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  2.

  THE ROGER CORMAN SCHOOL OF FILM

  Roger

  Cameron is not the first Hollywood director to arrive at filmmaking by way of a science background. Before he sent Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling through Robin Hood, Allan Dwan studied engineering at Notre Dame. Howard Hughes and Frank Capra both attended classes at the science mecca that is now Caltech. Howard Hawks was an engineering student at Cornell University, and Alfred Hitchcock studied electrical engineering in London.

  It was a Stanford University industrial engineering grad who would give Cameron his first job in the movie business—Roger Corman. “In engineering, one of the big things you do is plan,” Corman says. “And it’s the same with making movies. When the director is able to say ‘cut, print’ on the first day of shooting, that picture’s half made.” Corman should know. He has produced and/or directed some four hundred of them, with an efficiency and thrift that NASA would admire. Corman famously claims to have filmed the 1960 comedy Little Shop of Horrors in two and a half days, on a bet. When he went to England to shoot the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death in 1964, he saw some leftover sets from the just-wrapped Becket lying around and decided to use those. He is best known for exploitation films like Candy Stripe Nurses and Death Race 2000, but Corman’s oeuvre stretches to the gothic horror of the Poe movies, inventive sci-fi like X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, and a thoughtful antisegregationist piece that was one of William Shatner’s first starring roles, The Intruder. The prolific director-producer also distributed foreign art-house movies in the United States, like Fellini’s Amarcord and Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. He even had the temerity to show an Ingmar Bergman movie at drive-ins, to the Swedish tragedians delight.

  But the most successful product of Corman’s movie-making factory has been people. His low-budget productions have launched the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, and many others in Hollywood. Corman recruited the young and eager—he was usually the only person working at his company over age thirty. “I was giving them training and an opportunity to make a picture that nobody else would give them,” he says. “In return they were getting less money than someone with more experience.” The hours were long and the working conditions far from glamorous—if an office had a leaky roof, its inhabitant was encouraged to look forward to the end of L.A.’s brief rainy season. But those were trade-offs most were happy to make for a chance to work at a company where, with enough pluck and talent, you could go from carrying light stands to directing your first picture in less time than it took to graduate from film school.

  By the time Cameron came knocking on the door of Corman’s New World Pictures in 1979, the independent film company was beginning to feel some pressure. Thanks to the success of Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977, Hollywood studios had suddenly discovered genre pictures, Corman’s mainstay, and were making them with bigger budgets and higher production values. “They started making the exact type of film I had been making,” Corman says. “They were taking away our bread and butter.” In retaliation, Corman was about to embark on his most expensive movie to date, a $2 million nod to Star Wars called Battle Beyond the Stars. The story of space mercenaries trying to save a peaceful planet from a tyrant named Sador, Battle Beyond the Stars was a sci-fi version of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which had already been given a Western reenvisioning in The Magnificent Seven. Corman pulled out his big guns for the film. John Sayles, who would later write and direct the Oscar-nominated screenplays for Lone Star and Passion Fish, wrote the script, while the animator Jimmy Murakami directed. The cast included some name actors whose careers had crested: Richard Thomas, John-Boy from The Waltons, played the hero. George Peppard, moving from the Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the A-Team stage of his career, was a space cowboy, and Robert Vaughn, the smooth spy from the 1960s TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., essentially reprised his gunslinger role in The Magnificent Seven. A rookie film composer named James Horner wrote the score—he would go on to work with Cameron on Aliens, Titanic, and Avatar. After bids came in for the film’s special effects that totaled more than the sum of his entire production budget, Corman decided to create his own effects department and hired a TV effects supervisor named Chuck Comisky to run it. It was Comisky for whom Cameron screened his Xenogenesis footage. He was hired on the spot as a model builder.

  A Spaceship with Tits

  New World’s model shop was in a dusty former lumberyard in Venice, California, a few miles from Corman’s office in Brentwood. The producer dispatched his twenty-four-year-old assistant, Gale Anne Hurd, to check on the progress of the model builders and the sets. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford with a double major in economics and communications, Hurd was a classic Corman hire—bright, hardworking, and young. She was given far more responsibility than a studio executive’s assistant would have—making offers to agents, scouting locations, preparing marketing materials, and keeping Corman up on the progress of his technical staff. A pretty, petite brunette, Hurd walked into the model shop, which was full of spaceships and builders hard at work. “This very tall blond guy came up to me and said, ‘Hi, can I help you?’” She explained that she was there to make a report for Corman, and the tall blond guy gave her a tour. He showed her the designs for the spaceships, the various stages they were at, the time lines for finishing them. “I said, ‘Wow, that’s really impressive. You must be the head of the model shop.’ He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, I’m just a model builder.’” Cameron had only been at Corman’s for a matter of days, but he was already taking charge. He seems constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise. “He had a very commanding presence,” Hurd says. “Even if his position was not running the model shop, he clearly seemed to be running the model shop.”

  When Cameron was hired, all of the spaceships for Battle Beyond the Stars had already been designed, except for one. The hero ship, Richard Thomas’s vessel, was supposed to be run by a female robot named Nell. Corman held a design bake-off for the spaceship, soliciting ideas from his staff. Cameron had always won the art contests back in Niagara Falls, and, in his own way, he had been preparing for this moment for years. His Star Trek comic books, his 2001 Super 8 knock-offs, the concept art for Xenogenesis—it was all about to come in very handy. He threw himself into the design, deciding the ship should have a female personality to match the robot that was running it. He drew a warrior ship that was graceful and streamlined and resembled a twisted, almost cubist female torso. It had two big, round engine pods in the front. Corman made his way around the room looking at the proposed designs. The others were all geometric—rectangles and triangles. When he got to Cameron’s design, Corman stopped. “He said, ‘Now what’s this?’” Cameron recalls. “I said, ‘It’s a spaceship with tits.’ He said, ‘I like this.’” Clearly Cameron knew his audience. Corman’s films were as famous for baring breasts as they were for making money. “He said, ‘This is the design. You are now in charge of this ship.’” All of a sudden, Cameron was in charge of something. “Intuitively, Jim understood that each spaceship had to have a personality of its own,” Corman says. “He expressed it in his design, clearly and simply.”

  The young model maker was emboldened by his new responsibility. The next time Corman came through the shop, Cameron stopped him. “I said, ‘You know, Roger, I’ve been studying the production and there’s a fatal flaw.’” He explained to Corman that the filmmakers had no way of putting the actors in their movie inside the model environments in a realistic way. But there was a way to do it, Cameron said: front projection. It was what Stanley Kubrick had done on 2001: A Space Odyssey. “And I know exactly how to do it,” Cameron told him. He didn’t tell Corman he hadn’t actually done any front projection before. “I didn’t lie, I just didn’t tell the whole truth,” he says. Cameron was made head of the New World Pictures’ new Front Screen Projection Department. He hired a staff of one, his friend Randall Frakes. “I was li
ke the guy in Flight of the Phoenix who knows exactly how to fix the plane. But they find out later he’s only ever built model airplanes. I had a tremendous amount of theory and zero practical experience.”

  Just over a month before principal photography on Battle Beyond the Stars was to start, Corman made Hurd assistant production manager. She noticed that the art director, who had come highly recommended by Universal Studios, was moving awfully slowly. None of the sets had been designed. The art director was used to having a draftsperson design the sets for him, but on a Corman film, if you were the art director, you were the draftsperson. Hurd recalls, “I said to Roger, ‘I’m really concerned. I haven’t seen any blueprints. There are no hammers pounding nails.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you go find someone who can pull it all together?’” Looking for advice, Hurd sought out someone who actually seemed to know what he was doing: Cameron. “Who do you think can do this?” she asked him. “Interiors need to match exteriors.” Cameron immediately drew what the interiors would look like and gave Hurd the drawings to show Corman.

  Cameron was so eager and the production so consuming that he had started sleeping at the model shop. Instead of going home at night, he pulled a prop gurney out into the hallway, away from the smell of the paint and Bondo, and grabbed a few hours of sleep there. That’s where he was when Corman’s new assistant, Mary Anne Fisher, woke him up at 3:00 a.m. Corman had just fired the art director, she told him. Did Cameron want to take his place? He had never been an art director and had no idea what was involved in the job. “Sure,” Cameron said, and rolled over and went back to sleep. In a matter of weeks, he had jumped from a model builder on a film to its art director. Even by the accelerated career-advancement standards of New World Pictures, it was a breakneck promotion.

  The Culling Process

  The day after his prop-gurney recruitment session, Cameron entered into one of his first negotiations. “OK, let’s talk about my salary,” he said to Fisher. At the time, he was making $200 a week. Fisher offered him $300. “What did the other guy get?” Cameron wanted to know. $750, but he was very experienced. “I said, ‘Yeah, but he fucked up. The show is in dire crisis. You fired him. You want me to do the same job. I want the same money’” He nearly quadrupled his salary. There’s a reason Cameron has spent much of his career without an agent.

  Next he reported to the production manager’s office. “He said, ‘OK, here’s your petty cash voucher. And here’s your coke and here’s your black beauties,’” Cameron says. It was January 1980. “I said, ‘What’s this for?’ He said, ‘Well, this is for the crew. It’s part of the payment system.’ “Cameron took the two bottles. He had never done either drug before, so he took a crew member aside and asked what he was supposed to do. “You just chop a little line, do it up with a spoon, and hand it to somebody,” the crew member told Cameron. “You ask ‘em, ‘Do you need something?’” Cameron felt strange about his new responsibility. “Now I’m the production drug dealer all of a sudden? Do I get to do any art direction?” Drugs are one of the Hollywood minefields Cameron has managed to avoid. “Not with my personality,” he says. “Me on drugs is not a good thing. Not a happy thing.” His adrenal glands seem to secrete speed anyway. While working on Battle Beyond the Stars, he pulled an eighty-five-hour stretch with one hour of sleep, just drinking coffee.

  Nearly thirty years later, Corman talks glowingly of Cameron’s work on the space epic, of how inventively the young man used egg cartons and metallic paint to create believable spaceship interiors in hours. Time and success may have hazed Corman’s memories. He actually fired Cameron twice. The shooting schedule on Battle Beyond the Stars was twenty-six days. One morning, after Cameron and his crew of three had been working all night building, dressing, and painting an interior, they were still finishing when the camera crew arrived. “God forbid it took us more than eight hours to build a set,” Cameron says. “Roger comes in and says, ‘Jim, this is just a shitty little set. It’s just a shitty little set, and it’s not done, and it’s costing me production time. You’re fired.’” Cameron stalked off, furious, and Fisher came running after him. “She said, ‘Come back! Roger just does that.’”

  Cameron learned that if Corman saw people painting and taping when a set was supposed to be done, the art director was toast. But if there was garbage all over the floor and the set was half painted, as long as the crew was gone, Corman didn’t care. So Cameron posted a lookout with a walkie-talkie and held a “Roger drill.” When Corman’s Lotus sports car came down the street, the lookout was to notify Cameron, who would blow a whistle twice, and everyone was to leave the set, no matter what they were doing, and go get a cup of coffee. The next morning Cameron was wearing a gas mask, spraying copper-colored automotive lacquer, the only thing that would dry fast enough, when he got the walkie call that the Lotus had landed. He tore off his mask and blew the whistle, and his crew dropped their tools and scattered. Paint fumes still hung in the air when Corman walked in and looked around. “Very good,” he said, and left. The crew came back in and finished the set.

  Cameron’s take-no-prisoners working style abraded some of his colleagues. The construction supervisor took visible joy in striking the art director’s sets with a skip loader. And the quiet guys in the model shop and special-effects departments wondered at this skinny know-it-all who, after a month, had completely coopted their operation. “I ran roughshod over the place,” Cameron confesses. “It’s a culling process. Some people don’t want to deal with it, the fact that so much relies on personality and not logic. That it’s hype. That it’s the pitch. I knew you had to sell and you had to make your move.” Some of the Corman crew would go on to work for Cameron. Dennis and Robert Skotak, two brothers toiling in the relative peace of the special-effects and model departments when Cameron arrived, would receive Oscars for their work on Aliens and The Abyss. Thirty years after he screened Xenogenesis and gave Cameron his first paying job in Hollywood, Comisky was working on the visual effects for Avatar.

  “There are two components to any filmmaker,” Cameron says. “How you picture the movie in advance and how you make it happen in the real world.” Cameron is exceptional both at dreaming up the vision and rallying people around it, assuaging their fears, and convincing them they’re capable of seemingly impossible tasks. Some of that leadership ability is innate—the boy who had all the neighborhood kids pulling his junkyard airplane. But Cameron’s already healthy sense of authority was boosted by the exuberant atmosphere of Corman’s company. “There wasn’t time for doubt,” Cameron says. “We didn’t know the twenty-seven reasons why we shouldn’t be able to do exactly what we were in the process of doing. There was this blissful ignorance about the process of how films are really made that allowed us to do some pretty darn extraordinary stuff given the time and budget restraints. You come out of it with this feeling like you can do anything.”

  “Bring Me the Maggots”

  After Battle Beyond the Stars, Cameron shuffled among different projects that made use of his design skills. Halloween director John Carpenter hired him to help create the grim future cityscapes in Escape from New York, a dystopian vision starring Kurt Russell in which the entire island of Manhattan has been turned into a maximum-security prison. It was a project for which Cameron was perfectly cast artistically—this was, after all, a guy who had been daydreaming about Armageddon since the fifth grade. Cameron took a plate of glass mounted with a photo collage of Central Park West buildings to the weed-strewn field in the San Fernando Valley where Carpenter was shooting, fine-tuned the Manhattan skyline with paint, and placed the glass in front of the camera, transforming the field into an overgrown Central Park.

  His second movie for Corman was Galaxy of Terror, the producer’s paean to Ridley Scott’s Alien, the grittily realistic sci-fi/horror hybrid that Cameron adored and would five years later direct the sequel to, having essentially done a dry run of it for New World. In Corman’s film, a spaceship crew meets with terrors created by their ow
n imaginations. The cast includes Erin Moran (Joanie Cunningham from Happy Days), soon-to-be Freddy Krueger Robert Englund, and then blaxploitation film regular Sid Haig, who would become a favorite of director Rob Zombie more than twenty years later. Cameron was the production designer, charged with creating evocative biomechanoid sets like the ones Swiss artist H. R. Giger had designed for Scott, but on a Corman budget. He was also an active member of the visual-effects team on the picture. By the end of the movie, he would have finagled himself his first directing job.

  Bill Paxton, a Texan transplant trying to launch an acting career, tagged along with a friend who was working on Cameron’s night crew at the lumberyard in Venice. Paxton was looking for graveyard shift work, to keep his days free for auditions, and had done some set dressing on another Corman film. Cameron was looking for warm bodies to finish his sets on time. “Jim said, ‘Can you start right now?’” Paxton recalls. “‘Go paint that wall over there.’ Typical Jim. Bang bang.” They built spaceship interiors from dishwasher racks, Styrofoam, a Winnebago mold. “I would find drawings on the floor that were these amazing renderings,” Paxton recalls. “These were just sketches Jim discarded. I hoarded away a couple of those.” Along with the sets, they started to build a friendship. Paxton had directed a funny, bizarre short film called Fish Heads, essentially a music video for a novelty song by a band called Barnes and Barnes, about all the things fish heads can and cannot do (mostly what they cannot do, like wear sweaters, play drums, and drink cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women). Paxton invited Cameron to a screening of the short at a punk-rock club in the San Fernando Valley. Fish Heads, which would ultimately sell to Saturday Night Live and achieve early-eighties cult status, endeared Paxton to Cameron, who realized the affable Texan had ambitions beyond painting spaceships. Three years later, when Cameron needed a punk rocker to get beaten up by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, he thought of Paxton. Over the years, the actor would appear in larger and more significant roles in Aliens, True Lies, Titanic, and Ghosts of the Abyss and become a diving buddy and confidant.