SMC Pod #163: Roger Corman's Rules

With the passing of the "Pope of Pop Film" Roger Corman at 98 this year, a key era of American moviemaking left us. Producer/Director Roger Corman famously made hundreds of movies without "ever having lost a dime". He did this by shrewdly making very low budget genre pictures catered to what was hip at the time (monsters, drugs, motorcycles, sharks, aliens...) with super talented hungry young moviemakers. Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdonavich, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron just to name a few all come out of the unofficial "Roger Corman film school". And Corman himself directed or produced key indie genre movies including the Edgar Allen Poe series of the 1960's, Monte Hellman's COCKFIGHTER from the 1970's, etc. Secret Movie Club programmer Craig Hammill looks at some of the "rules" a moviemaker can still learn from the maverick master who made daring movies while also protecting the bottom line.