Right now, Roger Corman’s legacy is filling our Fridays with micro-budget movies.
Corman died in 2024, at 96, but his films persist. They were huge in quantity, mixed in quality, tiny in cost. And they launched great careers.
On April 10, for instance, two films — “The Wild Angels” (shown here) at 8 p.m. ET and “The Trip” at 11:30 — will show us Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, before “Easy Rider.”
On April 17, we see early work of Peter Bogdanovich (Targets,” 8 p.m.) and Francis Coppola (“Dementia 13,” 1 a.m.). A week later, it’s Martin Scorsese’s “Boxcar Bertha,” at 8. Those three men have gone on to get 15 best-director Oscar nominations, winning three times.
There are others — Ron Howard, James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, etc. — who got their filmmaking start with Corman. But first, let’s focus on John Sayles, who wrote “Piranha” (9:45 p.m., April 17).
Back then, Sayles might have seemed more like a local-TV sportscaster — tall (6-foot-4), athletic (all-county football as an end), with a knack for blue-collar dialog. He attributed that to his years in locker rooms and to his parents — educators whom he described as “first-generation white-collar.”
Sayles was also a Williams College grad who had received favorable notices for his two novels, “The Pride of the Bimbos” and “Union Dues.” But that doesn’t get you far in Hollywood, where people don’t read …
Except that some do. Frances Doel, Corman’s script supervisor, was an Oxford grad. (For that matter, Corman was a Stanford grad.) She was already familiar with Sayles’ novels and promptly used him.
Sayles would write three Corman films — Joe Dante’s “Piranha” plus “The Lady in Red” and “Battle Beyond the Stars.” Corman gave him the room to add wit and depth; he also taught Sayles key things about writing movies that work well on a budget.
From there, Sayles would write two terrific horror scripts, “Alligator” and “The Howling,” for other producers. He would also become one of the best writer-directors of indie movies, even getting Oscar nominations for his “Lone Star” and “Passion Fish” scripts.
He’s in a long list of Corman alumni. Howard was just 23 when “Grand Theft Auto” was his directing debut; long before the mega-budget “Titanic” and “Avatar,” Cameron made low-cost sets and props for Corman.
Here are the upcoming Fridays on TCM. (All times are ET; TCM only sends one signal, so an 8 p.m. film is 5 p.m. PT.) Details are from “Roger Corman” (2000, Renaissance Books) by Beverly Gray, a former Corman assistant; and from a story Sean Axmaker wrote for TCM. The Sayles details above are from an earlier interview.
APRIL 10: “Masque of the Red Death” (1964), 8 p.m.; “The Wild Angels” (1966), 9:45; “The Trip” (1967), 11:30; “Gas,” (1970), 1 a.m.; Bloody Mama” (1970), “2:30.
“Masque” was the lushest of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. He borrowed sets from big-budget movies and had Nicolas Roeg, later an acclaimed director, as cinematographer. Vincent Price starred and Jane Asher — then 18 and Paul McCartney’s girlfriend at the height of Beatlemania — co-starred.
“Wild Angels” was easy to dismiss as a shaky-camera biker film; Bosley Crowther of the New York called it “an embarrassment.” What that overlooks is the effective use of handheld cameras and the young talent assembled. Mike Curb, 22, (later California’s lieutenant governor) wrote a great soundtrack; Bogdanovich did some rewriting and second-unit directing and the cast included Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra (shown here in front), plus Bruce Dern, Dianne Ladd and more.
Corman directed those two films and “The Trip” … a job that included what he called “research”: Jack Nicholson convinced him that he should try LSD before directing the films.
APRIL 17: “Targets” (1968), 8 p.m.; “Piranha” (1978), 9:45; “Queen of Blood” (1966), 11:30; “Dementia 13” (1963), 1 a.m.; “The Terror” (1963), 2:30.
After settling a contract dispute with Karloff, Corman gave Bogdanovich a specific assignment: Make a movie using just $50,000, plus some old sets, some leftover footage from “The Terror” and the final two days of Karloff’s deal. The result drew strong reviews.
Later that night, we can see “The Terror,” which Gray calls “Corman’s wackiest” film. He shot for two days on the “Raven” sets before they were torn down. Then he assigned others — Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, even Nicholson — to direct the rest, making up the script as they went along.
Before that, we see another odd project: Corman gave Coppola just $22,000 to make a horror film using some of the people, equipment and locations from a previous film. The result was incomprehensible, Corman felt; they fought over editing and emerged with “Dementia 13.”
April 24: “Boxcar Bertha” (1972), 8 p.m.; “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (1979), 9:45; “The Shooting” (1966), 11:30; “Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop” (2021 documentary), 1:15 a.m.; “Stakeout on Dope Street” (1958), 2:15.
Spotting the success of “Bonnie and Clyde,” Corman planned to direct “Boxcar Bertha” himself. Instead, he gave it to Scorsese, 29, giving him leeway to change the script … providing there was nudity every 15 pages.
Corman trimmed an hour from the film, but Scorsese remained a lifelong fan of Corman … as did many movie greats. In 2010, the man some people associated with low-budget schlock received an honorary Academy Award.