Quips and Quotations (Declaration of Independents Edition)

 

Roger made us work hard and long, I remember that! He was always fascinating to me, a fascinating man – and a good businessman! He had such incredible energy, it was tremendous – he was a dynamo to be around. I always knew he was going to be a huge success because there was no stopping him. He just made up his mind that he was going to be a success and that was it.

--Beverly Garland

Roger seemed a driven man. Roger wanted to accomplish a lot, he had to have a lot of drive to do it, and he pushed through. He not only pushed through, he punched through! With a lot of energy, and a lot of disregard at times...What we did for Roger Corman – I mean, things that you could never do in a real studio, but you did for this guy! Everything seemed unreal with him.

--Susan Cabot

I wrote a screenplay titled Gluttony, about a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that, you know? We couldn't do that though because of the [production] code at the time. So I said, 'How about a man-eating plant?', and Roger said, 'Okay.' By that time, we were both drunk.

--screenwriter Charles B. Griffith 

 

It's not precisely the Edgar Allan Poe short story known to high school English that emerges in House of Usher, but it's a reasonably diverting and handsomely mounted variation ... The film has been mounted with care, skill and flair by producer-director Roger Corman and his staff.

--Variety

[Frank Sinatra] was very worried that his daughter was in a film with the Hell's Angels. And for some reason he didn’t want to bring it up to me, so he arranged to meet with my second assistant director, Paul Rapp, and said, “Is Nancy going to be all right?” And Paul, we had never even thought about it, but Paul made up a whole lot of nonsense, just, “Well, we’ve got people there, we’re going to be protecting her all the time.” It was all just talk, but Frank accepted it, and Nancy was great.

--Roger Corman

1926-2024

(Things happen, so I'll just save the Mother's Day post until next year. You know how it is--Kirk)

 

 

Graphic Grandeur (Suspended Animation Edition)

 

In case you didn't know, today is National Cartoonist Day. Put on a smock and find one to hug. Before you do, however, I should point out that the word "cartoonist" is really kind of an umbrella term covering a wide range of artists. Generally speaking, there are two different kinds of cartoonists.

There's the still life cartoonist, such as Charles M. Schulz, who drew Snoopy.

And then there's the moving pictures cartoonist, such as Ub Iwerks, who (under the watchful eye of Uncle Walt) drew Mickey Mouse.

Not that cartoonists always stay within their respective boundaries. Sometimes there's...

   ...overlap.

 

Vital Viewing (Twangbanger Edition)

1938-2024

Guitarist Duane Eddy became an early rock and roll star solely on the strength of his electrifying guitar instrumentals. As Eddy himself once said "One of my biggest contributions to the music business was not singing."

He wasn't much of a talker either:

 In the above interview, Eddy mentions a big swordfish he had caught, but I bet it wasn't as big as the one caught by...

...Jerry Lewis.

But I digress. Here's one of Eddy's biggest hits:

Eddy came out with "Rebel-Rouser" in 1958, yet the above video looks like it's from about ten years later, if that one girl whose hair is dancing as much as her feet is any indication. Shows you just how well Eddy's sound fit into a musical era quite different from the one in which he emerged. I mean, I can't imagine Bill Haley or Carl Perkins in such a raucous 1960s setting.

Composer Henry Mancini fit in with both the 1950s and 1960s, mainly because his audience wasn't composed primarily of teenagers. After all, parents were still spending money on records, if not quite as much money as were their kids. Yet as someone whose music would one day be categorized as "easy-listening", Mancini was one of the more forward-looking composers of his era. No more so than when he came up with the opening jazz-and-rock-tinged theme to the 1950s TV detective show Peter Gunn. Duane Eddy must have taken notice, as he recorded his own version in 1960 that charted at #27. However, the story doesn't end there. In 1986, he re-recorded the song with the British alternative synth-pop band Art of Noise, and that version was a worldwide hit. Watch and listen as Eddy and his advant-garde friends perform the Gunn theme in front of a live audience in Nashville:

Noir rocks!