COLUMBIA FILM VIEW -- Roger Corman University has no campus and no academic Accreditation; it confers no de grees. But talk about life expe rience credits; under the careful telage of exploitation’ grand oldman, steady stream of fin makers have emerged from the loom of unrealized ambition in- {othe cinematic limelight: Peter Bogdanovich, Jon Davison. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Towne, Joe Dane, Jonathan Kaplan, Jona- than Demme, James Cameron ‘and Gayle Anne Hurd, John Sayles, Jim Wynorski...Jim Wynorski? Well, alright — Jim Wynorski ‘may not yet deserve a niche in the pantheon of auteurs. But he's the masters aptest acolyte, a filmmaker consunmately versed inthe ar of geting things mee: financed on the cheap, shot on the sly, cobbled together from existing. footage, chockablock wih fading stars and ready-made promotional oppornits. In an age when by- the-mumbers studio blockbusters loom large aver the cinematic landscape while the ever more profound blackhole of multiplex sereens uo for product, Winorsk’s brand of quick and dirty moviemaking isa bracing antidote to the kind of borom line thinking that con- sinces otherwise reasonable people Ishtar is going 1o blow them avay atthe box office Not that Winorski’s production mandate is any less dollar driven — its just weirder. And if sometimes its more amusing to hear about his pictures than to see them, well, you have 10 take your entertainment where you can + find it. Winorski started his career as a writer, citing a colleciton of science fiction short stories that had been made into movies, pen- ning outrageous sleaze for the National En- quirer and then moving into local commer- ial production in his native New York. In 1977 he made the inevitable move to the West Coast, and a chance encounter on an air- plane led him to Corman's offices, where he hhoped to sll an Alien-inspired science fic tion screenplay held writen. Things didn't work out quite as he had planned. IM WYNORSKI: New World’s advertis. ‘ng manager had quit two days before I walked in the door and they were desperate to find an advertising person. I took the job immediately — it was even good money. Wild Thing: The monster takes a ip im Wynorski makes movies to entertain... and repulse And we were off and running for the year, figured at least I was in a position to get close to Roger because I'd be deating with him every day. My job did indeed lead to other things About a year later I sold a screenplay to Roger that was eventually shot as Forbidden World. He paid me very little for it, but I would have paid him for the writing credit. That film was successful, and he asked me to write another one right away — something like a Conan film. He said, “I think we've missed the boat on these Conan things” because not only had Conan the Barbarian come out, but so had The ‘Sword and the Sorcerer, so he figured if he wanted to do a knock-off he'd better get it ‘out quickly. He sent me home on Wednesday and said, “Why don’t you use the next two days and the weekend to work, and come back to me on Monday with something” So Tran home and stayed up for four days straight writing this seript ealled Sorceress And I eame in on Monday with this 77-page script that I figured would be added to, knocked around alittle bit, rewritten...the usual. Roger took it into his offiee, eame out by MAITLAND McDONAGH Volume 7, Number 2/3, Winter/Svrina 1989 an hourand-half later, and said we were going to make it and I should start easting right away. I said, “But Roger, you need to have some rewrites done on this” and he just said, “Well, we ean do that as we go along but start casting and get ready to go to Mexiea” He hired a director named Jack Hill, who had done a lot of directing for im. Jack, it tured out, had discovered religion somewhere along the line. He came into my office and put Jot of holy pictures on my desk, facing him. And I said to my. self, “T've got to tell Roger this” I did, and Roger said, “Don't worry, Jack's a good, competent director” Well, it turned out that in finding reli gion he did a lot of...weird stuff. When the fim came back it was two-and-a-half hours long and it had these religious bal lets in it from some ancient reek Terpsichorean tradition or something, It was really unbelievable. Of course Roger was livid and had tall cutout, so this twand-thalf hour picture went down to about 80 minutes. In the end it actually did quite well In fact, it was Roger's biggest success for 1982. It was okay, though I wrote it.as a comedy and Jack Hill filmed it as a drama...even that wasrit all Jack's fault, T filled the seript with dumb jokes, all of which got filmed, but Roger cut them out. Roger doesn't have a great sense of humor and he wants his action pictures to be action pictures and his comedies to be comedies, although he has been heard to profess sometimes that he thinks the best action/adventures are the ones that eombine drama and eomedy. You carit prove it by what he does. Anyway, that was back in 1982, and that was the year I Jef the advertising department to devote my: self full time to producing and and waiting ‘Along with a partner, Linda Shane I wrote and produced a picture called Screwball which was a Porky's knockoff. But Porky's hadn't even come out yet, it had just tested very successfully. So Roger — who didn't even know what this picture was about — figured we could get the jump on everybody by coming up with a knock-off right away. Linda and T went out and found half the money; Roger came up with the rest. We co-produced Screwballs up in Canada for $450,000. Linda snuck into 20th-Century Fox, found a Porky's] script, xeroxed if andbrought it back; we read it and knew we could do a version, And we did Tt even spavimed several sequels none of which was 2 good ora sucoessfl asthe fist, Warner Brothers owned the rights and they did over 100,000 units on that picture, The best com- ment on the picture was from Siskel and her, or Leonard Maltin or someone like that: “Made for morons, by morons” This was your only foray into out-and-out comedy? ‘Yes I had done a lot of rewrites on other people’ scripts adding new lines and scenes for Roger, but I dont like to take credit for that kind of work. Roger would buy an Ital: ian or Japanese film or something, and weld redub it —I didn't really consider that writ- ing or directing. Which films did you do that kind of work I worked on something called Screamers [a notorious Corman mishmash assembled from an Italian movie called Island of the Fishmen and new footage shot by Joe (The Howling) Dante and special effects by Chris (The Fly) Walas), and I worked on Shogun Assassin. That was a lot of fun — it was the first thing I really got my hands on, and it ‘was actually two-anda-half pictures that we put together into one. After that I got the chance to direct a picture called The Lost Empire, which was a send up of all those pictures where beau. tiful women get stranded on an unchartered island and have weird adventures — in a way it was the first Amazon Women on the Moon. 1 did it for Cineplex Odeon, who needed three pictures to meet some kind of [produetion schedule they had. I didn't kn it at the time, but they were using the pi tures as tax write-offs, so The Lost Empire got very limited release and I was really frustrated that I had made this picture in CinemaScope, with lots of special effects and a pretty decent budget and nobody was seeing it. It got some play around the coun: try, but it didn’t get the play I had hoped it would. And they didn't pay-all the money they owed me...years later it’s still in lit gation. But I smile, because it was fun to make. I got to work with character actors like Ken Tobey from The Thing and Angel ‘que Pettijean from Star Trek and Raven Delaervix, who was a Russ Meyer babe. I've said this a8 a joke, but you should always print the legend, so here it is: I always said that when we were auditioning for The Lost Empire we wouldn't even let any girls in who were less than a 86D-cup. After that I did a picture called Killbots Which was released as Chopping Mall. Right. I wrote a couple of pictures in be tween. One, Sky Warriors was for Cannon, for Chuck Norris. That almost got made, except that Menahem (Golan] couldn't de- cide what kind of picture he wanted it to be; he kept coming to me for rewrites, say- ing “Write it up” then “Write it down,” then “Write it up again,” he had no idea what kind of budget he was dealing with. Finally after about seven drafts they decided to do ‘Missing in Action instead. really didn't care at that point... just figured it was money in the bank, ‘Skipping ahead, after Chopping Mall I did “The Monster Mash is sort of Airplane meets The Naked Gun meets The Horror of Dracula as a music video/TV sit-com.” ‘a picture called Deathstalker 2, which was made for home video release, It was a no: money situation... put some of my own up with Roger to make it on sets that had already been used. Right after that I did Big Bad Mama 2, with Angie Diekenson and Robert Culp. It came out prior to Deathstalker 2, oddly enough. Big Bad Mama 2 is a combination of a gangster film and an Italian western and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? I wanted to talk about things I had learned about while doing research on the Depression; some were real eye-openers for me. This ‘country was in very bad shape, in lange part ‘due to the actions of some very unscrupulous Forbidden Word rich people. I wanted to bring that out en- tertainingly, and I had always wanted to make a western — which nobody is doing any more — so I figured the closest I was likely to get to the sagebrush was this gang- ster picture set in Texas during the Thirties. Our film starts prior to the story in Big Bad ‘Mama and ends afterwards. It shows how Mama lost her husband, how she survived after being shot, and takes her right up to 1987 — when she's 87 years old — and she's still out on the road with her great-grand: daughter. Still alive and going strong. I did sort of my version of Rio Bravo crossed with Once Upon a Time in the West and all those other pictures. And of course there's the gangster element: tommy guns blasting away — all that fun stuff. We put it all to gether in a stew that tured out to be Big Bad Mama 2 After that Roger asked what I wanted to do next. I really didn’t know. He went on vacation and I sat around looking through alot of scripts I wasn't really interested in making. I was over at a friend's house and he showed me something hed acquired: An original shooting seript of Not ofthis Earth, with the original produetion schedule which showed that it had been shot in 11 days, And I thought it would be great to make this picture in 11 days. When Roger eame back, his reaction was “You've gor to be kidding me. That picture? It’s talky...very talky” But I convinced him — I told him weld do it in 11 days and weld sell it even if it was talky. I rewrote the seript which he didn't even bother to read because he was on hi way to Mexico where Deathsialker 3 was shooting. He just left and told me to go ahead and make it, but he bet me I couldn't do it in 11 days. A pretty substantial wager, and I didn’t want to lose. So I hired a veryfast DP who would keep things in focus, I got the set construction underway and I started pulling seenes from other movies, pieces of our past productions that I could shoehorn into the new pieture to stretch it cut to length without extending the shoot- ing schedule. I pulled a scene from Human- ‘ids from the Deep, anda scene from Holly- wood Boulevard, which was itself a film that. was made around scenes from other movies, = though the scene I used for mine was one shot for Hollywood Boulevard — 30 it was Tike a cannibal eating: a cannibal. We hired Tracy Lords, the former X-rated superstar to play the Beverly Garland role [that ofa woman who realizes her new neigh- bor is...not of this earth]. She did a very admirable job; in fact, I've gotten offers to do others, bigger pictares with her. The role ‘ofthe alien went to an unknown actor named Arthur Roberts... cast virtual unknowns, because I didn't really have any money to offer people — I was trying to do it on the same budget Roger did the original on, ad usted for inflation. That amounted to about $210,000, And since a quarter of it was my money, I didn’t want to go over budget. ‘We kept the same plot, and in many cases the same lines, but we changed other things to make it work for today’s audiences, There ‘lot more nudity in this picture, for exam- ple, Of course, there's no nudity in the orig inal. There are more special effects; we dort, chintzit out with contact lenses — we have rotoscoped eye glows. The three bums the alien picked up in the first film are now three hookers. There's a scene in the first ‘one where he goes wandering around Bev. erly Hills finds a roving Chinaman and sends him back to his home planet, which T always thought was ridiculous, So in my version the victim comes to him. She's a strip--gram girl who comes to the wrong. house; she gets sent back to the home planet, as a typical earth specimen. I kept a lot of trappings from the 1950s — all the phones are old phones, we got an old ’50s black Cadilla for the alien to drive...there are only a few references to today. The clothes are modern, but everything else is of yes- teryear. It's an odd looking picture, but fun, ‘There was something great about remaking 4 picture 1 always liked. And now we're looking at the release of The Return of the Swamp Thing. 1 always liked comic books and I always thought it would be fun to do a very gothie movie in the swamps — you know, to get into a real EC comies locale, And I always liked Swmap Thing as a character; he was drawn well in the first issues by Bernie Wrightson and he reminded me of the old EC comies...that’s really why I gravitated towards the projeet when it was offered to And why was it offered to you? [Laughs] Frankly, T never found out all the details I got a call last summer offering me the seript, which I didn’t think much of at the beginning. It needed a lot of work, 1 did what I could to make it better in the time before it went into production. I added practically all the humor, because I felt the approach was too deadly serious. I think if your picture has a title like The Return of omic Cockta the Swamp Thing, you ought to approach it with the attitude that you're going to have a little bit of fun. But I also see Swamp ‘Thing as the swamp equivalent of the beast in Beauty and the Beast...he’s the Elephant Man, he’ all the tortured creatures who have beautiful souls trapped in ugly exte riors, Hes part James Bond, part tortured soul, part comedian and all Swamp Thing, ‘Swamp Thing took a lot longer to finish ‘up than anything elge I’ve done because of all the logistical problems... post production things, mostly. Rotoscoping, cutting the ‘main title sequence, which is a montage of comic book images of Swamp Thing, the stereo mix; it was in post for a good six months. This is also the largest budget I've ever worked with, ‘And did it make all the difference in the world? Not really. I even came in a day early when they expected I was going to go over by five; the insurance company was convinced it eouldn't be done as scheduled. Whenever you tell people where this was filmed they want to hear swamp stories, and if theres one thing I learned it was that there are eight million stories in the swamp and every ‘one of them will happen to you. Things that look like submerged tail lights turn out to be ‘gator eyes, it's hot, things bite you, the mud is full of leeches...fun, fun, fun. Tm sure you're not going to let much time lapse before you get your next project on the road. T'm preparing two shows, one of which is due to startin April and the other in June. ‘The fire is a film version ofthe Bobby Pickett The Alen (Arthur Roberts) in Not of this Ear song “The Monster Mash,’ and the, other is a big budget flm with Christopher Reeve, called Hero for Hire. I wrote both of them. The Monster Mash is sort-of Airplane meets, The Naked Gun meets The Horror of Dracula as a music video/TV sit-eom. Withodt the Munsters. It's like a Mad magazine parody, with Freddy and Jason and The ‘all Man from Phantasm and Leatherface and Vin- cent Price and Linda Blair. Hero for Hire is about a search for the legendary fountain of youth. The story answers the question, “So, what do you do once you've found it?” That should take me thorugh the rest of 1989... It looks like I'm going to be happy all the way to the bank. And T don't mean that in the most callous way — T try to en- tertain people with my films. I don't go in saying, “I'll just make this piece of schlock, because I know it will sell no matter what, I give it my best shot, because I really do make pictures for myself — I try to make things I'll enjoy seeing, because I'm going to watch these pictures for years to come and I don't want to be embarrassed. I do the best I can for the budget T have...oh, and one more thing — I'm an actor now, too T’'m playing a producer in Hollywood Boul evard, Part 2, which Roger is making...it's kind of a remake of the first one, with the pomo star Ginger Lynn in the lead. So that’s the news — me up to date; past the date, What more ean I'tell you?