ndependent filmmaker Roger Corman is a true Hollywood legend. After a career of producing and directing hundreds of movies, Corman has brought his talents to television for the first time as executive producer and co-creator of Black Scorpion, a new series that kicks off the SCI FI fridayPRIME lineup.
Corman's autobiography (co-authored with Jim Jerome), How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, is an international bestseller. He has championed dozens of actors, ranging from Jack Nicholson to Sandra Bullock, and directors from Francis Ford Coppola to James Cameron.
Black Scorpion began as two made-for-cable movies that Corman created for Showtime. When the movies aired in Germany, Corman received a phone call from a German TV company that was seeking the rights to make its own Black Scorpion TV series. Figuring that he'd tapped into something with a lot of potential, Corman decided on the spot to make his own TV series. In fact, he shot a full season--22 episodes--before selling them to SCI FI. Roger Corman shares his thoughts on the making of Black Scorpion, the TV series.
You made a couple of Black Scorpion movies for Showtime. Why did you decide to commit to 22 episodes of a television version?
Corman: When you sell a TV show, you're selling an idea. Even if you're selling a pilot, you're still selling an idea, because everybody knows that you spent double or triple or more on the pilot than you're going to spend on the episodes. So nobody really knows what they're buying. But this way, what you see is what you get. I could go to the market and say, "Here's your whole 22 shows. It's for one year. If you like them, fine." And SCI FI saw them and liked them. The same thing happened in Germany, where the Black Scorpion movies had been a big success. And other than that, we haven't sold overseas, because I'm quite certain it's going to do well on the SCI FI Channel. The offers we've had from other countries are good, but I think after we do very well on the SCI FI Channel, I'll be able to go back and do better overseas.
Even with the history that you have, did you consider it to be a big risk to go ahead and make the series without a buyer?
Corman: Yes. I've made somewhere around 450 films now, and almost all of them have been successful. They're in the medium-budget and low-budget field. So the commitment for this much money was the biggest individual commitment I've ever made.
You're well known for shooting quickly. What was the shooting schedule like for Black Scorpion?
Corman: We didn't shoot that quickly. We shot five days plus the second unit for the first two shows. I felt that I wasn't getting the quality I wanted, so I upped it to six days. Putting it all together, including the second unit, the schedule was probably pretty close to what a network TV show would have, but it's much more complicated, because I don't think there's any other show on the air that has this much action and special effects. We have both a lot of martial arts and a lot of physical action. Black Scorpion is an expert martial arts fighter. Almost everyone she meets--the supervillains, the supervixens--all seem to be martial arts stars, too. She's a policewoman by day, Black Scorpion by night. She drives a white Corvette during the day, which is very fast. It morphs at night into the Black Scorpion-mobile, which is superfast. I didn't use regular Hollywood stunt drivers. Instead, I used racing drivers for our action scenes. There is probably more action in our car chases and in the fights and the explosions than in any other series.
It seems to me that when a comic book is transformed into a movie or a TV show, it usually follows one of two routes: it's either campy like the Batman series with Adam West or it's darker and more serious like a graphic novel or Tim Burton's Batman. Does Black Scorpion fall into one of these two categories?
Corman: It falls in between, but it comes closer to the Adam West Batman. I don't know if I would use the word "campy," but it is done with humor. There is a comic book style to it. I would describe Black Scorpion as a comic book superhero--a female Superman, Spider-Man, Batman. The series has a lot of action, and it is funny.
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Corman: That's what we're hoping it will be. We've screened a couple of episodes at science fiction conventions in Los Angeles, and it's gone over very well.
How does Black Scorpion compare with the other work you've done?
Corman: The most rewarding aspect was shooting the fights and the car chases. It was not that dissimilar from shooting a motion picture for the first couple of weeks. But when we got into it, we realized that we were shooting about 30 weeks. And we've never shot consecutively that way. It became something of a wearing process on the cast and crew, and we stopped after the first 12 weeks. We took a couple of weeks off just to have everybody rest up and sort of catch their breath and then went back and shot the last half. It was a much tougher haul over the long run than we'd anticipated. Michelle Lintel went to Mexico and just laid on the beach for 10 days.
What was the biggest challenge in making Black Scorpion?
Corman: I think the biggest challenge was the inventiveness of the supervillains. For instance, Adam West plays Breathtaker, whose mission is to deprive the City of Angels of oxygen--which in reality is partially done anyway, but that's another story. We had to figure out the costumes that he would wear. There's a woman named Hurricane who can cause hurricanes.
It looks like you've done a good job with your villains. There's a strong motivation for each villain. In fact, one villain's demand is for a good cause.
Corman: We tried to have something hitting every angle. One villain is very much involved with the homeless. We have various causes that the supervillains support, as it were. It's just the way they do it can be very startling.
What can you tell me about the series' star, Michelle Lintel?
Corman: She's a very bright girl. She was a Miss Kansas. What I wanted was for Black Scorpion to be tall, because she had to have the height to justify the fact that she could beat up people. Michelle Lintel does know martial arts. When she auditioned for the part, she was reading with an actor, and she kicked the script out of his hands. When she kicked that script into the air, I figured, here's Black Scorpion.
I've heard that Michelle Lintel does her own stunts.
Corman: She does almost all of her own stunts. She also does almost all of her own driving. She drives very well, very fast. There are just a couple of stunts that are possibly a little bit too dangerous. For instance, in one scene she's crashing through the barricade and the car is leaping into the air, so we did use a stunt man. She won two bronze medals in the Junior Olympics in track. She was a sprinter. She's very pleasant, very cooperative, and very funny. She contributed a great deal to the humor with ideas of her own. She works hard and she stays in shape.
Is it easier to work with actors when they do their own stunts?
Corman: Many years ago, I made The Wild Angels, the first of the Hell's Angels motorcycle films in the '60s with Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern. And I insisted at that time that everyone be able to ride a motorcycle. What I didn't want was what you see in Westerns--a close shot of the leading man jumping in a saddle, and then you cut to the long shot and the stunt rider gallops away on the horse. I wanted to stay in close on the bike, so in one shot I could see them getting on the bikes and riding away. And I used the same technique with Black Scorpion. So you can see that it's clearly Michelle in the fights.
It's such a great idea to bring in Adam West as a villain. And there are other actors that you use--Frank Gorshin, Soupy Sales, Lou Ferrigno ...
Corman: We brought a number of people who were leads in their own TV series and are well-known actors. They loved it. Adam West was particularly good. He played Breathtaker in the original Black Scorpion movie, and then he came back and did three of the TV episodes.
Did you have these actors in mind when you originally planned the series, or did you work them in later on?
Corman: We had Adam in mind and then we started thinking of different people and contacted them and brought them in.
Do you have plans to continue Black Scorpion?
Corman: We expect to go on to a second season. In our contract with SCI FI Channel there are figures for a second and third season.
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