Director Roger Corman came on board the good ship American International Pictures in the mid-Fifties and would go on to become their lead director in the following decade. However his significance in Hollywood history goes well beyond the parameters of filmmaking. Just as essential as the twenty-three films he would helm in the Sixties and the many he would subsequently produce in what was hailed as 'The Corman Connection;' this consists of a group of filmmakers later to make important contributions to the American film, whose earliest work is represented in the credits of undistinguished AIP productions. Thomas Colchart was listed as the director for 1963's Battle Beyond the Sun. In fact, the film was The Sky Calls (1959), a Russian space movie that was Americanized by the art of dubbing and the shooting of additional scenes; and 'Thomas Colchart' was actually none other than Francis Ford Coppola, a then twenty-something UCLA graduate who interned for Corman and was also his sound man, dialogue coach, assistant director and second unit-director. His reward would come the year 1963 with Dementia 13, a horror film Coppola made in and around Ireland's Howth Castle utilizing the resources and scraps of Corman's own The Young Racers (1963) which was shot on location at the Grand Prix. Others who honed their craft at AIP had their enthusiasm similarly rewarded.
A notable example being Monte Hellman, who already debuted as a director in 1959 with the Corman-produced Beast From Haunted Cave, but by 1963 he was still helping Corman to shoot The Terror, and that they did in all but seventy-two hours by taking charge of second-unit filming. He was more than adequately compensated three years after when Corman produced the two movies on which Hellman's high, although not widespread reputation is largely based. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966 respectively) two rough and tumble, ultra-violent and mythic Westerns shot in tandem in the Utah desert both featuring Jack Nicholson who was until that point an undistinguished Corman juvenile lead. They have been little seen unlike 1967s Targets which was the first feature shot by film critic and MOMA curator, Peter Bogdanovich, who reputedly had fueled the motorbikes on Corman's The Wild Angels as well as reworking its script. Other kahunas of the era were the directors Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, John Sayles, Paul Bartel, Jonathan Demme and Stephanie Rothman.
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| Hard to believe this is not and isolated scene from Easy Rider. It is however The Wild Angels (1966) |
If the combination of Roger Corman and American International Pictures was the most successful of the Sixties although it was privy to its fair share of competition. Joe Solomon's Fanfare Corporation for example was modeled on much the same lines as AIP; its large success with biker outlaw film Hell's Angels on Wheels (1967) not only furthered the career of the director Richard Rush, the star Jack Nicholson and acclaimed cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, but also pointed directly ahead to Easy Rider, the hallmark of 1960's counterculture cinema.
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| Late for another audition. The damsel in Dementia 13 distress. |