These movie masters started with micro-budgets

Where do the great filmmakers come from?
Baseball has its minor leagues, NASCAR has county fairgrounds, music has juke joints and dive bars. And for a time, filmmakers had Roger Corman.
Now that will be noted in a cable marathon. In eight hours (starting at 8 p.m. ET, July 17), Turner Classic Movies has Francis Coppola first film (its lurid poster is shown here) and the debuts of Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme and Peter Bogdanovich.
Three of those men are Oscar-winners, one (Bogdanovich) is a nominee and the fifth (Dante) has other awards. And TCM could have also chosen films by James Cameron or Ron Howard – other Oscar-winners from Corman-land.
None of the Oscars were for Corman productions. No one gives statues to movies with titles like “Caged Heat,” “Boxcar Bertha” or “Dementia 13.”
Sill, those started big careers. “Roger Corman gave me two of my best job opportunities,” Bogdanovich wrote in “Who the Devil Made It?” (Knopf, 1997). And he’s “been an encourage mentor ever since.”
That began, he wrote, when Bogdanovich “accidentally met Roger Corman in a movie theatre and he hired me.”
The first challenge was a biker film, “The Wild Angels.” Bogdanovich said he rewrote 80 percent of the script, with the help of Polly Platt. “I also directed three weeks of the film’s second-unit” and got no official credit.
“Wild Angels” (which TCM is showing at 4:15 a.m. on the morning of July 11) became Corman’s biggest hit, with a budget of $300,000 and a box office of $6 million,. Corman rewarded Bogdanovich with an odd opportunity.
After a dispute with Boris Karloff, Beverly Gray wrote in “Roger Corman” (Renaissance Books, 2000), Corman had two days left in the star’s contract. He told Bogdanovich to make a movie using that plus scenes from a previous film “The result was ‘Targets,’ an inventive contemporary horror offering (that) established Bogdanovich as a filmmaker.”
The movie cost $125,000 … a trifle compared to, say, the $15-million “Lawrence of Arabia.” (Bogdanovich has said Corman once told him: “I want you to write me a combination of ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – but inexpensive.”)
Some budgets were much smaller than “Targets.” Coppola had only $22,000 for “Dementia 13,” Gray said. He and Corman argued often; eventually, Corman hired another director to add an ax murder.
That film drew grim reviews, something Corman was used to. “The Terror” had portions filmed by at least five directors (including Coppola and Jack Nicholson), Gray wrote, and showed “Corman’s ability to shrug off the need for a coherent screenplay.”
Still, some films pleased critics. Demme (who later made “Phildelphia” and “Silence of the Lambs”) drew good reviews for “Caged Heat,” which had ads promising: “White Hot Desires Melting Cold Prison Steel.”
And some scripts were more than coherent. A few were by Robert Towne, later an Oscar-winner for “Chinatown.” Two – including Dante’s “Piranha” — were by John Sayles, later an esteemed indie filmmaker.
Many directors showed signs of their future selves. Scorsese’s cut of “Boxcar Bertha” ran about 150 minutes, Gray wrote; Corman trimmed it to 88.
Still, Scorsese consistently praised Corman, as did Coppola and the others.
Bogdanovich wrote about the years after his movie career faded and he switched to quick-based TV projects: “It took me back to the beginnings with Roger Corman’s guerilla school of picture-making and graphically showed me how indolent, spoiled and wasteful most feature production has become.”
Corman died last month at 98, after producing close to 500 movies, with some more in the works. By then, Demme and Bogdanovich had also died, but the others keep making movies – all of them bigger that the ones that TCM will show on July 17; the schedule, all times ET:
”Boxcar Bertha” (1972, Scorsese), 8 p.m.;”Targets” (1968, Bogdanovich); “Dementia 13” (1963, Coppola), 11:30; “Caged Heat” (1974, Demme), 1 a.m.; “Piranha” (1978, Dante), 2:30 a.m.