The great B-Movie director Roger Corman has died. As a kind of tribute, I’m reposting an essay I wrote some years ago on my old blog. Enjoy!
Ever since I turned forty, I find myself going to see fewer and fewer movies. It’s only natural, I suppose. The less time you have left, the less time you want to spend in a darkened theater, lost in flights of fancy. And so, what little I know of recent film releases comes to me second-hand, either through friends or online reviews or through the film trailers that I see when I do occasionally go to a movie. Even from this limited perspective, I can glean a few obvious facts about movies these days: 1.) they are all rated PG-13 and 2.) they are all about the end-of-the-world and 3.) they all rely heavily on digital effects.
These three qualities go together, of course, for reasons that are based more in economics than anything else. The digital effects are required to attract a modern audience raised on video games and violent TV. And because these CGI effects tend to be horrifically expensive, the movies must be rated PG-13 in order to gather as large are a customer base as possible. Finally, the reliance on end-of-the-world plots come naturally, mainly because the plot-lines that justify these breathtaking explosions, airships, monsters, and laser guns usually involve some kind Biblical-style, science-fiction-themed catastrophe.
Unfortunately, as io9 pointed out recently in a nice post, the combination of blockbuster effects, epic plotlines, and adolescent drama can ultimately have a deadening effect on our experience of film. I’ve been musing over this idea for some time, especially when I think back to some of my favorite movies from my youth, low-budget actioners like Escape from New York, The Road Warrior, Smokey and the Bandit, and even Damnation Alley.
Then, with untimely death of the great stunt man and director Hal Needham last month, the following question came into my head: When will Hollywood rediscover the great B-movie action flick?
Needham’s passing made me think of this because it was he, along with other great B-directors like John Carpenter and George Miller, who defined the kind of aesthetic I am speaking of. Cars. Guns. Swords. Muscles. And stunts. Lots of stunts. Real, bone-breaking, edge-of-your-seat stunts that left you thinking: how the f*** did they do that?
Don’t get me wrong: CGI effects can be great. When done well, they are just as thrilling and convincing as any old-style gag (and often more so). Avatar is an amazing example, obviously, of what CGI effects can do to enhance the performances of human actors.
But let’s face it—there is something cold and numbing about most CGI effects these days. Maybe it’s just the endless repetition, but I find myself unmoved by the sight of yet another hero sailing across a green-screen into a digitally created maelstrom of death.
Ho…hum….
Great B-movies, on the other hand, had an undeniably gritty, naturalistic, human quality to them. This was mainly due to their miniscule budgets, which required feats of genuine physical daring from low-paid stunt men (and, as often as not, from the so-called “leading” men, too, who got paid slightly more). These were guys who got half their pay in cash and the other half in cocaine (or painkillers). But they took genuine risks, and their performances were often more entertaining than those you would see in an A-list movie.
That’s the paradox. Special effects, for all their dazzling ability to mimic reality, are often less convincing than a guy hanging on the hood of a 1978 Chevy Nova with his fingernails while blasting a shotgun at another guy in a rubber monster suit. Go figure.
Of course, I’m not the first person to feel this way. Modern auteur directors like Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have been trying to re-capture this vibe for years with movies like Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse, and From Dusk Till Dawn, with limited success. My theory is that in order to make a good, low-budget, story-driven action film, you have to be a good, low-budget, story-driven director. Emphasis on low-budget. Desperation is the best motivation for a director. It’s also the essential ingredient of a great B-movie.
I mentioned Needham above because he was perhaps the only example of a stuntman who became a successful director, creating movies that I loved as a kid. Smokey and the Bandit. Hooper. Even the classic howler Megaforce was great if you were a fourteen-year-old kid with nothing better to watch. But, for my money, the greatest B-movie director of all time is John Carpenter. He had an early success with a micro-budget, blood-splattered hit called Assault on Precinct 13, and then went on to make such classics as Halloween and Escape from New York. Even today, thirty years later, I find these movies much more engrossing than the typical sci-fi bomb that craters its way into the local cineplex every summer. Despite their cheesy effects and less-than-stellar cast, great B-movies feel more real to me.
So I ask the question again: When will Hollywood rediscover the B-movie action flick?
The answer, of course, is that it won’t.
For one thing, the current economic model of film studios does not allow the making of such low-budget fare. Even stories that have the potential to be great low-budget flicks like The Fast and Furious soon become bloated, over-the-top blockbusters. And even a fine, grungy little horror flick like Pitch Black (which is maybe the closest thing to a genuine B-movie I have seen in the past decade or so) can quickly get co-opted into the dreadful CGI-overloaded Riddick. That’s the pattern.
But there’s another reason Hollywood can’t rediscover great B-action movies: it never discovered them. Even in the 1970s and 80s, most of the really great B-movies came from small, independent studios or from overseas (Australia and Hong Kong being the primary centers for schlock brilliance). It was only when a nominally A-list actor would attach himself to a lower-budget production that the major studios were willing to back a B-movie, with Smokey and the Bandit and The Terminator being prime examples. For the most part, great B-movies came from great B-movie producers and directors, playing with their own money, taking their own (very personal) risks.
Even so, here is my suggestion to Hollywood: instead of funding three big movies a year at 100 million dollars each, try making one big movie for 100 million and twenty smaller ones for 10 million each. You’ve got a better shot, this way, of getting a genuine hit. (How many multiples of its original budget did The Road Warrior rake in during that long-ago summer?)
This is how you make a good B-movie action flick, in four easy steps…
1.) Find some decent, young actors and actresses. They don’t necessarily have to sport bulging biceps or bodacious boobs (although it doesn’t hurt).
2.) Find some hungry, talented, unknown directors with a penchant for cars, guns, and dynamite (think James Cameron in his Piranha II days).
3.) Get some good, nerdy writers to pen the script, preferably from a great B action novel like something Stephen King or Roger Zelazny would have written, back in the day.
4.) Get some great stuntmen. Fire some squibs. Wreck some cars. Basically, have some fun. I’m just sayin’…
Ash Clifton, Writer 