Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (24 page)

D
REAMCHILD
(1985)
Drama

Review:
“A poignant story of the autumn years of Alice Hargreaves, the model for Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland.
Film follows her on a visit to New York in the 1930s, with fantasy sequences by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.”
(Video Hound’s Golden Movie Retriever
) Stars: Coral Brown, Ian Holm, Peter Gallagher.
Director:
Gavin Millar.

THE STUNT MAN
(1980)
Mystery
/
Suspense

Review:
“Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this fast-paced, superbly crafted film. It’s a Chinese puzzle of a movie and, therefore, may not please all viewers. Nevertheless, this directorial tour de force by Richard Rush has ample thrills, chills, suspense, and surprises for those with a taste for something different.”
(Video Movie Guide) Stars:
Peter O’Toole, Steve Railsback, Barbara Hershey.

SUGAR CANE ALLEY
(1984. French, with subtitles)
Drama

Review:
“Beautifully made drama about an 11-year-old boy and his all-sacrificing grandmother, surviving in a Martinique shantytown in the 1930s. Rich, memorable characterizations; a humanist drama of the highest order.”
(Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide) Stars:
Gary Cadenat, Darling Legitimus.
Director:
Edwin L. Marian.

SMILE
(1975)
Satire

Review:
“Hilarious, perceptive satire centering around the behind-the-scenes activity at a California ‘Young American Miss’ beauty pageant, presented as a symbol for the emptiness of American middle-class existence.”
(Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide) Stars:
Bruce Dern, Barbara Feldon.
Director.
Michael Ritchie.

WRONG IS RIGHT
(1982)
Comedy

Review:
“Sean Connery, as a globe-trotting television reporter, gives what may be the best performance of his career, in this outrageous, thoroughly entertaining end-of-the-world black comedy, written, produced, and directed by Richard Brooks. An updated version of
Network
and
Dr. Strangelove.” (Video Movie Guide) Stars:
Sean Connery, Robert Conrad.
Director
: Richard Brooks.

MIRACLE MILE
(1989)
Thriller

Review:
“A riveting, apocalyptic thriller about a mild-mannered misfit who,…standing on a street corner at 2 a.m., answers a ringing pay phone. The caller…announces that bombs have been launched for an all-out nuclear war….A surreal, wicked farce sadly overlooked in theatrical release.”
(Video Hound’s Golden Movie Retriever) Stars:
Anthony Edward, Mare Winningham.
Director:
Steve Dejamatt.

TIME BANDITS
(1981)
Fantasy

Review:
“This subversive kid’s adventure teams a youngster with a criminally minded pack of dwarves on the run from the Supreme Being through holes in time. A highly imaginative, quirky mix of Monty Python humor, historical swashbuckler, and kid’s gee-whiz adventure.” (Seen
That, Now What?) Stars:
Sean Connery, David Warner.
Director:
Terry Gilliam.

DEFENSE OF THE REALM
(1985)
Thriller

Review:
“A British politician is accused of selling secrets to the KGB through his mistress and only a pair of dedicated newspapermen believe he is innocent….They discover a national cover-up conspiracy. An acclaimed, taut thriller.”
(Video Hound’s Golden Movie Retriever) Stars:
Gabriel Byrne, Greta Scacci.
Director:
David Drury.

NIGHT MOVES
(1975)
Mystery

Review:
“While trying to deal with his own sour private life, a P.I. is hired by a fading Hollywood star to track down her reckless daughter, involving him in art smuggling, murder, and sex on Florida’s Gulf Coast. This incisive psychological drama manages to be both intelligent and entertaining.”
(Seen That, Now What?)

Stars:
Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren.
Director
: Arthur Penn.

In this chapter, we feeeed you the story of one of the most unlikely—but most popular—cult films of all time.

A
LL SET TO GO

A few days after he finished work on a film called A
Bucket of Blood
in 1959, director Roger Corman had lunch with the manager of Producers Studio, the company that rented him office space. The manager mentioned that another company had just finished work on a film, and the sets were still standing.

“I said, just as a joke, ‘If you leave the sets up, I’ll come in for a couple of days and see if I can just invent a picture, because I have a little bit of money now and some free time,” Corman recalled years later. “And he said, ‘Fine.’ The whole thing was kind of a whim. I booked the studio for a week.”

TO B OR NOT TO B

Corman, 32, had only been directing films for five years (
The Monster from the Ocean Floor
and
Attack of the Crab Monsters
were two early titles). But he was already developing a reputation for making profitable movies very quickly on minuscule budgets—a skill that would later earn him the title “King of the B films.”

He had filmed A
Bucket of Blood,
a “beatnik-styled horror comedy” in only five days, a personal record. He bet his friend at Producers Studio that he could make this next film in 48 hours.

COMING UP WITH A SCRIPT

Corman called scriptwriter Chuck Griffith, who’d written A
Bucket of Blood,
and told him to write a new variation of the same story. The only limitations: it had to be written for the existing sets, and Corman had to be able to rehearse all of the scenes in three days…and then film them in two.

Griffith took the assignment. He and Corman went bar-hopping to brainstorm an outline for the film. It was a long night: Griffith got drunk, then got into a barroom brawl. Somehow, he and Corman still managed to come up with a story about a nerdy flower shop employee and his man-eating plant.

DEJA VU

Griffith turned in the final script a week later. It was essentially a warmed-over version of A
Bucket of Blood.

• In A
Bucket of Blood,
a well-meaning sculptor accidentally kills his landlord’s cat, then hides the evidence by turning it into a sculpture, which he titles
Dead Cat.
When the sculpture brings him the notoriety he’s always sought, he starts killing people and making them into sculptures, too.

• In
Little Shop of Horrors,
a well-meaning flower shop employee becomes a local hero after he accidentally creates a man-eating plant (which he names
Audrey Jr.,
after his girlfriend) by crossbreeding a Venus flytrap with a buttercup. He then begins killing people to keep the plant—and his fame—alive.

LOW BUDGET

• The filming took place between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 1959. Corman spent a total of $23,000 on the film, including $800 for the finished script and $750 for three different models of Audrey Jr.: a 12-inch version, a 6-foot version, and a full-grown 8-foot version.

• Corman pinched pennies wherever he could. Jack Nicholson, 23 years old when Corman hired him to play a masochistic dental patient named Wilbur Force, remembers that Corman wouldn’t even spend money making copies of the script: “Roger took the script apart and gave me only the pages for my scenes. That way he could give the rest of the script to another actor or actors.”

• Corman also paid a musician named Fred Katz $317.34 for the musical score…but as John McCarty and Mark McGee write in
The Little Shop of Horrors
book,

      
Katz simply used the same score he’d written for A
Bucket of Blood,
which has also been used in another Corman film,
The Wasp Woman
and would be used yet again in Corman’s
Creature from the Haunted Sea.
Whether or not Corman was aware he was buying the same score three times is unknown.

• Even if a shot wasn’t perfect, Corman would use it if he could. In the first day of shooting, Jackie Haze and Jack Nicholson accidentally knocked over the dentist’s chair, spoiling the shot and breaking the chair. When the property master said it would take an hour to fix the chair so they could reshoot the scene, Corman changed the script to read, “The scene ends with the dentist’s chair falling over.”

• Corman was legendary for getting as much work out of his actors and writers as he could. One example: Chuck Griffith, who wrote the script, also played a shadow on a wall, the man who runs out of the dentist’s office with his ear bitten, and the thief who robs the flower shop. He also directed the Skid Row exterior shots and provided the voice for Audrey Jr. (Griffith’s voice wasn’t supposed to make it into the final film—he was just the guy who stood off camera and read the plant’s lines so the actors would have something to react to. Corman had planned to dub in another actor’s voice later. “But it got laughs,” Griffith says, “so Corman decided to leave it the way it was.”)

• Corman also saved money by filming all of the Skid Row exteriors actually in Skid Row, and using “real bums to play the bums.” Griffith, who directed the scenes, paid them 10¢ per scene, using the change he had in his pocket.

THAT’S A WRAP

• Corman finished all of the interior shots in the required two days, then spent a couple more evenings filming the exterior shots. To this day,
Little Shop of Horrors
is listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for “the shortest shooting schedule for a full-length, commercial feature film made without the use of stock footage.”

• In its original release,
Little Shop of Horrors
was only a modest success. It didn’t develop its cult following until the late 1960s, when it became a Creature Feature classic on late-night TV. It was adapted into an off-Broadway musical in 1982, which was itself adapted into a new $20 million film in 1987.

•
“Little Shop of Horrors
is the film that established me as an underground legend in film circles,” Corman says. “People come up to me on the street who have memorized parts of the dialogue. I suppose you could say it was
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
of its time.”

Asking someone to marry you used to be a solemn, private matter. No longer. Now it’s a public event, complete with trumpeters, billboards, and an audience—ranging from a few passersby to hundreds of thousands of TV viewers. (Incidentally, the answers to these proposals were all “yes”!)

D
AN CAPLIS

Proposed:
On television

Story:
Caplis and Aimee Sporer worked for Channel 4 news in Denver—he was the legal expert, she was the anchorwoman. One night they were sitting next to each other during a broadcast. After explaining how judges decide on criminal sentences, Caplis looked at the camera and told the audience that since they were like family, he wanted to share an important moment with them. He took a ring out of his pocket and put it in front of Sporer. Choked up, she said, “I would love to marry you,” then turned away from the camera. The quick-thinking cameraman cut for a commercial break.

LOU DROESCH

Proposed:
At a city council meeting

Story:
Pam Ferris, the city clerk of Louisville, Colorado, was taking notes at the council meeting when Droesch, a local mortgage banker, went up to the microphone to voice his opinion about an issue. It wasn’t the issue anyone expected. He said: “I’m crazy about your city clerk. And I ask that the city fathers approve my asking for her hand in marriage.” Then he got down on one knee and popped the question.

NEIL NATHANSON

Proposed:
In a crossword puzzle

Story:
Neil and his girlfriend, Leslie Hamilton, liked doing the San Francisco
Examiner
crossword puzzles together. “One Sunday,” writes Michael Kernan in
Smithsonian
magazine, “Leslie noticed that many of the puzzle answers struck close to home.

      
“State or quarterback” turned out to be MONTANA, which is
where she came from. “Instrument” was CELLO, which she plays. “I was about halfway through the puzzle,” she remembers, “when I figured out that a string of letters running across the middle of the puzzle said ‘DEAR__ WILL YOU MARRY ME NEIL.’…Sure enough, it was Leslie.”

Neil, it turns out, had been working with Merl Reagle, the
Examiner’s
puzzlemaker, for four months. They invited him to the wedding. “I never did finish the puzzle,” Leslie added.