Roger Corman
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International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020: The Gaze of the Old Filmmaker
Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? — William Blake As one of the centerpiece programs at the 49th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), “The Tyger Burns” was a canny display of un-hipness. What a joy it was to pay repeated witness to such a mammoth series of movies so gleefully, so wilfully out of touch. What better way to undercut the widespread love of emerging voices, new talents and young geniuses than to turn to aging, even senile artists who have either fallen […]
by Christopher Small on Feb 20, 2020 -
Looking Backwards To Look Forward
Lately, it seems that events are conspiring to make me look backwards. First of all, about two years ago, I was invited to donate my personal archives to the University of Michigan’s Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collection. It was an incredible honor to be joined with such illustrious company as Orson Welles, Robert Altman, John Sayles, Alan Rudolph, Nancy Savoca and, most recently, Jonathan Demme. But it was also a bit nerve-wracking to think that total strangers would be rummaging through my proverbial attic—a hoarder’s collection of film posters, correspondence (actual hardcopy letters, memos and mimeographs!), grosses and marketing […]
by Ira Deutchman on Sep 17, 2018 -
Death Race 2050, Dragons, Worms and Parents: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Paul Bartel’s 1975 road race movie Death Race 2000 is one of the great exploitation films of all time, a model of how to use the creative freedom of working with limited resources within a marketable genre for the purposes of subversive satire. Produced by Roger Corman, it has a deliciously nasty premise: in the (then) future, the population is kept pacified by gory reality entertainment in the form of a cross-country road race in which drivers receive points for mowing down pedestrians. Bartel and screenwriters Robert Thom and Charles Griffith milk this conceit for all that it’s worth, ramping […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 3, 2017 -
Sex Ed: Stephanie Rothman’s The Student Nurses
During a moment of high drama in the very special cult item The Student Nurses, which runs in a restored version at the new Metrograph in New York’s Lower East Side for one week beginning March 11, a pretty young woman rudely dumps her frustrated doctor boyfriend in plain sight of the sexy roommates she trains with at a large LA hospital. On his way out, just before wishing a corny “Peace!” to the other vixens, who are seated side by side on the living room couch, he keeps the scene from wandering into the expected emotional terrain by lamenting to […]
by Howard Feinstein on Feb 18, 2016 -
“A Very Nostalgic Look at my Childhood”: DP Dean Cundey on Back to the Future
When I saw Back to the Future as a kid in the summer of 1985, the film’s 1950s setting felt as distant and exotic as another century. As the movie celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, I feel both an aching nostalgia and an existential dread at the thought that the 1980s – with its Pepsi Frees, DeLoreans, and Huey Lewises — are now an equally distant and exotic relic. There were few movies that the 10-year-old me loved as much as Back to the Future. And most of them — from The Thing to Big Trouble in Little China — […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 22, 2015 -
10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Roger Corman
The following interview, in which producer and director Roger Corman broke down the filmmaking rules he lives by, was conducted in 2013 and is reposted today on the sad occasion of Corman’s passing last Thursday at the age of 98. R.I.P. Roger Corman. The legendary Roger Corman is America’s proto-independent filmmaker, having produced literally hundreds of films and directed dozens more, most of them genre films made under a “fast, cheap and profitable” model that still offers guidance for new filmmakers everywhere. And while Corman is best known for films made during an earlier independent era, one in which regional […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 10, 2015 -
Bridging Ford and Antonioni with Jack Nicholson: Monte Hellman on The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind
In July of 1964, director Monte Hellman and actor Jack Nicholson went to the Philippines to shoot two war movies back to back: Flight to Fury, which Nicholson also wrote, and Back Door to Hell. By June of 1965, Hellman and Nicholson had shot two more movies, the Westerns The Shooting (written by future Five Easy Pieces scribe Carole Eastman under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) and Ride in the Whirlwind (scripted by Nicholson). Four movies in twelve months, and not one of them shows any sense of a director straining against limitations of time and money. To the contrary, The Shooting is a flat-out masterpiece, a […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 17, 2014 -
Hidden Horror: Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
The following essay appears in the new horror-film anthology, Hidden Horror: A Celebration of 101 Underrated and Overlooked Fright Flicks. Click here for an interview with the book’s editor, Dr. AC as well as for links to four other essays published at Filmmaker. “I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness, a light that glows, changes…and in the center of the universe…the eye that sees us all.” I sometimes think I learned everything I know about horror movies from Stephen King. I have an old copy of Danse […]
by Christianne Benedict on Jan 13, 2014 -
Nebraska Star Bruce Dern on Alexander Payne and “the Dernsies”
This interview with Bruce Dern was originally published following the Cannes Film Festival, where Nebraska premiered. If you ever have the good fortune of getting a press pass that grants you access to a roundtable with a Hollywood star, there are few actors out there who could provide a better interview than Bruce Dern, who recently won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his performance in Alexander Payne’s comedic drama, Nebraska. A planned 20-minute roundtable with a few grizzled journalists turned into a half-hour sprawling monologue of memories and observations on movie production, gently flavored with imitations of Hollywood […]
by Chuck Tryon on May 26, 2013 -
Three Questions for Jonathan Demme
Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme has made Hollywood spectacles (The Silence of the Lambs, The Manchurian Candidate), eccentric indies (Rachel Getting Married, Something Wild), timeless rock docs (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young Journeys) and other unclassifiable delights. At the 12th annual Festival International du Film de Marrakech, Demme’s filmmaking legacy was honored with both a formal tribute, and an invite to give a “masterclass” to an enraptured Moroccan audience. Filmmaker sat down with Demme to discuss his iconoclastic career. Filmmaker: For decades, you’ve been slinking between narratives and documentaries. What interests you more? Demme: I’ve always followed my enthusiasm. If […]
by Aaron Hillis on Jan 9, 2013
