The Drive-In Movie Apprenticeship of Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme, who succumbed to complications from esophageal cancer and heart disease April 26, 2017, age 73, was a director whose 46 years of making movies constituted a career that could not be pigeonholed.  "He created a body of work," The New York Times' Bruce Weber noted, "that resists easy characterization."

Just as an example, take the ride that Demme offered in the aptly titled action comedy "Something Wild" from 1986, which started out as an exhilarating screwball romp about free-spirited Melanie Griffith's "abduction" of straight-laced Jeff Daniels before taking an abrupt turn into dark, disturbing territory with the entrance of an unhinged Ray Liotta, in his standout film role four years before "Goodfellas." The New Yorker's Pauline Kael said the film "breaks conventions and turns into a scary slapstick thriller."

In a scene set at a high school reunion, Jeff Daniels and Melanie
Griffith are confronted by Ray Liotta, with Margaret Colin.

As pointed out by reporter Josh Rottenberg in the Los Angeles Times' obituary for Demme, he was "equally facile" with comedies, dramas, thrillers, rock concerts, and documentaries. Rottenberg said Demme "could find as much to fascinate him in a flesh-eating murderer like Lecter as in a concert by rock band Talking Heads, a Mafia wife or a gas station owner who claimed to have been a been a beneficiary of Howard Hughes."

After winning the Academy Award as Best Director for "The Silence of the Lambs" (a picture that garnered four other Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor Anthony Hopkins, Best Actress Jodie Foster, and Best Screenplay), Demme's diverse output included the dramas "Philadelphia," "Beloved," "The Manchurian Candidate," "Rachel Getting Married," and "Ricki and the Flash," not to mention lauded documentaries about Jimmy Carter, a Haitian human rights activist, a proud survivor of Hurricane Katrina, and an Episcopalian minister in Harlem who happens to be Demme's cousin, as well as three acclaimed documentary-concert films featuring Neil Young.

Not bad for a man whose show business career started as a writer and director of women-in-prison flicks for drive-in movie mogul Roger Corman, an independent producer-studio head nicknamed the "King of the B's."

When Jonathan Demme was a student at the University of Florida, he discovered the college newspaper had no movie critic, and he assumed the position himself so he could get into films for free. He eventually got hired by the publicity department at producer-impresario Joseph E. Levine's Embassy Pictures in New York City, which led to a job as the publicist for director Roger Corman's action picture "Von Richtofen and Brown" (1971), starring John Phillip Law and Don Stroud as the rival World War I air aces.

Impressed with Demme's work, Corman asked him if he wanted to write a biker movie. Demme pitched the idea for an update of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's classic period drama "Rashomon" and wrote the screenplay with Joe Viola, who had directed TV commercials Demme had produced. With Viola in the director's chair, Demme produced 1971's "Angels Hard as They Come," featuring Scott Glenn, whom Demme would cast as FBI honcho Jack Crawford 20 years later in "The Silence of the Lambs."

The cast of "Angels Hard as They Come" included Charles Dierkop
(best known as Flat Nose Curry in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid" and as Robert Shaw's bodyguard in "The Sting"), Gilda Texter
(best known as the naked motorcycle rider in "Vanishing Point"), and
Gary Busey (best known for suffering permanent brain damage
after severely fracturing his skull in a 1988 motorcycle accident).

Demme remembered that the budget for "Angels Hard as They Come" was $125,000. For their writing and directing chores, he and Viola shared $3000.

Roger Corman is a presence - nay, a force of nature - whose name has appeared frequently in the Moviehouse. So now, the Moviehouse would like to offer an educational primer on Roger Corman so we're all on the same page before continuing with Jonathan Demme's early career working with the King of the B's.

In the 1960s, Roger Corman directed "Merchant of Menace" Vincent
Price in a popular series of imaginative horror pictures inspired by
tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Here, the two are pictured between scenes,
perusing a Japanese fanzine with Laurel and Hardy on the cover.

Roger Corman has produced over 400 feature motion pictures, direct-to-video pictures, and TV movies and directed 56 films. In discussing the 2006 book Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring by James Ursini and Alain Silver, the Barnes & Noble website stated, "Roger Corman just might be one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of motion pictures...This is not because of his success as a producer, although, as the title of his autobiography boasts, he made over 100 pictures and never lost a dime. It is because...Corman ran a de facto school for young filmmakers, the alumni of which have garnered more awards and made more money than any other group in film history." The graduation class includes directors Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, and James Cameron, along with such actors as Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Bruce Dern.

In 1962, Roger Corman acquired a 1959 Soviet science-fiction film called "The Sky Calls" (pictured below) and re-edited it for an American version titled "Battle Beyond the Sun," hiring Francis Ford Coppola, future multiple Oscar winner for "The Godfather" and "The Godfather Part II," to film new footage. Coppola received a director's credit as "Thomas Colchart," while the names of the Russian actors were replaced by those who did the English over-dubbing.

Also in 1962, Roger Corman, hoping to cash in on the popularity of Ray Harryhausen's eye-popping fantasy "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad," reworked a delightful Soviet fairy tale, "Sadko" (pictured below), into "The Magic Voyage of Sinbad," again employing Coppola's services as a "script adaptor."

The otherworldly Phoenix in the Russian fantasy "Sadko,"
played by Soviet actress Lidiya Vertinskaya, became the
elusive Bird of Paradise in "The Magic Voyage of Sinbad."

Roger Corman produced Francis Ford Coppola's feature film debut as writer and director, 1963's "Dementia 13." Corman had wanted a low-budget copy of Hitchcock's "Psycho," with a gothic atmosphere and brutal murders, but was dissatisfied with Coppola's finished product and brought in another fledgling filmmaker, Jack Hill, to shoot additional scenes.

British horror film staple Patrick Magee (also known as the wheel
chair-bound Mr. Alexander in "A Clockwork Orange") and William
Campbell (best known as space spoiled brat Trelane in the original
"Star Trek"series) stand on an Irish location for "Dementia 13."

In 1972, Martin Scorsese, eight times Oscar-nominated as Best Director, with a 2007 win for "The Departed," directed his second feature film, for producer Roger Corman, "Boxcar Bertha," a "Bonnie and Clyde" wannabe about a fictional Depression-era Arkansas outlaw folk heroine, Bertha Thompson, and her boyfriend, Big Bill Shelley (played by Hershey's real-life partner, David Carradine), a character loosely based on historic anarchist labor organizer Big Bill Haywood.

Barbara Hershey would recall the making of
"Boxcar Bertha" as "a lot of fun even though
it's terribly crippled by Roger Corman and the
violence and sex...We really had characters down
but one tends to not see all that, because you
end up seeing all the blood and sex."

After watching "Boxcar Bertha," Martin Scorsese's friend and mentor, director-actor John Cassavetes (pictured below), gave him a hug and said, "Marty, you've just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit...You're better than the people who make this kind of movie...Just try and do something different."

Martin Scorsese's next picture was the landmark "Mean Streets" (1973), starring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval, Amy Robinson, Richard Romanus, Cesare Danova, Victor Argo, George Memmoli, David Carradine, and Robert Carradine.

Martin Scorsese discusses wardrobe with costars Robert De Niro
and Harvey Keitel on the set of "Mean Streets."

Peter Bogdanovich, who was nominated for an Oscar for directing "The Last Picture Show" and nominated for a Golden Globe for directing "Paper Moon," started out as a film critic whose piece in an Esquire magazine article motivated Roger Corman to bring him on board as an uncredited screenwriter and cinematographer for Corman's 1966 biker saga "The Wild Angels," starring Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, and Bruce Dern.

Roger Corman directs Bruce Dern and Peter Fonda in "The Wild
Angels." Bruce Dern would work with Roger Corman in "The Trip,"
"The St. Valentine's Day Massacre," and "Bloody Mama."

Corman offered Bogdanovich the opportunity to direct a picture of his own. The result was 1968's "Targets," a thriller that followed two seemingly disconnected storylines - an otherwise wholesome, normal young man suddenly goes on a deadly sniping spree, while an aging horror film icon contemplates retiring - that coincidentally converge at a drive-in theater showing the horror star's final movie.

Peter Bogdanovich (above right) cast himself as
Boris Karloff's director in "Targets."

The elderly horror movie actor was a clever, semi-autobiographical role for Boris Karloff, whose last American film this was before he starred in a string of cheap Mexican thrillers. The character of the sweet-faced killer was based on Charles Whitman, the notorious "Texas Tower Sniper" who murdered his wife and mother before holing up in the University of Texas Tower, from where he shot and killed 19 people, wounding 31, before being cut down by police. (Interestingly, between his stint as the youthful star of Disney comedies and his gallery of grizzled antiheroes in John Carpenter action pictures, Kurt Russell delivered a convincing portrayal of Whitman in the TV movie "The Deadly Tower.")

Roger Corman acquired the rights to a Russian science-fiction called "Planet of Storms" that he dubbed into English and released as "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women." In a 2002 interview, Bogdanovich recalled that Corman "came to me and said, 'Would you shoot some footage with some women? (American International Pictures) won't buy it unless we stick some women in it.' So I figured out a way to work some women in it and shot for five days, and we cut it in. I narrated it, because nobody could make heads or tails of it. Roger wouldn't let me add any sound. It was just a cheap little thing we did, and people think I directed it when I really only directed ten minutes of it." Nevertheless, he was credited as director "Derek Thomas."

Bogdanovich cast blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren (a bargain-basement Marilyn Monroe) and other blonde actresses as Venusians because he thought "everyone should be blonde on Venus. I dressed them up in rubber suits, bottoms only, and put shells over their breasts." He gave the women "South Seas movie names" because "it seemed right."

Ron Howard, the Oscar-winning director of "A Beautiful Mind," was well into his TV stardom as Richie Cunningham on "Happy Days" when Roger Corman agreed to let him direct a film in exchange for a starring role in "Eat My Dust!" (1976), a low-rent "Smokey and the Bandit" car chase flick written and directed by Charles B. Griffith (the screenwriter of Corman's "The Little Shop of Horrors"). The movie Ron Howard was allowed to direct was 1977's "Grand Theft Auto," a low-rent "Smokey and the Bandit" car chase flick scripted by Howard and his father, actor Rance Howard.

Ron Howard emotes in "Grand Theft Auto" alongside Nancy Morgan,
who was married to "Three's Company" star John Ritter at the time.

Director Joe Dante, whose films uniquely alternate terror with wicked fun ("The Howling," "Gremlins," "The 'Burbs"), began his career working for Roger Corman, when he and fellow newcomer Allan Arkush co-directed the movie-within-a-movie parody "Hollywood Boulevard" in 1976.

(Left) Starlet Mary McQueen (Mary Woronov) watches filmmaker
Eric Von Leppe (Paul Bartel) direct a scene from "Machete Maidens
of Mora Tau" in "Hollywood Boulevard." (Right) In "Hollywood
Boulevard," Dick Miller plays an agent named Walter Paisley.
Walter Paisley was the name of the demented sculptor Miller played
in Roger Corman's "A Bucket of Blood." Miller reprised the character
in a number of films, including "Chopping Mall" and "The Howling."

Dante and Arkush subsequently shared editing tasks on the abovementioned "Grand Theft Auto," When Arkush directed the 1979 comedy cult classic "Rock 'n' Roll High School" for executive producer Corman (pictured below), Dante assisted him without credit.

Just before that, Corman gave Dante the assignment to direct 1978's "Piranha" (pictured below), a satirical horror picture inspired by "Jaws" and written by John Sayles, an otherwise level-headed, prestigious independent filmmaker.

"The piranhas...They're eating the guests, sir."

Italian producers of the 1981 in-name only sequel, "Piranha II: The Spawning," a piece of humorless dreck about mutant piranha-flying fish hybrids, gave James Cameron - the man who would be the box-office king of the world with "The Terminator," "Aliens," "Titanic," and "Avatar" - his first screen credit as director.

Lance Henriksen was just five years away from his signature role
as the sympathetic android Bishop in James Cameron's "Aliens"
when he portrayed the hunky police chief in "Piranha II." 

Admittedly, Roger Corman was not involved with the dreary sequel to "Piranha," but he was no stranger to working with James Cameron. James Cameron worked as a production assistant on "Rock 'n' Roll High School." He was the art director and model-maker for Corman's "Battle Beyond the Stars" (1980), a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi reworking of "The Magnificent Seven" (scripted by the aforementioned John Sayles), and was the second unit director on Corman's "Galaxy of Terror," an "Alien" wannabe starring Erin Moran and Robert Englund.

(Left to right) Sixties tough guy George Peppard, '80s leading lady
Darlanne Fluegel ("To Live and Die in L.A.," "Crime Story"), TV's
John-Boy, Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn (rehashing his role as
a haunted gunslinger from "The Magnificent Seven"), and B-movie
bombshell Sybil Danning play five of the astral hired guns in
"Battle Beyond the Stars."

Jack Nicholson made his feature film debut in the 1958 Roger Corman production "The Cry Baby Killer" (pictured below), playing a 17-year-old juvenile delinquent (Jack was 21).

The director of "The Cry Baby Killer" was Jus (Joe) Addis, a busy
TV director who was the life partner of actor Hayden Rorke, best
known as NASA shrink Dr. Bellows on "I Dream of Jeannie."

Corman directed the 1960 dark comedy cult classic "The Little Shop of Horrors," featuring an over-the-top bit part by Jack Nicholson as a deliriously masochistic dental patient. Corman's 1963 take on "The Raven," which turnied the gothic poem into a slapstick rivalry between medieval wizards Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre, cast Nicholson as Lorre's bumbling, amorous son (pictured below).

Even as the sets of "The Raven" were being dismantled, Corman filmed "The Terror" (1963), a rush job about a French soldier from Napoleon's army (Jack Nicholson, wearing Marlon Brando's costume from the Napoleon Bonaparte costume drama "Désirée") who falls in love with the ghost of a woman who was once the wife of the baron (Boris Karloff) of a crumbling, seaside palace. Karloff recalled that as the scenery was "being pulled down around our ears, Roger was dashing around with me and a camera, two steps ahead of the wreckers. It was very funny." Corman would recount, "Jack Nicholson finally directed himself when we ran out of directors."

In the mid-1960s, Roger Corman executive produced a pair of offbeat westerns starring Jack Nicolson and directed by Monte Hellman (best known for the existential road movies "Two-Lane Blacktop" and"Cockfighter"), namely "The Shooting," with Warren Oates, and "Ride in the Whirlwind" (written by Nicholson), with Cameron Mitchell and Harry Dean Stanton.

For the son of a Jersey showgirl, Jack Nicholson always seemed
comfortable in the saddle - as gunslinger Billy Spear in "The
Shooting" (above) and as cowpoke Wes in "Ride in the Whirlwind
(below). In 1976, Nicholson played an outlaw in the revisionist
western "The Missouri Breaks," and in 1978, he directed himself
as a roguish horse thief in the comedy western "Goin' South." 

In 1967, Nicholson wrote the script for director Corman's "The Trip," starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Bruce Dern. That same year, Nicholson had a cameo role as one of Al Capone's henchmen in Corman's ambitious gangster saga "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" (pictured below).

Richard Bakalyan (left), Dick Miller (one of Roger Corman's stock
company of players and the star of 1959's "A Bucket of Blood"),
Jonathan Haze (the star of Corman's "The Little Shop of Horrors"),
Jack Nicholson, and actor Rico Cattani ammo up for the titular
tommy-gun slaughter in "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

After appearing in a handful of art films and student movies, including two made by fledgling director Brian De Palma, Robert De Niro made his Hollywood debut in 1970's "Bloody Mama," director Roger Corman's liberally fictionalized account of Depression Era crime matriarch Ma Barker and her brood of larcenous, homicidal sons. Shelley Winters went over-the-top in unbridled histrionics as the incestuous, tommy-gun wielding mother hen in a cast that included Pat Hingle, Don Stroud, Bruce Dern, and Robert Walden.

Ma Barker (Shelley Winters) makes sure her boy, Lloyd (Robert
De Niro), washes behind his ears in "Bloody Mama."

In contrast to his gaining 60 pounds for his role as boxer Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull" ten years later, Robert De Niro dropped 30 pounds to play Lloyd Barker, depicted in "Bloody Mama" as a drug-addicted simpleton. DeNiro spent considerable time before production learning about the local culture in the film's Arkansas locations. In the movie, Lloyd overdoses on heroin. In real life, Lloyd Barker was the last living of the Barker sons. In 1922, he was sentenced to 25 years at the Leavenworth penitentiary but was released in 1938. Eleven years later, he was killed by his wife, who pleaded insanity.

After "Angels Hard as They Come," Joe Dante and Joe Viola collaborated once again on the script for 1972's "The Hot Box" (pictured below), directed by Viola for executive producer Roger Corman. Filmed in the Philippines, the steamy women-in-prison potboiler depicts a foursome of abducted nurses who end up leading a jungle revolt with their captors.

This is what all Peace Corps nurses wear when leading
a Third World revolution...The cigarette sells this photo.

Prolific Filipino filmmaker Eddie Romero directed the 1973 women-in-prison melodrama "Black Mama White Mama," from a script based on a story by Jonathan Demme and Joe Viola, who were inspired by the 1958 Tony Curtis-Sidney Poitier drama "The Defiant Ones." Blaxploitation icon Pam Grier and blonde B-movie starlet Margaret Markov portrayed fugitive prisoners who are shackled together (pictured below).

In 1974, Jonathan Demme asked Roger Corman if there was any chance he could direct his own picture. According to Demme, Corman said, "Okay, write a women's prison movie." Corman thought the cycle had played itself out, so he urged Demme to bring something new to the genre, while, of course, retaining the violence and shower scenes that fans of such fare had come to expect.

Demme would later recall that for Corman's New World Pictures company, "the titles and play dates were set before there was even a script. Roger made sure that he could book a women's prison movie in thousands of theaters, and then he'd say, 'Okay, we better make this.' It was always important to work fast. There were always lots of notes on the scripts from Roger. They all kind of had to do with narrative and character...It wasn't like more sex and violence and topless girls. Everyone who came in the door knew what the formula was; you didn't need to be reminded about the action and the nudity and the subtle social commentary."

"Caged Heat" player Erica Gavin (far left) had
established herself as the frequently naked star
of Russ Meyer's soft-core romps "Vixen!" and
"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls."

What Demme brought to "Caged Heat" was a satirical consciousness previously lacking in the arena. He transformed the clichéd sadistic warden from male to female in a wondrously demented characterization by a wheelchair-bound Barbara Steele (best known her iconic role as a vengeful witch in the 1960 gothic horror classic "Black Sunday").

(Top) Jacqueline (Erica Gavin) looms over Superintendent McQueen
(Barbara Steele) in "Caged Heat"; (below) medieval witch Asa Vajda
(Steele) is fitted with a customized spiked mask in "Black Sunday."

The music score for "Caged Heat" was composed and performed by Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, featuring guitar work by Paul Butterfield Blues Band-Electric Flag plank spanker Michael Bloomfield. "Caged Heat" was also apparently the screen debut of a fledgling actress who called herself Deborah Clearbranch. When her mainstream career stagnated, she re-invented herself as X-Rated Critics Organization and Adult Video News hall-of-famer Desireé Cousteau, endeared to adult movie fans for a goofy charm and voracious abandon she brought to roles in "Pretty Peaches" and "Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls" (pictured below, with prolific adult movie stalwart and inspiration for "Boogie Nights'" prodigiously endowed Dirk Diggler, John C. Holmes).

Enquiring minds want to know...Once holding her own
against such adult cinema icons as Marilyn Chambers,
Desireé Cousteau left the industry to study to become a
psychologist and practices in her home state of Georgia.

In 1975, Jonathan Demme directed "Crazy Mama," the third in a series of crime melodramas about gun-toting mothers from Roger Corman's film companies, following 1970's "Bloody Mama" (Shelley Winters) and 1974's "Big Bad Mama" (Angie Dickinson). Unlike the Depression-era setting of the earlier pictures, "Crazy Mama" was set in 1950s Americana.

To add the proper atmosphere, Jonathan
Demme piped in period platters like Nervous
Norvus' "Transfusion," The Everly Brothers'
"Devoted to You" and "All I Have to Do Is
Dream," and The Chordettes' "Lollipop."

"Crazy Mama" tells the story of three generations of women on a cross-country crime spree: Cloris Leachman, her mother (played by Ann Sothern, a leading lady in 1940s Hollywood and on 1950s TV), and her daughter (portrayed by Linda Purl, best known as Andy Griffith's daughter on "Matlock").

Coming along for the larcenous ride are rugged '60s leading man Stuart Whitman, Don Most (best known as Ralph Malph on "Happy Days"), Bryan Englund (the actor son of Cloris Leachman, who passed away from an overdose of prescription medication in 1986 at the age of 30), and one of '70s sitcoms' favorite sassy octogenarians, Merie Erle (pictured below) .

Dismissed as campy by some critics but appreciated for Demme's sense of kitschy fun, "Crazy Mama" boasted an eclectic supporting cast that included Jim Backus, Tisha Sterling (Ann Sothern's real-life daughter, portraying Sothern as a young woman), genre actress Sally Kirkland, and Roger Corman regular player Dick Miller. The picture also marked the screen debuts of Dennis Quaid and Bill Paxton, the latter of whom was working on the film as a set dresser before Demme yanked him off the art department truck and threw him into wardrobe to replace a no-show extra.

There was a stretch in Peter Fonda's post-"Easy Rider" career when filmmakers realized he really wasn't an actor worthy of his father's legacy.  Even Bruce Dern, who costarred with Fonda in "The Wild Angels" and "The Trip," admitted in a 1975 interview, "It's very hard to do quality work as an actor, because he's just just not an actor. He just doesn't have a clue." Fonda was summarily pigeonholed as stone-faced antiheroes seeking vengeance for the little guy against the "man" in eye-for-an-eye fodder with titles like "Outlaw Blues," "High-Ballin'," and 1976's "Fighting Mad," written and directed by Jonathan Demme for producer Roger Corman.

In "Fighting Mad," honest farmers (with the sort of faces, in the words of The New York Times reviewer, "that made nimble the brush hands of Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell") contend with ruthless strip miners, corrupt politicians, and lackadaisical lawmen, and when the land-grabbing bad guys kill Fonda's brother (played by Scott Glenn, who, as mentioned, would play FBI boss Jack Crawford in Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs"), Peter grabs his bow and arrow. climbs on his bike, and takes the law into his own hands.

In 1977, Jonathan Demme parted ways with Roger Corman, directing a quirky comedy based on the current fad of CB radios titled "Citizens Band."  The diverse cast featured Paul Le Mat (drag racer John Milner in "American Graffiti"), Candy Clark (platinum blonde Debbie Dunham in "American Graffiti"), Bruce McGill ("Animal House's" D-Day), Roberts Blossom (Old Man Marley in "Home Alone"), Ed Begley Jr. (Dr. Ehrlich on TV's "St. Elsewhere"), and Richard Bright (enforcer Al Neri in the "Godfather" films).

"Citizens Band" reunites "American Graffiti"
costars Paul Le Mat and Candy Clark.

The script was written by Paul Brickman ("Risky Business"), but Demme summed up the result, "It was a gargantuan flop." It bombed so badly that Paramount Pictures considered yanking it out of the theaters almost immediately.  In hindsight, Demme noted, "I had to take a step back and look at the movie again and go, 'Good Lord, it's 90 minutes of people talking to each other over CB radios!'"It was re-edited and re-released as "Handle with Care," earning, over time,  the status of a beloved cult film.

An interesting footnote for "Citizens Band" is that the picture marked the beginning of a longtime collaboration between director Jonathan Demme and character actor Charles Napier (pictured above, with comedic character actress Ann Wedgeworth). Lantern-jawed with a mouthful of mile-high teeth and a sonorous voice with a syrupy Dixieland drawl, Napier would become familiar to moviegoers as Tucker McCoy in "The Blues Brothers" and as the duplicitous government paper-pusher Murdock in "Rambo: First Blood Part II," but he was first "discovered" by Demme after a series of macho roles in campy soft-core sagas made by bosom-obsessed auteur Russ Meyer, including "Supervixens" (pictured below).

Charles Napier would appear in ten movies for director Jonathan Demme, from "Melvin and Howard" and "Married to the Mob" to "Philadelphia" and "The Manchurian Candidate."  Sadly, Napier succumbed to undisclosed causes in 2011, age 75. He once praised Demme as "an actor's director...meaning, 'You've got an idea, let's hear it.' Not dictatorial but yet firm if need to be."

Memphis Police Lt. Boyle (Charles Napier) has a bad encounter with
Dr. Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs."

In 1978, Jonathan Demme directed Peter Falk in a seventh season of "Columbo" titled "Murder Under Glass," featuring French leading man Louis Jourdan ("Gigi") as a homicidal restaurant critic (pictured below).

Jonathan Demme subsequently tackled a big-screen mystery in an obscure but nonetheless fascinating pastiche of Hitchcockian suspense and ancient Hebrew lore called "Last Embrace" (1979). Roy Scheider, following one-two-three knockout performances in "The French Connection," "Jaws," and "Marathon Man," portrayed a recently widowed government agent who falls into a precarious relationship with a woman who may or may not be assuming the role of a Judaic avenger systematically dispatching descendants of an archaic ring of white slavers in New York's Lower East Side that once targeted Jewish immigrants.

Along with a cliffhanging climax at Niagara Falls - reminiscent of similarly dizzying nailbiters in Hitchcock's "Saboteur," "Vertigo," and "North by Northwest" - the neglected gem of a thriller featured a music score by Miklos Rózsa, à la Alfred's favorite film composer, Bernard Herrmann (Rózsa, in fact, composed the music for Hitchcock's "Spellbound"). Even director Jonathan Demme made a Hitchockian cameo as a passenger on a train.

Thanks to director Mike Nichols dropping out, Demme was given the opportunity to direct 1980's "Melvin and Howard," a blithe fable based on real-life Mormon milkman-and-schmo Melvin Dummar (Paul LeMat) who claimed to have picked up a stranded Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) in the Nevada desert after the latter spilled his motorcycle during a late-night dune-jumping romp. According to Dummar, Hughes showed his gratitude by naming him as the major heir of his estate in a much-publicized will.

Three years after winning back-to-back Best Supporting Oscars for
"All the President's Men" and "Julia," Jason Robards was nominated
again in the same category for his walk-through as Howard Hughes
in "Melvin and Howard."

Screenwriter Bo Goldman, who garnered an Oscar for his adapted script for 1976's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for "Melvin and Howard," while Mary Steenburgen earned the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Melvin Dummar's first wife (pictured below, with Paul Le Mat).

Unjustly overlooked by Oscar, at least as we see it in the Moviehouse, was Pamela Reed's subtle essaying of Dummar's second, far more sympathetic spouse (pictured below), which came in the wake of her scene-stealing breakout role as Belle Starr, the brazen paramour of Cole Younger (David Carradine), in 1980's "The Long Riders."

It was with "Melvin and Howard" that Jonathan Demme hit his stride as a confident and singular filmmaker, moving on to what the Los Angeles Times called "the startlingly original 'Something Wild' and the dizzy and demented 'Married to the Mob,'" before making the multiple-Oscar-winning "The Silence of the Lambs."

"Married to the Mob," starring Matthew Modine as a gangly FBI
agent who falls in love with gorgeous Mafia widow Michele
Pfeiffer, features a nifty music score by Talking Heads frontman
David Byrne.

Jonathan Demme was once asked what was the most important lesson about filmmaking he learned when he was making those "B-movie cheapies" for Roger Corman. "It's a mantra, and I do it to this day," Demme answered. "I learned it on 'Caged Heat' from Roger. When the shot is finished, here's what you say: Cut, print, the next shot is...You have to know what your next shot is. Never stand around for a second. You have to keep rolling all day. So you have to know where you're going with shot lists and storyboards. That's enormously important, and I still think that way today."

Roger Corman joins Jonathan Demme on the set of "Fighting Mad."

Postscript: Turnabout Is Fair Play

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. So goes an old saying. A number of the aforementioned filmmakers have paid homage to their mentor, Roger Corman, by giving him cameo roles in their own pictures. Here are some peeks at actor Roger Corman.

In Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather Part II," Roger Corman
(seated to the left of actor G.D. Spradlin as Senator Geary) plays a
U.S. senator on a special committee investigating the Corleone family.

Roger Corman appears as "Man in Phone Booth" in the sly 1981
horror comedy "The Howling," directed by Joe Dante.

Twenty-two years later, Joe Dante promotes Roger Corman to
"Hollywood Director" in "Looney Tunes: Back in Action."

Roger Corman portrays a congressman given a VIP tour by
astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) in "Apollo 13,"
directed by Ron Howard.

Nobody does telephone like Roger Corman, pictured here as FBI
Director Hayden Burke in "The Silence of the Lambs," directed by
Jonathan Demme. For director Demme, Corman also had cameos
in "Swing Shift," "Philadelphia," "The Manchurian Candidate,"
and "Rachel Getting Married."

In 2010, Jonathan Demme presented Roger Corman with an Honorary Oscar, "for his rich engendering of films and filmmakers."