and had as a young woman before, during and after World War II gone to movies a lot. And I did not. But I was intent on not going into the Civil Service or Foreign Office or teaching. I wanted the experience of working outside England. I wanted adventure. Since I didn’t know what a producer was, I thought, Who knows? This might be interesting. I had an interview with Roger in London at the Mayfair Hotel.

He had queried my tutor about who was the best student. I think he was very disappointed in me because he quickly discovered that I couldn’t drive, and I’d never learned to type. At that time at Oxford, you weren’t allowed to type. You had to write your papers. I know it sounds strange, but so it was. And as I’d grown up in South London, I’d never needed to drive. I just went about by train and bus. He also asked, very seriously, why I had never passed an exam in math, to which I really had no answer except that I was a dolt, a math illiterate. He asked me what my interests were, and I told him, Writing and theater. He said, Well, I hope you didn’t come on this interview because you want to be an actress. Girls do that sort of thing. I felt quite indignant about that, really. If you came to work for me, he said, you wouldn’t be doing anything like that. You would be doing location scouting. I had no idea what that meant. Anyway, he pointed out that American girls had a lot more initiative and that he was going to interview some American girls. And that was that.

So then—I would say three months later—just after I had accepted a job at Penguin Books, I got a telegram from Los Angeles saying The job is now open. Get a visa, and leave immediately. Time is of the essence. It was followed by a letter, probably sent by a temporary secretary, I imagine, explaining that the prior assistant, an American, had had a nervous breakdown, so the job was now open. I got the visa, and it took a little more time than Roger wanted, but I arrived in Los Angeles. I had never flown before, and I didn’t know anybody, so it was exactly the kind of adventure I’d been looking for, although I had no idea what I was going to be doing. I was met at LAX by the assistant of Roger’s brother, Gene, and she was very nice to me. She drove me to the Hollywood Studio Club, where I would be staying. It was a really lovely building designed by Julia Morgan, specifically intended and built for actresses and would-be starlets. Roger put me there because it had a twenty-four-hour switchboard, and he would be able to get me at any time. I could easily walk to Columbia Studios at Gower and Sunset, as well, where he had his offices.

SA: This was in 1964?

FD: It was December 1964 when I came over here.

SA: What was the initial work that Roger had you do? There was location scouting?

FD: I didn’t do any of that initially. I did purely secretarial work, at least I would describe it that way. Basically, I was the receptionist. I did typing, filing, errands, fetching breakfast or coffee