Name: Roger Corman on Letterman, September 1, 1982
Uploaded: 2019-07-14T17:44:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Roger Corman on Letterman, September 1, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-14. Transcript available. Roger Corman offers a retrospective of his career as a filmmaker.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Roger Corman on Letterman, September 1, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-14. Transcript available. Roger Corman offers a retrospective of his career as a filmmaker.

Welcome back to the show.
In a filmmaking career that has spanned over 30 years,
my next guest is the man responsible for such cinematic classics as
The House of Usher, Wild Angels, The Monster from the Ocean Floor,
The Attack of the Crab Monsters, Little Shop of Horrors, and hundreds of others.
A great many of his films are considered cult favorites,
and many of their stars are now the biggest names in Hollywood.
Please welcome Roger Corman.
That's an impressive list.
We have others.
We have Monster from the Ocean Floor, Stakeout on Dope Street,
The Battle of Blood Island, Queen of Blood, The Wasp Woman,
The Viking Women, Teenage Caveman.
Now, now, there I must break in.
The picture Teenage Caveman was never made.
I made a picture called Prehistoric World that for one wild week,
the distributors changed the title to Teenage Caveman.
When nobody came, they changed the title back to Prehistoric World.
So we can still maybe shoot one later tonight and use the title.
Yes, the title is still available.
It's interesting.
How does it feel when people, there are books written about these movies
and they refer to you as the king of schlock and they treat these films as
being silly?
How do you react?
I like the guy who laughed out there.
How does that affect you?
Well, I kind of like the books.
That's very nice.
And a certain amount of lecturing goes with it.
It's the feeling that maybe I'm becoming an elder statesman that I'm not so
totally pleased with.
And now you're doing other things.
You're helping to distribute The Tin Drum, Breaker Morant,
and films that may be considered the other end of the scale, huh?
Yes, we have a number of art films we're distributing.
As a matter of fact, this fall, we're going to open Fitzcarraldo.
It's going to be in the New York Film Festival,
and it won Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
So we're very pleased with that particular film.
Now, earlier I mentioned that we could use this title and shoot a film after
the show.
You actually did that kind of schedule of shooting films, didn't you?
Pretty quickly.
Yes, most of the films, the ones you're referring to, were the earlier ones.
I was shooting on schedules of anywhere from 5 to 10 days
and budgets of anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000, the big time.
5 to 10 days?
Right.
What's the least amount of shooting you had for a movie?
Well, there was a picture called The Little Shop of Horrors
that I shot in two days and a night.
And there's a musical off-Broadway based upon it playing now.
And was this the one that Jack Nicholson was in?
Yes, right.
And I believe we have some footage of this particular film,
and we might as well take a look at this now.
This is, what was the date on this, 1959 or so?
In that area, yeah.
A Little Shop of Horrors,
and I think we're actually going to see a bit of Mr. Nicholson
in the Roger Corman classic.
The patient came to me with a large hole in his abdomen caused by a fire poker
used on him by his wife.
He almost fled to death and gangrene had set in.
I didn't give him much of a chance.
There were other complications.
The man had cancer, tuberculosis, leprosy, and a touch of the grip.
I decided to operate.
My patient just left.
You could come in now.
Most people don't like to go to the dentist,
but I rather enjoy it myself.
Yeah.
Now, no, no, Bacaine.
It dulls the senses.
This is going to hurt you more than it is me.
Oh, goody, goody.
Here it comes.
Oh, my God.
Don't stop now.
That's amazing.
Most of these films actually did really well at the box office, didn't they?
Yes, most of them did very well, as a matter of fact.
And who were some of the other people besides Jack Nicholson?
This must be an endless list,
who you used and later surfaced as huge worldwide stars.
Well, let me see.
Of the actors, there was Bobby De Niro, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern,
a number of others, the names escaped me,
a number of directors also.
Francis Coppola, Marty Scorsese, Irv Kirshner,
Peter Bogdanovich, a number of others.
Oh, as a matter of fact, Charlie Bronson.
I forgot the first picture.
Let's take a look.
We actually have some photos here.
Will you go away first?
Yeah, come back.
Okay, well, we're going to pause for a commercial,
then we'll take a look at the photographs of the films
with Mr. Roger Corman.
We'll be right back.
Talking to Roger Corman, we just saw a clip of the movie.
Again, what was the name of that?
Oh, Little House of Horrors?
Little Shop of Horrors.
Little Shop of Horrors.
Let me ask you a couple of questions.
How does Jack Nicholson react to that part now?
Have you spoken with him recently?
Oh, he speaks very well of it.
He considers it to be one of the high points of his early career.
And the dentist was wearing a scarf.
Any reason for that?
Because he's not actually a dentist.
It's a very involved plot.
He has actually murdered the dentist.
Oh, I see.
This is a comedy.
And he's killed the dentist and is masquerading as the dentist
until he can get rid of the body.
Meanwhile, Jack is a masochist who likes to come to the dentist's office,
comes while he is still trying to get rid of the body.
We're sometimes...
That's fairly involved.
You have to keep it straight here.
Now, these were made very cheaply, weren't they?
Now, why...
I mean, I suppose if you had a choice, you'd rather have a bigger budget,
but why did you make so many inexpensive films?
Well, for one thing, I didn't have very much money,
and I was financing some of the films myself.
And also, I did a lot of films for American International Pictures,
which was a small company at the time,
and they didn't have too much money either,
so it was kind of forced upon us.
And some of these scripts, did you always have scripts?
We generally had scripts.
I would say most of the time there was something there to work with.
Sometimes we would go in with...
I wouldn't say we never went into production with no script,
but sometimes we went in with the first draft script
that we were rewriting as we were going along.
It sounds dangerous, but I'm also guessing it was a lot of fun, wasn't it?
Yes, it was.
It was very stimulating, a little nerve-wracking occasionally.
All right, now let's take a look at some of these photographs.
These were taken, I guess these are production stills,
taken from the films that were being done?
Yes, that was Machine Gun Kelly,
with Charlie Bronson playing one of his first leads.
He was very, very good,
and that was a film that got a certain amount of acclaim in Europe.
It established Charlie something of a star in Europe
and brought me to the attention of some European critics.
All right.
And here we have...
Now that was Prehistoric World,
known briefly as Teenage Caveman,
with Bobby Vaughn, Robert Vaughn,
playing his first lead over there.
Uh-huh.
All right.
This was Five Guns West,
which is the first film I ever directed.
I had a big schedule on that, nine days.
The circle is around Mike Connors.
He was known at that time as Touch Connors.
This was in the days of...
His agent represented, let me see,
Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Race Gentry,
a number of...
Race Gentry?
Race Gentry was one of the up-and-coming stars at the time,
and he gave Mike the name Touch,
and Mike used it for about a year,
and then he said, I've got to get rid of this,
and he became Mike Connors immediately.
All right.
There he is again, Touch.
Is anybody working now like you used to,
making the kind of films you used to make?
Not really.
It's very difficult today.
Now, this is The Terror,
with Boris Karloff and, again, Jack Nicholson.
That was a picture in which I really did not have a script.
We used the sets left over from The Raven,
which I had done for AIP,
and Jack was one of the leads in The Raven
with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Peter Lorre.
And I was supposed to play tennis one weekend,
and it rained,
and we wrote the script that afternoon
and shot that section in two days.
That's amazing.
Now, how long,
if somebody went to see one of your films,
how long would it be?
Oh, these were normal films.
90 minutes?
Yeah, 80 to 90 minutes,
somewhere in that area,
maybe 95 sometimes.
All right.
Now, this is a good casting pair.
Right.
Ray Moland and Don Rickles.
A great comedy team.
Now, that was Don's first picture,
and weirdly enough,
he was very nervous.
I never would have believed
that one of my jobs as a director
would be to calm down Don Rickles
and tell him,
everything's going to be okay, Don,
you're doing fine.
You know, these films are,
they're sort of silly now,
but everybody has nothing but the highest regard
for you and your work,
and it's,
they're good B-movies.
I don't know how to explain it exactly,
but they're a quality effort for,
well, brilliance on a budget
is the name of the book, isn't it?
Yes.
Pretty much described it.
I'll go along with that.
All right.
This is,
this is Bobby De Niro,
the glue snipper.
He played one of the sons
of Ma Barker,
the great female gangster
of the 1930s.
That's his mother,
Shelly Winters,
in the background there.
Yeah.
And Bobby was working
on something of his own.
He was ostensibly building
model airplanes.
Building model airplanes.
And as always,
kids,
don't try this at home.
All right.
And I think this may be
just the same film.
That was,
that's a still
of Ma Barker
and her four sons.
Shelly and I cast the sons,
and they've all gone on
to do very well,
and we're very pleased with them.
This is Clint Kimbrough,
who's become a director
on one side,
and then Bobby Walden,
who's on the Lou Grant show.
Don Stroud,
who's played more co-star roles
than anybody his age
in Hollywood.
And De Niro,
again,
on the left.
Good heavens.
They were a very,
very good family.
That's amazing.
Now,
some of the directors
that you've given work to,
their first or second project,
have then turned around
and cast you in films.
You've been in several
important movies,
haven't you?
Right.
When Francis Coppola
did The Godfather,
I was cast as the junior senator
on the crime
investigating committee,
and then I worked
a couple of times
for a few other directors
as well.
It's funny,
you're such a pleasant man,
it's hard to associate you
with, well,
Attack of the Crab Monsters
or The Beast
with a Million Eyes,
but it's a lot of fun,
isn't it?
Right,
and you never know
what's going on
in the back
of somebody's mind.
Now you're a big film executive,
do you miss this activity?
Yes,
it really was fun
when we were doing those.
I was younger,
we were playing
with low budgets,
and some of the films
really were done
almost as jokes
to see if we could do a film,
see if I could do a film
in two days
for $30,000.
Now we're spending
a little bit more money,
matter of fact,
quite a bit more money,
and it becomes
a little more serious.
Do you think
that the motion picture industry
will ever go back
to courting those
really, really cheap movies
because of the budgets
getting out of hand now?
I think some of the budgets
will retreat.
Some of the $30, $40,
$50 million budgets
have been losing
$20, $30, $40 million
and somebody's got
to call a halt,
but it can never go back
to where it was.
One, inflation has been
a factor,
but even discounting inflation,
I think the various economics,
which I can get into
at the moment,
work against that kind of film.
Well, it's a pleasure
meeting you.
Truly a legend
in motion pictures,
ladies and gentlemen,
Roger Corman.
Thank you, Roger.
Thank you, too.
We'll be back
with cult figure Viva.
Thank you.