How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime | Roger Corman

How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime | Roger Corman | Very interesting read for pop culture, film and business buffs

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How I Made A Hundr...

	How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime Roger Corman Da Capo Press, 1998 - 254 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In these pages Roger Corman, the most successful independent filmmaker in Hollywood relates his experiences as the director and/or producer of such low-budget classics Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Man with the X-ray Eyes, The Wild Angels, The Trip, Night Call Nurses, Bloody Mama, Piranha, and many others. He also discusses his distribution of the Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut movies that later won Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Film category. Corman alumni?John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Fonda, Joe Dante, and Jonathan Demme, among others?contribute their recollections to give added perspective to Corman's often hilarious, always informative autobiography.

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Movies on a Shoestring from the Man Who Made a Career of It.

Roger Corman wrote "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime" in 1990, reflecting on a 35-year career making movies, during which he was nearly always in production. The title of the book should be taken literally. Corman tells us just how he directed or produced the low-budget independent films for which he is famous. After giving a brief account of his early life, Corman dives into his career of non-stop filmmaking, launched by "The Monster from the Ocean Floor", made for $12,000 in 1954, through directing films for American International Pictures 1955-1969, producing youth-oriented exploitation films and distributing foreign art films for his own company New World Pictures 1970-1982, and finally his focus on the home video market in the 1980s.

Corman learned the business of making movies as he went along, so he takes the reader though the financing and production of many of his movies, his mistakes, his philosophy, and his legendary efficiency. The recollections of people who worked with Corman, many of whom got their start in the unofficial "Corman School", are scattered throughout the text. These add an interesting variety of perspectives. Among those who chime in with their thoughts on working with Corman are actors Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, and Vincent Price, directors Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, John Sayles, and Francis Coppola, and Corman's wife and associate producer Julie Corman.

Corman's disdain for bureaucracy, his many methods of penny-pinching, his attempts to inject social relevance into exploitation films, his commitment to making films to suit the market (or even to suit the sets!), and his almost infallible instincts for what people want to see come across strongly. Corman's obsessive thrift seems almost pathological at times. He might have done better to spend a little more money here and there and to have more concern for his cast and crew's safety. But the ways in which he managed time, re-used sets and footage, and got people to do things for cheap would be helpful to anyone trying to break into the business on a low budget. Corman filmed "The Little Shop of Horrors" in 2 days on a leftover soundstage. It's one of the cheapest and most enduring films he made.

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Very interesting read for pop culture, film and business buffs

I'm not sure of how I happened upon this biography, but I'm glad I did. I'm not particularly a Roger Corman fan, having seen perhaps three or four of his films without really noticing that Corman had a part in their making.

Corman's life is interesting. Not only was he probably the most successful independent filmaker in history, he was also mentor and first-chance for many of today's leading producers, directors, writers and stars.

Remarkably down to earth and honest, Corman admits that his life has not been totally fulfilling: like many successful people, success is never enough - there's always one more challenge down the road and more than one challenge left unexplored in the past.

Corman engages in some, but not deep, analysis of his films, explains his evolving political philosophy and provides snippets that from another author might be construed as name-dropping. But Corman was there and it's his interactions with these people he's talking about, so it's not in the least obnoxious.

Above all, the value of Corman's book may not be to film buffs, but to business people, especially small scale entrepreneurs. Corman's management methods and his approach to filmaking were true nose-to-the-grindstone. He knew his market; he studied his market; he created his product to appeal to his market and he kept costs down to a minimum in order to reduce his risk of loss.

Quite a guy and his biography is worth the couple of hours it takes to read it.

Jerry

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Interesting

An interesting if not biased look at the life (and art?) of Roger Corman. Essential reading for low-budget filmmaking.

You'll Understand Corman Better

To this day, I haven't seen one Corman film I've liked. Still, this book is a nice look into the world of low-budget producing. It gave me the opportunity to truly understand my disdain for Corman and AIP.

Most of the book focuses on three or four of the productions Corman is most proud of. I would have preferred him spending additional time on his more obscure films. Teenage Caveman only gets a paragraph or two written about it.

A documentary would have been a more appropriate format for this material than a book. It would have been much shorter that way at the very least. Then again, Corman always had a knack for dragging things out in his films. Ever seen Swamp Diamonds?

The main theme of the book seems to be, "Yeah, Corman's films were bad, but he did pretty good for what he had." That doesn't take away the fact that they're bad films. Don't watch them unless you have a high threshold of pain.

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Lowbrow, Low Budget Fun

The funniest random comment from Roger Corman in this book related to the use of stock footage: Corman mentioned that when he was filming the Edgar Allan Poe series (Poe was popular since all of his tales were in public domain)that nobody associated with the productions ever envisioned the home video market would permit film students and others to analyze the films on a frame by frame basis! One oft used fire sequence was economically obtained when Corman paid the owner of a barn, who had obtained a burning permit to demolish the dilphidated structure, a few dollars to photograph the razing of the barn. The collapsing rafters from the flaming roof appeared in film after film.

Roger Corman managed to learn enough about filmmaking to become a profitable commodity. He avoided the major studios with one exception: "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre." This celebrated cult film was shot on the backlot of 20th Century Fox and featured just about every heavy and extra who had ever appeared on the television series "The Untouchables." Corman was foiled in his bid to cast Orson Welles as Al Capone. Studio executives feared that Welles would wrest control of the film away from Corman and begin directing the movie. Fox contract player Jason Robards, who was to have played Bugs Moran, was quickly recast as a malnourished Scarface, and Ralph Meeker was substituted as Moran. Corman regulars, Jack Nicholson, Dick Miller and Bruce Dern can also be glimpsed in the finished film. This cult favorite was the closest that Corman ever came to the Hollywood mainstream.

Corman was steadily employed as a cost conscious producer and director who got most of his projects completed on time and under budget. He was an advocate of getting every last dollar's worth of production values up on the screen. The sole exception was "The Intruder." This civil rights message picture about a bigoted political agitator was the only Corman film to lose money in its initial release.

Roger Corman's greatest legacy may well be the number of actors and directors who launched their celebrated careers in his B minus films. This book is an amusing diversion, but like many of Corman's drive-in quickies it is not too deep in terms of its analysis.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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