The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget
Ed Naha
Arco Publishing, 1982
In pre-Internet days, books on filmmakers in cult-exploitation-whatever genres were often like this. While professional and polished, they were at heart books made by and for the fans, where the writing was more factual than critical. Before such resources as the IMDB came along, we relied on tomes like this to provide information on films we had yet to discover.
This album by screenwriter (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) and novelist Ed Naha (also editor of Starlog magazine, and the first issue of its sister publication, Fangoria) is a good read, yet a lot of the trivia tidbits within will probably be the revelations for the true Roger Corman fan. This book is a lovely compendium of the highs (and lows) of his impressive career. While it has been out of print for years, it is well worth tracking down.
The book is broken down into segments detailing various specialties of producer-director Roger Corman’s career in exploitation from the 1950s to the time of its publication: from teenage rebels to bikers, from monsters to gangsters, made for various drive-in specialists like American International Pictures in the 1950s and 60s, and his own company, New World Pictures, in the 1970s. Additionally, every film directed by Corman, up to 1971’s Von Richthofen and Brown, gets a singular review. All of the content is well-researched and lovingly detailed, with generous quotes from interviews with Corman or his associates.
This happened to be published towards the end of Corman’s reign at New World Pictures, so even today there is a sense of completeness to the book, especially since many of Corman’s veteran fans prefer to overlook most of his prolific output at the subsequent Concorde lot, just a few years after this book was released. The section on New World, more than any other, highlights the schizophrenic nature of his career. While continuing to produce exploitation pictures at this studio, Corman also acquired foreign-language films for domestic release at drive-ins. It is amusing to view stills from staid art pieces like Lumiere next to something from Death Race 2000.
Brilliance on a Budget is a scrapbook in a sense that the photos take precedence over the text (and there are lots of great stills that would be even harder to find today), but the book is also a good companion piece for the fan, because the writing is also honest. Still, doesn’t anybody like Ski Troop Attack as much as I do? (Ironically, after this publication, Ed Naha would write two screenplays for Corman: Oddballs and Wizards of the Lost Kingdom!)