Is that a jab at Battlefield Earth?
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add incessant dutch angles to the list and it would be.
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This is a good rationale for being a hack. Which isn’t to say that it’s wrong, exactly. Neither is it exactly right.
“Critics and academics” have had a strong hand in preserving or reviving lost works. I know this happened with Bach and I thought Shakespeare had a similar story, though I can’t recall the details. (MST3K lies uneasily with some overlap in the critic camp, and it is why we remember, say, Manos over many much better films.)
Similarly, while we remember Shakespeare and Dickens, we don’t so much remember Mrs. Radcliffe (sort of the J.K. Rowling of her day), Fernando Sor (sorta the Andrew Lloyd Weber of his), or James Malcom Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest (who might be the David Webers of their day, from what I’ve heard of Honor Harrington).
Yes, as mentioned earlier–in the swearing thread, I think it was–there’s nothing wrong in being The Thing For The Moment. Further, it’s probably a vain conceit to prefer “popular over the long haul” to “intensely popular in the moment,” except that once the moment’s gone the formerly popular thing tends to lose its value (and gains some additional value for “insight into the moment” and “nostalgia”).
I mean, again, MST3K is wholly dependent on this fin de siècle monoculture which is large enough for people to have huge swaths of common reference points, but fragmenting so that things like MST3K to pop-up at the edges.
Anyway I don’t think we’ll be seeing any Corman Westerns “classic film series”, except maybe in the odd Beverly Garland tribute. His Poe Cycle has some legs, I think, as do the super-cheap quickies like Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood.
The point of this ramble I guess adding up to: Being an author doesn’t preclude being a writer and neither preclude being a hack.
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I agree, which gets at some of why I don’t 100% agree with Weber. For every Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft there were thousands of pulp writers whose work didn’t live after them for various reasons. And all three could be dismissed as “hacks” if you felt like it, except that their creations tapped into something universal enough to give them staying power.
And there’s really no way, at least that I am aware, of predicting what will last and what won’t - although there is a small industry in dredging up quotes from critics who were spectacularly wrong about one thing or another. This, I think, is what Weber was really getting at. The works of those three pulp writers I mentioned are almost certainly more popular 100 years after they were written then they were when they were published. Odds are most couldn’t have seen it.
In film terms, take Die Hard (1988) for example. When it came out, it as a throw away Summer action movie starring a TV actor. Now, it’s iconic.
You’re probably right about this too, although of course you benefit from hindsight. For myself, I often fall back on the old cliché cop out, “I know what I like.” A lot of what I like in film would be considered by many others to be “great films.” Others, maybe not so much, but with some the world finally caught up with my brilliance.
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I’ll be the killkilljoy, then, who points out that no action comes without risk, and the tradeoff for “has to be safe enough” is often “well, then it won’t get done”. The things Buster Keaton did and, heck, Chaplin literally broke his neck—literally just to get a laugh.
That said, Corman sometimes (often?) didn’t even pay people, so we shouldn’t be surprised if the corners he cut were beyond the necessary and prudent…
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Could and were.
In fairness, a superlative throwaway summer action movie.
I try, anyway.
What else can you know? Technique? It’s overrated (by artists, anyway)!
Watching a lot of these '80s horror movies I dismissed back in the day, I’m finally catching up to their brilliance: It’s amazing how much we (moviegoers) took for granted back in the day.
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Never seen it, but that description applies to a lot of movies these days.
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“Do you WANT lunch?”
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I put Corman and Ed Wood above, say, Coleman Francis because their movies at least usually tried to say something to uplift the human condition. They were often exploitative as heck and so hamfisted they could be served for Christmas dinner, but the intent was there. Whereas Coleman’s pictures were just bleak and nihilistic, and you can only get away with that when you have talent.
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I wouldn’t put Corman and Wood in the same category. Corman is competent if a bit craven when it comes to business, causing him to cut a lot of corners and make sub-par films (not all the time, but often) and the cost-cutting shows. Ed Wood was not competent and punching well above his weight, but his movies did have a strange sort of heart to them.
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At the very least, Corman was partially responsible for what is still the best Fantastic Four movie.
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It is a strange irony that the most watchable FF movie was the one never intended to be seen.
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Is that confirmed? My impression is that it was intended to be seen and Corman was bought off.
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The story I’ve always heard was that Canon never intended it to be a real movie, they just needed somethin the can to hold onto the rights longer. Corman still made the best FF movie he could with the meager budget and heck if it doesn’t hold up better than any of the three Fox ones.
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The man who directed the movie was Oley Sassone - New Orleans’ own, btw. I went to a showing at a local theater here in NOLA a couple of years back, which Sassone attended. He was very proud of his work and his love for the material clearly shines through despite its flaws. To hear Sassone tell it, Corman’s role as producer came down to (under)funding the Fantastic Four.
Per Sassone, Corman never told anyone they were only making the movie to preserve the rights until the movie was finished. He only told Sassone on the phone afterwards. When you watch the movie, this story is very believable because it plays with tons of sincerity. Needless to say, Oley Sassone is not very fond of Roger Corman.
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I mentioned this elsewhere, but there is one moment in Corman’s FF which is just hilarious. When Alicia, The Thing’s blind girlfriend, is kidnapped, they put a blindfold over her eyes for some reason, but that’s not the hilarious part. The hilarious part is you see the blindfold go on from her perspective!
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That’s an Police Squad! style gag!
Sure, I would be pissed, too… OTOH, what could Corman do? You can’t say “I need you to make a fake movie for legal reasons,” can you? I feel like that would tend to undermine whatever legal reasons there were.
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(Joel voice) Oh wow.
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Alternatively, you could have used his “Unbelievable” from that one phone ring in “Monster A-Go-Go”.
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I watched the big Season 11 Doug McClure double feature this weekend – The Land That Time Forgot and At The Earth’s Core. (I wonder if in a future season, they might complete the hat trick and riff The People That Time Forgot as well. Admittedly, there is only so much McClure one can endure in a single season.) Whatever one might say about those movies, they are, for the most part, visually easy to watch, certainly when compared to many films from past experiments. Director of Photography Alan Hume’s name looked familiar. I looked him up and found out why. Among his other films as DP are:
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy
A View To A Kill
Shirley Valentine
Without A Clue (one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes movies)
A Fish Called Wanda
and something called Return of the Jedi
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