Roger Corman

“Here is Targets, Peter Bogdanovich's first film. Peter had been my assistant on several pictures and shot second unit on a few. He was clearly very talented and I had a very strange commitment with Boris Karloff to do a few days on another film. The result was Targets with Boris at a drive-in where one of his pictures was premiering and there was a shooter on top of the drive-in and the idea was to more or less combine fictional violence with real violence. It was a brilliant film.”

“Here is The Gunfighter, which was a personal film for me. I had just become a story analyst at 20th Century Fox. I finally got a script called The Big Gun. The Big Gun was about a famous gunfighter whose reputation precedes him wherever he goes. I wrote a number of notes on it and I suggested changing the title from The Big Gun to The Gunfighter. I submitted this to the story editor who recommended it to one of the producers at Fox. He produced the film and the film was a giant success.”

“Here is Fellini's picture Amarcord. This is one of the foreign films we distributed. I remember that Allan Arkush and Joe Dante are trailer editors and had just finished editing the trailer for some wild exploitation film and they said, 'This is a different kind of film, how should we build the trailer?' I said, 'With the same style you use for the exploitation films.' They did it and Amarcord was the biggest opening film Fellini ever had in his career.”

“Here is the Russian film of War and Peace. This is one of the greatest film adaptations of a novel in my opinion ever made. The way Bondarchuk photographed those battle scenes going on into the distance in long shots and then cutting to individual shots as you took in the concept of the grandeur of the forthcoming battle and the beginning of the battle and then brought you in to the terror of the real battle is brilliant.”

“This is Raging Bull directed by Marty Scorsese. Marty actually directed his first feature film for me, it was called Boxcar Bertha. I had previously produced and directed a film called Bloody Mama. A little later they wanted a sequel and I said I'll produce it but I'll pick a new director and I picked Marty. Boxcar Bertha became a solid success and it started Marty's career and Raging Bull is a great example of the way he was able to combine violence and explore the life of Jake LaMotta.”