In every case, the movie studios eventually caught on, but he’s always been really sharp. He cranked out cheapies and made a mint, which is also what he’s doing with his Syfy movies today. All those new video shops needed product. He made movies that went directly to video. In the ’80s, when Hollywood started making the movies he had always made but on a bigger scale, he knew he couldn’t compete, so he recognized before the big studios did that there’s an ancillary market in cable and VHS. In the ’70s, he started his own indie, New World, which was the first hit indie studio-three decades before Miramax. In the ’60s, he was the first to serve the counter culture, as I alluded to before.
When he was starting off in the 1950s, there was a teen audience that wasn’t being served, and he recognized that, and he put monster movies at the drive-in. I think it’s important to point out just how brilliant a businessman Corman has been. But Corman was making movies about LSD and bikers. When teens were interested in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the studios were still making Mary Poppins. And he was also tapping into, before that golden age happened, tapping into counter-culture topics that the big studios weren’t. Around that time, he stopped directing movies himself, and all the people he brought up-Scorsese, Coppola, Robert Towne-defined that golden age of American cinema. Cover Topics Ignored By the MainstreamĬorman is the unofficial godfather of the great movies of the ’70s. You can always find a way to make movies faster and cheaper and quicker. It comes out of Corman’s whole mentality: If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. If you go to Sundance now, you see movies that are made on iPhones, and you can use digital cameras, you can make movies for really, really cheap amounts. And over the years, he’s been really smart about finding cheaper and cheaper ways to make movies. He was making movies for $10,000 in two days. He couldn’t really compete with the big studios, but he found out how to do it faster and cheaper. The term was first used in the 1951 Variety magazine review of Quo Vadis.Making Movies Smarter, Faster, and Cheaperīack in the 50s when Corman started making movies, he started making them on total shoestrings. I found out that this era is where we get the word ‘Blockbuster’ to describe a heavily marketed and advertised movie event. Motion pictures like Them!, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and Godzilla permeated pop culture in the 50’s, and have had a resurgence recently with movies like Cloverfield, Pacific Rim, and …. This is where movies warned that nuclear weapons could make an animal get real big and cause mayhem and destruction. These types of movies came at a time when the great universal pictures monsters were yesterdays news and the cold cold war era social zeitgeist was drenched in fears of radiation and nuclear fallout. In a scene with such overt symbolism that it would have made Sigmund Freud blush, the rock and roll wakes the monster.
The whole plot of attack of the crab monsters doesn’t really make sense and the acting and effects are totally B level cinema, but that doesn’t matter because most of the kids who watched these films were too busy making out in their parents station wagons to care. Gordon shamelessly tried to pander to a younger crowd by showing the citizens drag the stunned giant arachnid to the high school gym, where they inexplicably decide to fill the gym with teens and hold a sock hop.
( My parents choked to death on a crab at the all you can eat cruise buffet, I will have vengeance!)