CREEMEDIA

Some people might wonder what all the fuss is about. Certainly, after catching Attack Of The Crab Monsters (’56) or War Of The Satellites (’58) on the tube, the idea that their director, Roger Corman, might be the focus of cultish admiration and in certain circles nonchalantly referred to as a genius may seem too ludicrous to believe. But it’s true. To understand this it helps, a little, to have seen Corman’s movies when they were first released, to have experienced them in the full innocence of a 50’s childhood when the sight of a paper mach£ crab monster could excite seemingly profound emotions, or in the full confusion of a 60’s adolescence when bcith Edgar Allan Poe and the Hell’s Angels yielded sympathetic icons—profound and sympathetic enough, anyway, for one to look back years later and, in an effort at justification, find a deliberate artist at work. It helps even more to be familiar with the entire Corman oeuvre, since even if you can’t quite discern the hand of genius in such dismal entertainments as She Gods Of Shark Reef (’56) or Ski Troop Attack (’60), you have to cop the brilliance of his career.. .a career which represents not so much the triumph of art over commerce, as of spunky individualism over economic prohibitions. A classic American success story.

Our hero decided to become a director after a script he had sold was made into a movie that bore little resemblance to his original conception (Highway Dragnet [’54] —specifically, his neat climax had been fumbled). After some initial freelancing he hitched his star to the newly formed American Releasing Corporation, soon to become American International Pictures (AIP) where, assured of steady work and with his artistic vision inviolate (such as it was—the movies he intended to make were to be pulpish to the marrow, ten days and $80,000 being the average schedule and budget) he made films in all the disreputable genres including gangster, western, and teen exploitation. But it was the horror and SF ones that were best served by his pithy approach, the genres where reach of the imagination counts at least as much as the size of the budget. By age 30, having directed eight movies in ’56 alone (including the legendary It Conquered The World which was remade, though not by Corman, in ’68 as the equally mood enhancing Zontar: The Thing From Venus), he was the established King of the B’s, the Titan of Tawdry, the Cheops of Cheap—you get the idea.

Corman capped this phase of his career with a masterful satiric trilogy created with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith—Bucket Of Blood (’59), Little Shop Of Horrors (’60—shot in two days), and Creature From The Haunted Sea (’60). That these audacious spoofs met with only middling financial success upset the maestro as did the failure of his only effort at Kramerian social relevance, The Intruder (’62)—after this drama of racial conflict in the South stiffed at the box office he declared, “you will never see my political or philosophical beliefs blatantly in a film of mine.. .after the heartbreak I experienced with The Intruder you have to dig for them.” Fair enough. The movies to dig during the next decade were the Poe flicks, most of which centered around the overripe horror of Vincent Price chewing the scenery supplied by the cleverly concealed but still rather low budgets. Also notable were those two archetypical counterculture riffs, The Wild Angels (’66) and The Trip (’67).

Restless as usual and now justly famous, Corman tried his hand at working with iarger budgets. With Gas-s-s-s! (’69) and Von Richthofen and Brown (’70—and his last directorial effort to date) he found himself back where he began, without autonomy, as nervous studios (AIP, UA) re-cut the films to adhere to their insipid standards of what constituted a possible commercial success. Unable to escape the low-budget ghetto without interference, he retaliated by forming New World Pictures which, during the next decade, distributed domestic hijinks (Deathrace 2000 [’75], Rock ’n’ Roll High Schoo/[79]), Filipino weirdness (TNT Jackson [’74], The Big Doll House [’71]) and foreign “art” films (Cries And Whispers [’72], Amarcord [’74], ’80’s The Tin Drum). Corman was content to run things but not direct, and it seems apt for someone so in tune with his times that his reckless art flourished modestly in the 50’s, garishly in the 60’s, and anti-climatically, thru subterfuge, in the 70’s. The word now is that he wants to return to directing and though it’s possible that Corman carte blanche may not be as interesting as Corman on a budget, that having less restrictions to overcome he’ll be merely dully exploitative, still, the Zeitgeist is right for a Corman comeback—in these newly repressive times, with reactionary mad slashers on screen and in power, we need a more representative expression of our collective and rebellious subconscious. Whatever that may turn out to be.

A hefty part of Corman’s legend centers around the distinguished film folk who apprenticed with the master—Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne, Martin Scorcese, are a small part of this impressive list—and Ed Naha, in his excellent book, has gone to some of these alumni, as well as Corman himself, for this story. The fact that it is an excellent book is a pleasant surprise since Naha’s previous non-fiction works—Horrors: From Screen To Scream and The Science Fictionary —were jejune, fannish surveys rife with factual error. Here, his nondescript style works well as, unburdened by esoteric exegesis, the book quickly gets down to the meat of the matter, the anecdotes.

The anecdotists include Samuel Z. Arkoff, c'o-founder and former president of A1P, your basic plain speaking mini-mogul, somewhere between delightfully acerbic and obnoxiously crude, who puts things in a sane perspective: “It used to crack me up when somebody would write a long dissertation on one of Roger’s movies.. .Roger gets more pained than I do when people talk about all this art crap.”; Richard Matheson, who scripted most of the Poe pictures, and who opines “(Corman) was a camera director. He was most concerned wjith the visuals”—a statement which, as in the case of Hitchcock and Kubrick, explains a number of abysmal performances: Peter Fonda, who tells of his involvement with The Wild Angels and The Trip in a remembrance which, liberally sprinkled with old time hipsterisms, sounds like it might have been taped around ’67; and of course Corman, who knows he’s a cult figure but is humble about it—“A lot of people see these films today and ask me if I knew I was being existential. No. I was primarily aware that I was in trouble... shooting with hardly any money and less time.”—and appropriately droll, summing up one early effort with “Occasionally, one of the hands would fall off the creature, but aside from that it was a very smooth production.”

There’s a lot here; hey, I didn’t even mention Bloody Mama (’69) or XThe Man With The X-Ray Eyes (’63) or Not Of This Earth (’56) or the original title-tells-all movie The Saga Of The Viking Women And Their Voyage To The Waters Of The Great Sea Serpent (’57), all of it neatly done. There are a few mistakes—Tower Of London (’62) was not a swashbuckler, Poe wrote a story called “Hop Frog” not “Hop Toad” —and due to the book’s format, an anecdotal history followed by an anecdotal filmography, some anecdotes get repeated (Jack Nicholson’s statement that The Terror (’63) is the only film he’s ever made that didn’t have a plot is repeated three times). But the pictures are fresh, the anecdotes interesting, the filmography, with cast and crew listings, exhaustive and, so, the book recommended. It’s a well-done tribute to a man who Naha, in one of his more memorable phrases, describes as “a combination of visionary, master accountant, and used car salesman.”

Tube Stars Behind Bars

PRISONER: CELL BLOCK H

(syndicated by Network 10)

CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!

CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!

CLANK! CLA—hey, what is this, a Krokus gig? Counting time at the Australian treasury? Lou Ferrigno typing a savage Rock-A-Rama about the Incredible String Band?

Nope—the sound is tin cups on iron bars, and you’re on hand for the biggest entertainment development since the Shakers invented the swivel chair: Cell Block H, the soap opera for people who despise soap operas.

This Australian production stands out from among the other serials like an intelligence concession at Marineland. For starters, Cell Block is the first soap in the history of sanitation canals to move faster than “reality.” None of those three day glances or characters that go upstairs for six months. Some episodes cover three or four days in one 30-minute show. If actual time want that fast, you could blink and miss beautician,’s school. If you’re lucky.

Another plus is the absence of standard soap stereotyping (i.e. good girl/bad girl, decent citizen/Neil Young). Instead, the cagey Aussies provide us with all-new stereotypes! Maybe you’ve seen them in Cagney movies, but not wearing rather adorable blue pantsuits and muttering “cor blimey” all the time.

The only sore spot so far has been the yahoo promos for ths show. Women behind bars! Action in the showers! Kill the dirty lezzies! But the writers not only handle the gay angle without sensationalism, they deal with it better than our own network soaps tickle the pickle of heterosexual love. It’s just not a particularly sleazy production. Grimy? Oh yes. Smutty? For sure. But sleazy? Well, sometimes.

The inmates at Wentworth—a strictly bubblegum detention center somewhere in Emuland—even look like real prisoners. Most of them are fat, all of them are mean and they all smoke so much, the air looks like tank parachutes.

Bea Smith, self-proclaimed top poochie, will not remind you of Aunt Bea. She’s a 250-pound Volvo of a woman with a sly, contagious sense of humor. She’s in for murdering her hubby and his lover, a crime for which she would have been rewarded her own mini-series if she was a man.

Lizzie, sometimes referred to as Dopy, is the 60-odd-year-old Granny of the stir. Her cavernous, lived-in wrinkles combine with dead jeep gray hair to create a head that looks like an owl eating a big prune.

Judy and Doreen are an on again/off again lesbian couple. Doe has cuter ’n’ a tick written all over her many regions of baby fat despite her constant whining. Friendly blimp Jude is the prison Mom. In fact, when her own daughter was briefly detained at Wentworth, she got to room with Jude because Mommies are gentler with the broomstick.

And let’s not forget Margo with the Marianne Faithfull haircut and a nose that demands to be called The Beak.

The screws lack the playful sadism of “real life” guards with the exception of Vera, a cartoon dyke the cons all call Vinegar Tits. Really! Right on TV! Turns out she’s a real hot mama though, when she diddles her way into an affair with new screw Terry, a jerk otherwise known as Dave Danger. Finally, there’s Mr. Fletcher AKA The Prick. He is, too.

One typical story line began with Dave D., Dopy, Beaky, Prick and Tick in the rec room, rec-ing, when who should turn up in the joint but Terry’s ex-wife, Kathy. She’s being hotly pursued by The Mob, who want to make her stand in the corner forever.

In a mere two weeks, Cell Block covered her entire 90-day visit and most of the subplots that sprouted from it. This includes a breakout, a fire, a hunger strike two pregnancies, two botched marriages, several trials, Smith’s fake amnesia and what happens when Margo calls her Royal Jelly Belly. It’s too frank and disgusting for you guys who are right now reading this at 7-11. Let’s just say she learned the hard way that you can’t play the clarinet with swollen glands.

At the end of her stay at Wentworth, Kathy sets fire to the laundry, then V.Tits and then finally steals all the feathers from the warden’s bottom drawer— anything to stay in the pokey, safe from gangsters. But good old Terry pulls some strings to assure her release. Thanks Terry! She’s not ten feet outside the prison gate when a big black sedan zooms by and runs her over. Oops, thinks Terry. Sorry Hon!

It’s hard to say whether this maverick syndic soap will attain much popularity here, although it’s made definite inroads among the trash set. What the producers ought to do is bring Bea over here to do some talk shows. They’ll love her, or else Lizzie’s aberrant litter behavior would be quaint city and the theme song—a limpid Maureen McGovern soundalike involving flowers, raindrops, sun-shines, bla bla bla—is just sickening enough to tear up the U.S. charts.

OK. Now, all you home viewers get out your tin cups and start banging them on your bars, chains, TV grill, etc. CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLA—good job, now we don’t have to listen to any more Rose Tattoo records!

Rick Johnson

Celluloid Flotsam

ROCK ON FILM

by David Ehrenstein and Bill Reed

(Delilah)

This book wants to be the definitive work on rock music’s role in motion pictures. It’s rather scholastic in nature, and the way each chapter ends with a list of “Subjects for further research” makes it seem as though authors Ehrenstein and Reed have delusions of the book being used as a reference text in film classes. It is like a condensed, rock version of the text books required in my college “History Of Motion Picture” courses.

Unfortunately, for a book to be “definitive” and “scholastic,” it must first get its facts straight, and Rock On Film is very lax when it comes to factual accuracy. Now, it may seem like nitpicking to complain that Lesley Gore’s name is misspelled (“Leslie Gore”) on a page that directly faces a poster for Ski Party which features the correct spelling, and it’s probably trivial to complain that Micky Dolenz’s name is Micky and not “Mickey.”

However, there is no excuse for the other factual errors, many of which refer to films released during the past several years.

•The authors are correct in praising the train baggage compartment scene in A Hard Day’s Night as a “brilliantly staged musical number.” However, the Fab Four performed “I Should Have Known Better” in that scene (I’ll never forget it!), and not “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You.”

•The Kids Are Alright didn’t feature any form of narration, let alone “Ringo Starr’s On-screep narration.”

•Rust Never Sleeps did not feature “snippets from Woodstock, including the scene of Jimi Hendrix playing the National Anthem.”, Selections from the Woodstock soundtrack were played at various times during the concert from which the film was taken, but there were no “scenes” from the Woodstock film.

•Bruce Springsteen didn’t perform “Stay” and “Devil With The Blue Dress On” in the No Nukes film. Those are the Springsteen selections on the No Nukes LP. In the movie, Springsteen performed “The River,” “Thunder Road” and a portion of “Quarter To Three.”

It’s apparent from the final item that Ehrenstein and Reed either didn’t see the film or have very poor memories. If they can’t get their facts straight on films released less than three years ago, how can they expect us to trust what they have to say about Rock, Rock, Rock or Mister Rock And Roll, both from 1957?

Finally, I think Ehrenstein and Reed miss the trash appeal element of many rock films. They can condemn Riot On Sunset Strip all they want for its terrible storyline and its Mike Curb soundtrack (I don’t care what his politics are, Curb’s “Blues Theme” from The Wild Angels is still a great song!), but who wants to see the Chocolate Watchband and the Standells in a tasteful, high class, big budget film?

But I shouldn’t be too harsh on these guys. When they’re good (i.e., their review of Rock !N’ Roll High School), they’re very good. They do seem to have their hearts in the right places, and there’s a definite need for this type of book.

If they would only correct their errors, fix the index which doesn’t correspond to the correct pages, and include some of their omissions (James Dean isn’t mentioned once in the entire book!), Rock On Film could rate a close third to Greil Marcus’s essay on rock movies in Rolling Stone’s Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll and Philip Jenkinson & Alan Warner’s excellent but out-of-print Celluloid Rock. Or better yet, maybe some enterprising publisher will get Warner and Jenkinson to update their book and reissue it. Now, there was a definitive reference book on rock ’n’ roll films!

Bill Holdship