Losing a Dime Making a “Message” Film

How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Roger Corman with Jim Jerome.

Director, screenwriter, and film producer Roger Corman died on May 9, 2024, at the age of 98.
Obituaries praised him for mentoring great directors, and actors, as well as the art films he distributed.
However, his work as a director and screenwriter was dismissed.
After all, Corman was known as the “King of the B-Movies,” and the producer of Sharkopus vs. Whalewolf.
American newspaper editors, and movie critics, tend to be confused by the ideas of “low” and “high” art.

The title of Corman’s autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, was inaccurate.
By 1990—when the book was published—Corman had already made over 100 movies.
Second, although Corman was a master of staying under budget, he had lost money on at least two films.

Adam Cramer (William Shatner) in 1962’s The Intruder.

One was a film he’d directed—1962’s The Intruder*—about a northern bigot named Adam Cramer (William Shatner) who travels to southern towns stirring up racial hatred.
The other was a film he’d produced—1974’s Cockfighter—which starred Warren Oates as Frank Mansfield, a man determined to win a Cockfighter of the Year award.
(According to Beverly Gray’s biography of Corman: his “heart was in this project; he should probably have directed it himself.”)

The Intruder was also released under the title I Hate Your Guts.

The Intruder and Cockfighter have in common that they are ambitious, well-acted films that are difficult to watch.
Both were also box office failures that you can only watch on YouTube.
However, they’ve each held up well.
I read a few Corman obits; none mentioned either film.

Pam Grier was in several Roger Corman films, including The Arena.

One lesson that Corman learned from making The Intruder was that attempting to teach the mass audience was a bad idea.
He also learned that message movies wouldn’t break even.
In later films—exploitation/thrillers like 1971’s The Big Doll House (Pam Grier’s first major role), and 1975’s Crazy Mama—he veiled social consciousness with violence, humor, and trashiness.

According to IMDb, Roger Corman directed 56 films between 1955 and 1990, some of them under the pseudonym “Henry Neil,” or uncredited.
His first was a Western: Five Guns West.
A few years later, his creations included memorable black-and-white science-fiction—among them, It Conquered the World (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), and Wasp Woman (1959)—designed for double bills at drive-in theaters.

Europe was more impressed by Corman’s work, than America.
In 1966, his biker film The Wild Angels was nominated for the Venice Film Festival “Golden Lion.”
This was the film that gave Corman his rep for being “anti-establishment.”
However, as Corman put it in 2000: “I was always the squarest guy in a hip group.” (pg. 85: Roger Corman, by Beverly Gray)

Roger Corman (left) with Vincent Price (right).

I developed my taste for horror films watching Roger Corman’s “Edgar Allen Poe” films of the early 1960’s.
I especially adored Vincent Price in The Tomb of Ligeia, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Raven.
(The Tomb of Ligeia was Martin Scorsese’s favorite Corman film from his youth.)
Corman films always had a touch of humor.
I first saw these films, not at a drive-in, but in a small movie theater that played second-run triple features.

Roger Corman was the producer or executive producer for nearly 500 films.
These included 1977’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (nominated for four Oscars) and 1979’s Saint Jack (nominated by BAFTA).
After he started New World in 1970, he was Distribution Producer for well-known art films: including, Cries and Whispers, (1972), Amarcord (1973), Fantastic Planet (1973), The Story of Adele H (1975), The Tin Drum (1979), and Breaker Morant (1980).
Big studios at the time didn’t want to “take a chance” on foreign films.
Frank Moreno (VP at New World) and Corman took financial risks on films they admired. 

The monster (in Frankenstein Unbound) has eyes pieced together with three different iris colors. According to Beverly Gray, Corman was shocked to learn that Producer Thom Mount spent so much (a cool $100,000) on the poster art.

Corman was in his mid 60’s when he directed his last film Frankenstein Unbound (1990).

This film involved time travel (from 2031 to 1817); a scientist (Dr. Joe Buchanan) who accidentally creates “time slips” while trying to create a weapon; and an insane Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia).
It’s a fever dream of a movie.
The plot is interspersed with dream sequences in which Dr. Buchanan (John Hurt) is being chased and tormented.

The original black and white sketch (by Dave Christensen) for the Frankenstein Unbound poster.

Corman believed that the $11.5 million budget for Frankenstein Unbound was excessive, and he insisted on cutting corners during the making of the film.
(Some of the practical special effects could have used some CGI, if such had been invented.)
The film bombed at the box office, but it wasn’t a critical failure.

The British movie edition paperback of Frankenstein Unbound, that shows the monster (Nick Brimble) and his bride (Catherine Rabett).

Frankenstein Unbound was based on the novel of the same name by British author and anthology editor Brian Aldiss (1925-2017).
However, turning the film’s hero from a presidential advisor, into a scientist, was likely Corman’s idea.
(Corman was a screenwriter for the film, as well as the director.)

The romance between the hero (John Hurt) and Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda) was taken from the book.
Aldiss greatly admired Mary Shelley, and credited her with writing the first science-fiction novel, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

Corman never lost his affection for making “guilty pleasure” movies.
Beginning in the early 21st century, he began producing CGI-dependent TV movies—like Dinocroc (2004), and Sharkopus vs. Whalewolf (2015)—for direct-to-video and the Syfy channel.
(Mostly, he just approved the scripts and the budgets.)
This was a return to his drive-in themes of the 1950’s and 1960’s, except with CGI.

*A caption in Ed Naha’s book, The Films of Roger Corman, calls The Intruder “a noble experiment.” In the text of Naha’s book, Corman is quoted saying: “I had never believed in any picture as much as I believed in this one.”

Condemned to Repeat the Past, Part Two

As I pointed in my previous post; there were some similarities between the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In 1964’s Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) faces the embodiment of the Red Death (also Vincent Price).

The world had over one hundred years to prepare for another pandemic, but somehow public health never received the funds it needed (after the 1918 Spanish flu).
Perhaps, the memory of the 1918 pandemic was just too frightening, and the experience had to be buried.
Perhaps, being fully prepared for a pandemic is just impossible.

We've known for a long time how human disease can affect history.
Justinian’s Flea, by William Rosen, explains how the Bubonic Plague (541-549 AD) “killed at least 25 million people; depopulated entire cities, and depressed birth rates for generations,” leading to the Dark Ages.
The 1918 Spanish Flu at least doubled or quadrupled that number, killing an estimated 50 to 100 million people.
However, that flu likely led to the Allied forces beating Germany, and winning WWI,* also shaping history in that sense.
We’re waiting to learn had much COVID-19 will affect this era.
One fact seems obvious.
But for COVID, America would likely be in the middle of a second Trump term.

British actor and political activist, Sir Tony Robinson praised Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918 on the British cover jacket, predicting (in 2018) that “another pandemic could be just around the corner.”

This article is about the differences between the 1918 Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
(Since scientists don’t fully understand either pandemic, a layperson writing this article is an absurd project.)
One difference is in the symptoms.
Both viruses were “shape-shifters,” and each were mistaken (at first) for the common cold.
In Pandemic 1918, British author Catharine Arnold [Note the British spelling of medical terms.] describes symptoms of the Spanish Flu, as the second wave hit, and the disease developed into a more aggressive form:

In the summer of 1918. . . victims collapsed in the streets, haemorrhaging from lungs and nose. Their skin turned dark blue with the characteristic ‘heliotrope cyanosis’ caused by oxygen failure as their lungs filled with pus, and they gasped for breath from ‘air-hunger’, like landed fish. . . Others suffered projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhoea, and died raving as their brains were starved of oxygen.

Catharine Arnold recounts how the Spanish flu starved President Woodrow Wilson’s brain, and he became delusional during his serious bout with the flu (in April of 1919)—during the Paris peace conference.
President Wilson dragged himself out of his sickbed, and rearranged the hotel furniture, saying (perhaps, in a letter or diary):

The greens and the reds are all mixed up here and there is no harmony. Here is a big purple, high-backed covered chair, which is like the Purple Cow, strayed off to itself, and it is placed where the sun shines on it too brightly.

The California State Board of Health advocating that to avoid the 1918 Spanish Flu, people should wear masks.

Essentially, the 1918 Spanish Flu was a bird/avian flu (H1N1 influenza A) and the infected animal (whose virus infected a human) in COVID-19 was (most likely) a bat.
Victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu died from secondary bacterial pneumonia, while victims of COVID-19 usually died from organ failure.
According to the Columbia University Department of Surgery website, hundreds of patients in the U.S. have received double lung transplants, due to COVID-19.

Dr. Edwin Jenner of the CDC (Noah Emmerich) whispers to Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead (“TS-19,” season 1, episode 6) that “Everyone is infected.”

The zombie is an allegory for infectious disease.

Besides the difference in symptoms, the two viruses hit different population groups.
COVID-19 mainly kills people older than 65, as well as people with comorbidities (like diabetes and obesity) and impaired immunity responses.
However, the 1918 Spanish Flu tended to strike people between 20-40, enjoying the prime of their lives—fit vigorous soldiers, and young women of child-bearing age.
Young Walt Disney caught the Spanish flu at the age of 17.
James Thurber was 24 when he became ill.
Georgia O’Keefe was 31.
All of their lives could have cut short if they had died from the flu.
(What we need to remember is that this was just a tendency, and NOT a rule. All types and ages of people caught the Spanish Flu, and all types and ages of people are catching COVID-19.)

Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (center, Tamilyn Tomita) in the 1990s American TV series about fighting biological disasters and conspiracies—The Burning Zone.

While the German DVD packaging is on the web, we're unable to locate an English language version. The series also doesn’t seem to be currently-available on streaming services. 

Wonder why???

While there’s little evidence that there was asymptomatic spread with the Spanish Flu, it’s evident that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19.
In Dr. Deborah Birx’s book, Silent Invasion, she comments that “asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and even mildly symptomatic spread are particularly insidious, because, with these, many people don’t know they are infected.”
She comments that it was a “huge miscalculation” for the CDC to expect “the new coronavirus to behave like seasonal or pandemic flu.”
Dr. Birx determined that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19, and she used math to accurately predict the number of cases.

COVID-19 is reaching double the number of countries on the globe as the 1918 Spanish Flu did—likely, as a result of greater air travel, and the greater intertwining of economies in this century.
In 1918, communities in Alaska could protect themselves with armed guards, and South Pacific islands could bar visitors from landing.
Today, few places are remote enough to prevent contagion.

It’s also interesting that while I can’t find any indication that people caught the Spanish Flu more than once, people are coming down with different strains of COVID-19 multiple times.
Sometimes, patients even have two strains of the COVID virus at the same time!
Public health officials urge those over 65 to make sure that their vaccinations are up to date.

*According to Pandemic 1918, by Catharine Arnold: “By May, influenza had crossed effortlessly over ‘No Man’s Land’ to hit the German army. . . the disease affected 139,000 men during June and peaked in early July.
Influenza had brought the all-conquering German army to its’ knees, while the Allies, stricken too, took advantage of their enemy’s weakness to regroup.”