If you love B-movies with plenty of camp, comedy and gore, then you’ve probably seen a few films created by the writer/producer/director Roger Corman, the man behind SyFy channel pictures like “Dinocroc vs. Supergator” and older classics like the original “Little Shop of Horrors.”

Up-and-coming director Alex Stapleton turned the camera onto the camp master in her film “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.”

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It follows Corman’s career – over half a century of cheap-as-dirt indie filmmaking – and the resulting 400-plus films that he created in that time. The film launched earlier this month, and Stapleton called BH recently for an interview about her film, Corman’s influence, and getting Jack Nicholson to cry on camera.

BH: Where does Roger Corman fit into the history of cinema?

Stapleton: I definitely think he’s part of the backbone of cinema. I think, creatively speaking as a filmmaker and director, he kind of helped – along with his compatriots – to birth the kind of blockbuster genre film experiences that we experience today that the studios are making.

I think Roger was definitely one of the pioneers in that movement. When you look at the movie “Avatar,” you look at the director and it’s James Cameron, and James Cameron [worked] under Roger Corman for years and… I think that James Cameron would probably tell you the same thing: that he learned a lot about how to put together a genre story by working for Roger.

I also think that as far as moments in cinema history, Roger has had a huge influence, specifically with the American new Hollywood movement, by finding and mentoring people like Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, [and] Peter Bogdanovich, starting their careers but also giving them the idea – Peter Fonda, Denis Hopper and Jack Nicholson – giving them the idea to make the movie “Easy Rider,” which is a hybrid movie of Roger’s movies “The Trip” and “Wild Angels.” (more…)

Director James Cameron wants to be King of the World from a more rural perch.

The man who gave us “Aliens,” “Terminator” and “Avatar” is packing his bags and leaving the U.S. indefinitely. Destination: New Zealand.

Cameron has successfully applied to buy 1,067 hectares (2,636 acres) of farmland in New Zealand. In an application filed with the New Zealand Overseas Investment Office, Cameron says he and his family “intend to reside indefinitely in New Zealand and are acquiring the property to reside on and operate as a working farm.

Cameron’s claim to fame was transforming Arnold Schwarzenegger into a killing machine with the “Terminator” franchise. In recent years, he became the undisputed box office champ with two of the highest grossing films of all time, “Avatar” and “The Titanic.” He also routinely stands on a soap box to support environmental causes, but his personal choices hardly match his green rhetoric.

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The current 3D wave has thrown just about everything our way, from three-dimensional boobs (“Piranha 3D”) to Medusa’s snaky mane (“Clash of the Titans”).

But we haven’t yet had a certifiable auteur take a crack at the format – until now.

Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” opening wide tomorrow, finds the Oscar-winning director turning his attention to the third dimension. The early reviews are glowing – a gaggle of comments essentially saying it’s the best use of 3D technology yet. Will that be enough to convince audiences that paying a surcharge – and wearing those clumsy glasses – are worth the effort?

Scorsese has his work cut out for him, and he can blame an industry which abused 3D nearly every step of the way.

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Sony Mulling Internet-Based Alternative to Cable TV

Faster, please:

“According to Wall Street Journal sources, Sony is mulling the launch of an Internet-based alternative to cable TV service in the US. Per the report, Sony has approached several big media groups seeking to negotiate rights to beam their TV channels via the Web.

“Sony’s proposal would see the channels go out to Sony-made devices like PlayStation consoles, TVs and Blu-ray players.”

Update on ’Star Trek’ Sequel Production

What will Hollywood do if this franchise peters out? Clone the original cast? “Star Trek Babies”?

What the ‘Community’ Hiatus Says About the Current State of TV

You buy this?

Community creator Dan Harmon attempted to explain why his NBC show continues to get low ratings despite outstanding marks from critics. “Well, the average person comes home from work really tired, and just wants to flip through channels until they land on the thing that’s the least objectionable to them,” Harmon said. “So they don’t regard the television as an appliance that’s supposed to spiritually satisfy them, they regard it as a thing that’s supposed to comfort them and be a little stupid. It’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because that’s what TV has given them all their lives and it’s hard to go out and do the work of finding a show.”

I can’t judge the show because I’ve never seen it, but this actually seems to be the decade for intelligent television — from “The Sopranos” straight through to “The Shield,” “Mad Men,” and “Breaking Bad.”

An NBC show obviously has to pull in more viewers than those cable shows, so maybe that’s the answer. Move to cable.

Celebrating 40 years of ‘The Omega Man‘

This is one of those films I keep watching again and again hoping I’ll like it better. But as much as I want to like it, to say I prefer Will Smith’s remake would be quite the understatement. Maybe it’s watching Heston enjoy the dirty, filthy hippie movie “Woodstock” or those silly sunglasses Anthony Zerbe wears.  There’s something about “Omega Man”’s tone that doesn’t work for me, and it gets worse as the film rolls on.

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Director James Cameron isn’t shy about touting his green vision for the globe – even if he refuses to debate those who don’t see the eco-world his way.

But Cameron, currently prepping to shoot two sequels to his mega-smash ‘Avatar,’ told ‘Nightline‘ he won’t be so heavy handed when incorporating his environmental beliefs into the sequels.

‘The [environmental] themes will be there and be played out in a way that people can accept. I’m not going to become more strident. I’m not gonna say, ‘we got away with this much environmental content in the first movie. Now, let’s double it.’ That would be a mistake. It has to be entertainment first and foremost.’

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I’ve worked since 1985 in the Hollywood movie and TV industry.  I started from scratch building miniatures that we shot against blue screen with motion-controlled robotic cameras.  My first James Cameron movie was “The Abyss” and by the second, “Terminator II,” I was supervising.  I continued on through the late ’80s and early ’90s handling on-set special effects, meanwhile producing and directing films and commercials on the side.

At one point I deviated into movie marketing and started a company that designed movie posters. Working on the computer brought me full circle back into effects work as it transitioned to digital visual effects. I worked for a couple small companies for a few months until each movie was completed and then started with a mid-sized company that had started to consistently win bids for larger studio pictures .  It was a less stressful position than being on set with so many egos and at only 40 hours a week instead of 70, it was much more like a regular job.

On my first day I was assigned to a workstation in a small room with one other artist.  I sat behind someone I’ll call Carl, a Compositor, who married together different elements into one shot. The first thing that people find unusual about visual effects work is that there is a lot of sitting around and waiting for shots to preview and render on the computer. So, artists spend a lot of time conversing with each other and surfing the net.  Carl had just downloaded Paris Hilton’s sex video and was going on about how much she liked sex. This didn’t bother me especially in an era when we had to hear about the creative uses our former President had for cigars. (more…)

So with the news that Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is underperforming and leaving theaters rather than expanding, it’s unclear whether producer John Aglialoro will be able to produce the planned sequels for the adaptation of Ayn Rand’s most famous and controversial work. Name recognition from one of the bestselling books of the past century, still a chart-topper due its appeal to libertarians and limited-government advocates, wasn’t a strong enough draw to earn back even half of its $20 million production budget so far, and this raises a lot of questions for those who rooted for the film. What does this mean for conservatives and fans of Rand?

Obviously, it means everything we’ve ever believed is absolutely wrong.

The free market just doesn’t work. Every conservative really is a secret dog-whistle racist. America is no more exceptional than North Korea. The earth really is barreling towards cataclysmic destruction because of you air conditioner. True equality and justice comes from redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. Wait–

*brakes screech*

*spit take*

*jaw drops*

*pants fall*¹

Redistribution of wealth? Lucky for Aglialoro and his partner at Atlas Films, Harmon Kaslow, they’re located smack dab in the middle of millionaire country; and Los Angeles’s rich filmmakers all agree that redistribution of wealth is the right path for America! So, here is my plea to some of Tinseltown’s most beloved left-wing filmmakers. We’ve seen the light, and now we need your help. (more…)

Many movies about people trapped in dangerous locations focus on their plans to escape. “Daylight” focused on a group of people who were trying to escape a tunnel that collapsed. “The Towering Inferno” focused on a group who were trying to escape a fire in an office building. “Sanctum,” on the other hand, focuses on people who are trying to escape but are overtly willing to give up their lives if they become injured.  As depressing as that may sound, the reasons to give up on life are at the cornerstone of this story as multiple characters choose to die quickly rather than keep fighting to survive.

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The story revolves around a group of divers who are exploring an underground cave. Frank (Richard Roxburgh) is the acclaimed leader of the exploration who enjoys finding new worlds underwater. Josh (Rhys Wakefield) is his estranged son who doesn’t understand his father. He rebels against his father and his father’s great expecatations of him. The father and son are joined in the cave by an easily forgettable supporting cast that includes Ioan Grufffurd as a financial supporter of the trip.

Once the crew starts exploring the cave and diving into the depths of its underwater tunnels, a torrential rainstorm begins flooding the cave.  In their search for an escape route, the team must hunt for a way out as their oxygen depletes and the water continues to pour in. As hope fades, the situation becomes more dire and and the crew becomes more distressed, searching for a way out. (more…)

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Via Elizabeth Snead at The Dish Rag, who got the video, story and transcript:

“Go home, get online and find out the facts about climate change. And then the next time you hear some crap on talk radio or Fox News, you’ll know the truth. Don’t get your science from demagogues. Get your science from scientists.”

Does James Cameron mean we should get our science from … these scientists?

See, if I’m going to get my Global Warming science from anyone it’s going to be a troop-smearing, anti-Christian, chicken little, environmental hypocrite of epic proportions, cuz that’s how I roll.

But first…

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Everyone loves a little bit of adventure, but some people take it to the extreme, whether climbing Everest or exploring the wonders of deep-sea diving. The hardy band of explorers in the new thriller “Sanctum” are crazy enough to engage in both at the same time, by tunneling and swimming their way through the largest cave ever discovered – a gaping hole that burrows at least two miles down below the earth’s surface.

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They’re funded by a billionaire industrialist (Ioan Gruffudd) named Carl, who’s willing to spend his vast fortune for bragging rights on being the first to explore the earth’s last frontier, and the stubborn old codger named Paul (Richard Roxburgh) who’s calling the shots and leading everyone through ever-greater risks is supposed to be the world’s greatest cave explorer.

But what if man simply isn’t meant to mess with something that vast and unknown?

That’s the harrowing twist that kicks “Sanctum” – an Australian movie that is now being brought to American screens through the endorsement of its executive producer James Cameron and bears the most stunning 3D cinematography and effects this side of his landmark “Avatar” – into high gear. Over the course of nearly two intense and grueling two hours, the team of about a dozen explorers winds up battling for survival against floods, falling rocks, tunnels that are too narrow, hypothermia, and the nasty underwater affliction known as “the bends.” (more…)

Every year we regular folk are blessed with wisdom from Hollywood’s elite: how to vote, worship, eat, what to drive, raise our kids, who in corporate America is making too much money, and who we should love and who we should hate. All while stars gorge themselves on private jets, third homes, and shaped tofu holiday dinners at 5-star resorts.

While we at Big Hollywood are quick to point out that celebrities can use their soapbox to do some good, but each time they open their mouth to tell us how to behave, they run the risk of losing the magic of their screen persona.  So to help remind you who spoke up on behalf of “all people” this year, here is a rundown of the 10 most asshat celebrity comments of 2010:

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10.  When Whoopi Goldberg went on O’Reilly to discuss her reason for walking off The View (i.e. plug her new book Is It Just Me?: Or is it nuts out there?”) rather than defend her position about the world having a “Muslim problem,” the two also touched on the issue of whether a Jewish kid or a Muslim kid is more likely to be bullied in the US because of his religion.  O’Reilly had the facts but like most good, Hollywood liberals, Whoopi just said, “I don’t believe it.”

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9. Mel Gibson finds himself on the list for having a long history of racist rants, drunk or not. He gets an extra asshat mention for not checking for a wire when being honest in the face of a Russian. (more…)

When movie director James Cameron descended upon the Athabasca oil sands a while back, Albertans were subjected to the predictable but nonetheless aggravating media blitz of misinformation that occurs when a mega-star chooses a cause to elevate.

The elevation came in the form of a supercilious warning to put the brakes on the world’s second largest proved oil reserve. It could, he feared, become a curse if not properly managed.  This revelation came upon reflection via a government sponsored helicopter tour and a token chat with a group of not-so disenfranchised First Nations peoples in the area. (In 2009, oil sands companies contracted more than $890 million for goods and services from Aboriginal owned businesses and employed 1600 Aboriginals in permanent jobs).

And with that, Mr. Cameron and the media were able to close the case on the oil sands, as Mr. Cameron purportedly had to jet.  It’s not Mr. Cameron’s fault, completely. The oil complex is just that – complex.  It’s not the kind of business one just picks up as a hobby horse.  Sure, Cameron can regurgitate the technical terminology if he likes. It would be difficult for a techno-geek of titanic proportions to resist a sexy term like steam gravity assisted drainage (SAGD).

Here is where I suggest “putting the brakes on.”  Perhaps a moratorium on incendiary statements by celebutantes or politicians a-la-Pelosi who are not able to, because of their lack of training, do the type of deep comprehensive assessment required for these matters.

There are a few facts that cannot be disputed and you will get those out of Mr. Cameron, the enviro-statist and their press sycophants.  In this case it can be narrowed down to just two: the area containing the deposit and the size of the estimated reserves in Alberta.  Then it’s down the rabbit hole we go. (more…)

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“Minimalist celebrity” Vincent Kartheiser doesn’t own a car, won’t have kids, is a vegetarian and went to all that trouble to zero-scape his lawn, which sounds both difficult and clever. 

He also doesn’t own a toilet:

In fact, I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own.”

He has? Like what?

“Like, I don’t have a toilet at the moment. My house is just a wooden box. I mean I am planning to get a toilet at some point. But for now I have to go to the neighbours. I threw it all out.”

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It’s the forced hilarity between James Cameron and Governor Schwarzenegger at the very end of the video that ultimately changed our minds about how we’ll vote on Prop. 23, that swung us over to the dark-side of over-regulation and middle-class job destruction.

How could anyone resist that Rat Packy ring-a-ding-ding rapport?

Over at NRO, however, Mark Krikorian wasn’t as awed as we were:

I don’t know anything about the substance of the issue, though my inclination would be to assume Cameron’s full of it. But what’s interesting is that Cameron is a foreigner, a Canadian citizen, who withdrew his application for U.S. citizenship after Bush won reelection in 2004. So what business does he have telling Americans how to vote on anything? Do Americans appear in Canadian political ads?

James Cameron, full of it?  Mark, please stop believing your lying eyes.

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Few franchises have had a steeper fall than the Alien series. In 1992 Alien³ appeared to near-universal derision. James Cameron nailed the essential problem when he said, “[director David] Fincher pissed me off by killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop, essentially trashing the entire ending of Aliens in the first few minutes of Alien³.” Absolutely correct. In the place of Cameron’s great characters, Fincher’s film substituted Sigourney Weaver’s wacky desire to have her character die, use no guns, and (in effect) “make love” to the aliens. The result was catastrophic.

And yet is that very different from the disastrous decisions Cameron himself has made since Aliens appeared in 1986? Take his Terminator franchise — the director’s initial script note when first conceiving of the sequel read, “Young John Connor and the Terminator who comes back to befriend him.” Cameron’s buddy and fellow Terminator scribe Bill Wisher remembers that “The idea of a boy and the Terminator seemed real funny to me, and we both had a good laugh about it. But after we finished laughing, Jim looked at me seriously and said this was the story we ought to do.”

For those of us who thought that a Cameron-helmed Terminator 2 would build on the space marine look-and-feel introduced in the first film and perfected in Aliens — in the process bringing the story into that way-cool dystopian future, perhaps with Sarah Connor traveling forward in time to somehow reunite with a still-living Reese and change history for the better — Cameron’s decision to make Arnold the good guy and build the movie around a Hollywoodized moppet was the worst possible outcome.

It wasn’t just the decision to make one of the greatest villains in movie history into a joke that ruined Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it was the simplistic preachiness underlying the plot. Joe Morton, the actor who portrayed the doomed Miles Dyson in the film, recalls that, “[Cameron] told me how Terminator 2 was going to be an anti-nuclear film and that it would show authority figures as the real Terminators. I had read the script and so I remember laughing and telling him ‘Sure Jim. I think kids are going to walk out of the theater after seeing this movie, saying ‘Did you see the way the Terminator shot that guy in the knees?’ But Jim insisted that it would be much more than that.” (more…)

“Filmmaking is a trauma that is akin to combat,” says James Cameron. Anyone who has ever attempted to make a movie knows exactly what he is talking about. Loads of money is on the line with little guarantee of success. Dozens of personalities need to be managed, many of them with ideas and egos in conflict with the director’s vision for the picture. The hours are brutal, the conditions often cold, hot, dirty, or dangerous, and before long everyone is perpetually exhausted. On a film set, a particularly nasty strain of Murphy’s Law reigns: anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at exactly the most inopportune moment.

The vast majority of people making movies soon find themselves happy to get any semblance of a decent shot in the can for editing later — never mind genius imagery, they’re just happy to have escaped with their lives. That genuine entertainment, never mind genuine art, is created in this environment is nothing short of a miracle. It takes a person of singular mind and indefatigable intensity, someone who refuses to accept defeat or take “no” or “impossible” for an answer, sometimes dozens of times every day for months on end.

In the documentary Superior Firepower: The Making of ‘Aliens’ (found on some DVD versions of the movie), one can see various members of the crew gingerly handling the subject of James Cameron’s reputation as a hard, unforgiving taskmaster on his sets.“He didn’t know any other way to work,” said Jenette Goldstein, who played Vasquez in Aliens. “He wasn’t going to waste anyone’s time or money. And he expected no one to waste his.” Prompted to explain the crew’s animosity towards Cameron, Sigourney Weaver deadpanned that, “They were big Ridley fans.” The late Stan Winston, special effects and creature creator extraordinaire, called Cameron’s Aliens set a “tough, demanding atmosphere,” before musing that the director was “cursed with a vision.” In the thick of war, little heed is paid to how genteelly orders are given — why would filmmaking be any different? (more…)

“And then some bulls*** happens.”

That’s how the initial treatment of Aliens (then called Alien II) tapered off after a mere twenty pages. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill had done little more than describe the basic setup: “Ripley and soldiers” versus the eponymous creatures. The rest, they decided, was for the guy who wrote The Terminator to flesh out.

Getting fired from Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, a schlocky job-for-hire, convinced James Cameron there was only one way he could make his Hollywood dreams come true. “I knew I was never going to be offered another movie,” he later explained about that time, “unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film that made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects that would justify my existence on the project, and I also had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that studios were likely to trust me with.”

So a guy who already specialized in sci-fi special effects and production art decided to add screenwriter to his list of talents. Using his fiery fever-nightmare about a killer robot as his jumping off point, and calling on many of the seminal sci-fi influences of his youth, he proceeded to write The Terminator. Each effect and action scene was thoroughly dissected on paper: Could I do this on a micro-budget? What special effect tricks could pull it off? Just like his early demo-film Xenogenesis, this would be a movie designed not just to entertain, but to show Hollywood what he could do. (more…)

Oh James. No, I’m not a Bond girl pandering to the Spy of Spies. I’m just a movie fan annoyed that Cameron is obsessed with himself. Cameron, you make beautiful films. You need someone to help you write your scripts. I’ll leave it at that. 

He won’t though. Take his Vanity Fair interview when he is discussing the re-release of “Avatar.” He also said of “Piranha 3D”: 

“You’ve got to remember: I worked on ‘Piranha 2’ for a few days and got fired off of it; I don’t put it on my official filmography. So there’s no sort of fond connection for me whatsoever. In fact, I would go even farther and say that … I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like ‘Friday the 13th 3D.’ When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip. And that’s not what’s happening now with 3D. It is a renaissance – right now the biggest and the best films are being made in 3D. Martin Scorsese is making a film in 3D. Disney’s biggest film of the year – ‘Tron: Legacy’ – is coming out in 3D. So it’s a whole new ballgame.” 

First of all, knowing Cameron, the fact that he got fired is a big issue here, and he’s holding it against the piranha films.  (more…)

Here’s a handy-dandy guide to help track the excuses James Cameron’s used to cluck-cluck-cluck his way out of two (that we know of) global cooling global warming climate change debates – debates the director himself requested (through his proxy Richard Green) with name conservatives, including talk radio host Rusty Humphries, documentary filmmaker Ann McElhinney, Marc Morano, and our own Andrew Breitbart: 

1. Sorry Rusty, but I have to jet off to an “eco-emergency” in Brazil.

2. Sorry Andrew and company, but after 10 days of negotiating, Mr. Cameron would prefer to debate Glenn Beck. 

Does anyone honestly believe Cameron has the stones to debate Man-Made Climate Change with Glenn Beck? I’m not sure how you debate something that doesn’t exist, but there’s still no way in hell Cameron would debate it with Beck. Yes, that excuse is just Chicken Little doubling down on the phony swagger. 

After reading through the 10 days of tortured negotiations between Cameron’s camp and ours – where we agreed to one ludicrous demand of theirs after another — and then learning that Rusty Humphries was run through this same disingenuous eco-mill, the game Cameron’s playing becomes pretty obvious.  If I learned nothing in my 17 years of corporate bill collecting, I learned that when someone adamantly refuses to take “yes” for answer, the only conclusion you can come to is that they entered the negotiation in bad faith and with no intention of ever closing a deal.    (more…)

Science fiction is a strange genre, liberally blending the past, present, and future into wonderful new forms. It takes a special mind to seamlessly achieve this mixture, to get an audience to truly believe that what they are seeing on the screen, fantastic as it is, is a living, breathing (and, in the case of Aliens, screaming) world. James Cameron is one part cerebral Vulcan scientist and one part wistful artistic hippie, with more than a bit of raging Scottish highlander sprinkled on top. It’s hard to imagine the movie ever coming into being without that curious makeup fueling its creation from first to last.

Cameron was the oldest child in a Canadian family of five. Born in 1954 and growing up near Niagara Falls, he was just in time to catch the tail end of the atom bomb/Sputnik hysteria and to spend his teen years watching Vietnam play out on the nightly news. “In my youth I was an absolutely rabid science fiction fan,” he says. “I read all the classics, all the old Ace paperback novels. I was really into people like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. When I read science fiction I saw stuff in my head that I had never seen in films.” He also loved the films of underwater pioneer Jacques Cousteau: “I began to think of the deep ocean as outer space. This was an alien world I could actually reach.”

Dad was a quiet, thoughtful electrical engineer who gave his son a healthy interest in hard science. With his younger brother Mike playing Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein (Mike would himself become an engineer, and later developed some of the equipment his filmmaker brother used to explore the depths of the sea) Cameron regularly engaged in scientific experiments. One day saw them constructing a submersible “out of a mayonnaise jar, an erector set and a paint bucket,” complete with a live mouse as crew, and sending it to the bottom of a river on a rope (the little critter survived). Another time, they had the fire department chasing (and bystanders reporting as a UFO) a hot-air balloon constructed with dry-cleaning bags and lofted into the air by the heat generated by on-board candles. (more…)