"The World of Roger Corman"

A

Aspiring Mogul

I just saw the documentary, and his career is of great interest to me, because he got so many SF flicks made on super-low budget.

An obvious strategy is to use his strategy, but to enhance the movie with quality story telling. This has apparently been the strategy of many an aspiring mogul, but .... well, what is the but? IOW, what's the flaw in the strategy?
 
That strategy worked for him. Seems like it can work for anyone
else. Of course the distribution chain is very, very different today
than in the 1950's and 1960's. He exploited how people watch
movies and the types of movie people were willing to pay to see.
Any aspiring mogul should do the same thing today.
 
Thank you, Rik. :)

But what's the market for B movies today? I was at the AFM a couple of years ago, as you know, but I didn't know enough to ask that. I will this time around.

In a related vein, suppose I was to do a low-budget SF movie about a youth named Luke who goes off to rescue a princess named Leia. I won't tell you the rest of the story, but, suffice it to say, he will get a shock when he finds out who his mother is. :D

Anyway, the focus is the story and, yes, the characters. But my impression is that many aspiring moguls have said they want low-budget movies that focus on the stories, not SFX, and their business strategy crashed, so I'm trying to learn from their mistakes.
 
The catch is the SF is typically a very expensive genre to film. SFX, sets etc typically cost big $$$$.

'Another Earth' managed to pull it off, and launch careers in the process. I think their budget was $400k-ish.

It's very debatable but if you really want to do SF, maybe a killer short or two would have a better chance of getting you noticed.
 
IndiePaul said:
The catch is the SF is typically a very expensive genre to film. SFX, sets etc typically cost big $$$$.
Click to expand...

I understand that, with a green screen and using CGI to the max, you can really, really cut costs down. The fan films are doing it that way, and they have some pretty good stories. Anyone have any ideas?


'Another Earth' managed to pull it off, and launch careers in the process. I think their budget was $400k-ish.
Click to expand...

True.


It's very debatable but if you really want to do SF, maybe a killer short or two would have a better chance of getting you noticed
Click to expand...

I'm beginning to get the urge to do that - someone said that, when the time is right, I'll know. I think that time is coming. :)
 
MiniJamesW said:
Roger Corman has always interested me but I haven't seen any of his films yet. Any recommendations of his best work?
Click to expand...

I liked "Battle Beyond the Stars", but his best work may be "The Intruder", a film against racial segregation - the lead role was played by William Shatner, who would go on to be part of one of the first inter-racial kisses on TV.

I'm thinking of using Battle as a case study - does anyone know if the DVD has a special features section on how it was produced?
 
Last edited:
"Battle Beyond the Stars" is a remake of "The Seven Samurai", which was later remade into "The Magnificent Seven".

These three movies are therefore a trilogy of sorts. And, guess what? It has a similar theme to ST:TOS' "Errand of Mercy", and I have found a VERY VALUABLE nugget for one of my episodes.

Thanks everyone. :)
 
I bought the DVD for "Battle Beyond the Stars", which I watched when it came out 30-odd years ago, and it's pretty good. I recognized James Horner's Star-Trek like score, and, of course, many actors were well-known then.

For a low-budget, it had some pretty good sci-fi concepts, like the idea of clones, world-mind, telepathy, and genetic engineering, and they made the story very different from "The Seven Samurai" or "The Magnificent Seven". This is, to me, a test of good sci-fi, because sci-fi cannot just be a transplanted story - as Robert Heinlein said, it has to have a scientific or technological element such that, without the element, the story couldn't have happened - and that was true in this case.

So I'll give it a good grade - B or B+. :)


Getting back to my research, this was made for $2 million, which would come to under $6 million today. But much of that would be in the makeup and props - aliens and spaceships cost money - as well as paying the stars George Peppard and Robert Vaughn. If that was taken out, perhaps the budget could have been cut in half.

The DVD had a section on how they went out of their way to cut costs, and also how they had to work long hours to get it done.

This was his most expensive movie, and I seem to remember reading that his usual budgets were a few hundred thousand (in today's dollars).
 
Aspiring Mogul said:
I understand that, with a green screen and using CGI to the max, you can really, really cut costs down. The fan films are doing it that way, and they have some pretty good stories. Anyone have any ideas?
Click to expand...

Be careful about basing your strategy on these as examples - there's a big difference between fan/amateur work and commercial work.

CGI has cut costs down, but they don't go away entirely. It still takes a lot of hours by skilled people to pull off convincing CGI. When you look at something like a fan film, and what it cost to make, it generally doesn't account for the time most of the people are putting into it.

I call this the 'shadow budget' - the crew time that isn't actually paid for out of pocket.

For instance, look at any of the 48 hour projects my team has done - our typical budget for a 5-7 minute short is in the $100-300 range. That covers food, props, costumes, grip rental, etc for the weekend, but doesn't cover any of our time.

So our typical crew for one of those projects is about 5 people - camera, director/second camera, assistant director/gaffer, sound, producer/props/costumes. Add 2-4 actors. Two of us do most of the post, so we don't have separate people for that. Time-wise, when we do those we're working on a hard deadline. We have to cut corners and make compromises to get everything done under the deadline. To realistically do our best work on a similar project we'd probably need 50% more time then we typically put into our films. But for argument's sake we'll just look at the time we actually put in - figure 7 people minimum, putting in 30-40 hours each - about 200-300 man-hours.

Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour. That gives you an absolute bottom 'shadow budget' of $1500 - $2200 for labor. Our work was done in CA though, where minimum wage is now $9/hour, which pushes us to $1800 - $2700 minimum for crew time - so that's going to vary depending on where you are.

That doesn't count any overtime, of which there is quite a bit in projects like that. It also doesn't count much equipment rental because we own most of our own equipment, at least $20-30k in camera, audio gear, and post equipment total. It doesn't count production insurance (just covered over our individual freelance business insurance) or permits (we shoot guerrilla style). It really doesn't include any pre-production either.

So leaving all that aside, lets call it $2-3k for our crew labor. Is that really realistic though? It's entirely likely you might be able to find a crew to work for minimum wage, but the work you're likely to get out of them is unlikely to be at the quality level you're looking for or need for a commercial production. I haven't worked for minimum wage since 1994. If you came to me and wanted to hire me for a similar project I wouldn't be charging you minimum wage. My freelance rates vary, but at my lowest rates that $2-3k would barely cover my time, let alone the rest of the crew. The most recent similar project I did for a client on my own cost them over $5k, and that was with no additional crew, no on-set audio, and the entire cast being comprised of company employees.

You'd be looking at probably $10-20k minimum to hire us all to do a similar project - a 5-7 minute short film. If it was a really compelling project we might be willing to do it for a significant discount, but that doesn't scale to a feature length project. I can afford to give you a few days at a reduced rate, but if you need me for several weeks or more you're having to compete with real projects paying full client rates - so it actually costs me far more monetarily than the discount I'd be giving you. And if you're asking me to do it in my free time your project better be pretty damn amazing to compete with the personal projects I'd normally be working on when not doing client work.

So that's the reality of amateur vs. professional - we can do our own projects for about 1/100th of what it would realistically cost you to hire us (or anyone with the necessary level of skills & experience) to do a similar project for you. If you base your budgetary considerations on the out-of-pocket costs of an amateur production you're not looking at things realistically, unless you yourself are willing to put in the time to develop the skills yourself and build a team of similar people who are all as invested personally in the project as you.
 
If it's $10-20K for a 5-minute short, then, for a 2-hour movie, using a simple calculation, the cost of CGI would be 24 times that or $240-480 K. That would be my entire budget, so that would push me out of the running.

But I thought movies can be made for half million - Dark Star was made for $60 K in those days, which would be $300 K today.
 
Last edited:
Sure - there are economies of scale. Equipment rental gets cheaper once you get to weeks instead of days, people will work for less with a long-term commitment vs. a few days, etc.

You'll get the best rates on something like CGI work if your schedule is very flexible - leaving people room to take on higher paying projects as they come along rather than having to turn them down due to their commitment to your project, allowing them to fill their slow times with your project. That can be difficult from a business standpoint though - do you have the flexibility to wait 6 months or a year or more for extensive CGI to be completed before your film is ready to release?

Movies are regularly made for anywhere from a few tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand - but in that range you're often dependent on getting a lot of work done at a very low rate (compared to industry standards) or for free, and/or keeping the overall film as simple as possible. That's why I've been pushing you in the direction of building a team who are personally invested in the project, rather than just working for you - that's what you'll need to get the kind of quality/cost ratio you'll need to do a sci-fi on the cheap.
 
ItDonnedOnMe said:
Movies are regularly made for anywhere from a few tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand - but in that range you're often dependent on getting a lot of work done at a very low rate (compared to industry standards) or for free, and/or keeping the overall film as simple as possible. That's why I've been pushing you in the direction of building a team who are personally invested in the project, rather than just working for you - that's what you'll need to get the kind of quality/cost ratio you'll need to do a sci-fi on the cheap.
Click to expand...

Define, "personally invested in the project".
 
It's their project, not just yours. i.e. a group of people working together to make their own film - one person may be the director, and in charge of the general direction of the film, but all of the team are making significant contributions to the project, such that when it is completed they can point to it and say "that's my film" rather than just "I worked on Joe Blow's movie". You might have other people who are peripheral working on it, but your core team is all significantly invested personally and creatively in the project.
 
Aspiring Mogul said:
An obvious strategy is to use his strategy, but to enhance the movie with quality story telling. This has apparently been the strategy of many an aspiring mogul, but .... well, what is the but? IOW, what's the flaw in the strategy?
Click to expand...

The flaws in that strategy are:

1) that "quality story telling" is harder to come by than you'd think, &

2) investors want to see their money return some day.
 
ItDonnedOnMe said:
It's their project, not just yours. i.e. a group of people working together to make their own film - one person may be the director, and in charge of the general direction of the film, but all of the team are making significant contributions to the project, such that when it is completed they can point to it and say "that's my film" rather than just "I worked on Joe Blow's movie". You might have other people who are peripheral working on it, but your core team is all significantly invested personally and creatively in the project.
Click to expand...

Agreed, I do that with my staff, which is why they're loyal to me. :)

That said, platitudes aren't going to be enough, and they have to get some money - that's the mistakes many goofball bosses don't realize.



Zensteve said:
The flaws in that strategy are:

1) that "quality story telling" is harder to come by than you'd think, &

2) investors want to see their money return some day.
Click to expand...

You ain't kidding about quality story telling. As for the investors, I was at the AFM in 2012, and one of the producers told me to warn my investors to expect to lose everything, because that's the nature of the business. As Louise Levison said, it's a lottery, and anyone putting in money must accept that.
 
"THE WORLD OF ROGER CORMAN"
Roger Corman is my hero. I grew up watching his films in the theatre, and THE RAVEN is
by far his best film. Corman is in his 80s now, and he STILL produces about four films
a year. The underlying key to his success is that he owns the distribution company that
distributes all of his movies...Concorde Films. He owned and operated NEW WORLD PICTURES for many many years before Concorde. He knows exactly how many units he can sell, so
he knows exactly what he can spend, and what his limitations are. He usually shoots his films without permits, and MANY of his films are shot overseas or outside the U.S...Mexico for example. His operation is one of a kind, and I seriously doubt that anyone can ever surpass or match his success. So far he has produced...drum roll...409 feature films. Wow!
 
Another thing, sadly, doesn't that documentary talk about how the big studios undercut his way of movie making when they themselves moved into his niche, only with big budgets? =(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top