Attack of the Monster Musical

A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors

Adam Abraham

• Éditeur: Methuen Drama
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350179325
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Theatre

How many hit musicals are based on films that were shot in two days at a budget of $30, 000? The answer is one: Little Shop of Horrors. Roger Corman's monster movie opened in 1960, played the midnight circuit, and then disappeared from view. Two decades later, Little Shop of Horrors opened Off-Broadway and became a surprise success. Attack of the Monster Musical: A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors chronicles this unlikely phenomenon. The Faustian tale of Seymour and his man-eating plant transcended its humble origins to become a global phenomenon, launching a popular film adaptation and productions all around the world. This timely and authoritative book looks at the creation of the musical and its place in the contemporary musical theatre canon. Examining its afterlives and wider cultural context, the book asks the question why this unlikely combination of blood, annihilation, and catchy tunes has resonated with audiences from the 1980s to the present. At the core of this in-depth study is the collaboration between the show's creators, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Told through archival research and eyewitness accounts, this is the first book to make extensive use of Ashman's personal papers, offering a unique and inspiring study of one of musical theatre's greatest talents.

CHAPTER ONE

Skid Row: From Roger Corman’s Hollywood to Off-Off-Broadway

Some movies are made for art, some for profit, and some in order to win a bet. The Little Shop of Horrors falls in the third category. Perhaps it was not so much a bet as a challenge: could a feature-length film be shot in exactly two days? Roger Corman, an independent producer and director, said Yes. He rose to prominence in the 1950s, when the Hollywood studio system was crumbling. The federal government forced Paramount and other studios to sell off their movie theatres; families migrated to suburbia and stayed home to watch television; and the moguls who once led the system—Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn—were dying. The cinema audience was also getting younger, ready to rebel without a cause, more attuned to the macabre. Attack of the Crab Monsters. A Bucket of Blood.

Corman thrived in the changing climate. Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1926, he was raised in the Great Depression, forever haunting his relationship with money. He studied industrial engineering at Stanford University and then English literature at Oxford before he drifted into the movie business.¹ Living in Los Angeles and working outside the system, he produced films for pennies and always turned a profit. Vincent Price called him “dead serious, humorless.”² Corman, with sufficient preparation, could shoot a film in five or six days. “I had never thought of myself as doing Great Art,” he said. “I felt I was working as a craftsman.”³

A longtime Corman assistant, Beverly Gray, noticed “the engineer’s zest for problem-solving.” Actor Mel Welles, who appeared in many Corman films, observed that the director solved problems “with the greatest amount of efficiency.”⁴ Prolific and reliable, he became a key supplier for American International Pictures (AIP), a company formed in the 1950s by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. According to one critic, AIP “specialized in fun, hip, sexy, and contemporary alternatives to Hollywood’s stuffy spectacles and mundane melodramas.”⁵ In the summer of 1957, for example, AIP offered Invasion of the Saucer Men, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and Reform School Girl. Growing up in New Jersey at the time, Joe Dante noticed that “they were movies your parents wouldn’t want you to see.”⁶

AIP offered Corman $50,000 for each film he produced, plus a $15,000 advance on foreign sales. So Corman completed each film for under $65,000; every third or fourth film would be extremely cheap, thus increasing his profits.⁷ Nevertheless, Corman bristled at the well-known term for low-budget Hollywood fare: “I never made a ‘B’ movie in my life.”⁸ He insisted that the B movie (the second half of a double feature) was a relic from the 1930s and 1940s, when the major studios controlled production, distribution, and exhibition. Yet in the era when color photography became affordable for the majors, AIP found a winning formula by combining two similar black-and-white pictures into a double feature: “two films for the price of one.”⁹

The legend that Roger Corman produced The Little Shop of Horrors in two days has often been told.¹⁰ However, Corman biographer Mark Thomas McGee argued that “the legend is a lie.”¹¹ Here is what happened. In 1959, Corman formed his own company, the Filmgroup, which generated movies on the AIP model: fast and cheap. When offered free access to a movie set that depicted an office, Corman brainstormed ideas with a frequent collaborator, the screenwriter Charles Byron Griffith, known as Chuck. They considered a story about cannibalism but feared that it would never get past the censors. Late one night, when such ideas emerge, Griffith suggested a “man-eating plant.”¹² The resulting screenplay resembles a Corman-Griffith film made earlier that year, A Bucket of Blood.¹³ Both projects center on the same trio: a hapless loser, his love interest, and his boss. To economize, each story is built around a single workplace location (a beatnik café, a florist shop), and in each case, the loser-hero becomes an accidental murderer, thus winning attention and the love that he craves. Griffith entitled his new script “The Passionate People Eater”¹⁴—a variation on “The Purple People Eater,” a 1958 novelty song by Sheb Wooley. In the song, a creature from another world descends to the earth and proclaims, “I want to get a job in a rock ’n’ roll band.” So the song blends a monster movie and rock music: a potent combination.

In December 1959, “The Passionate People Eater” went into production. Corman intended to beat his own record for speed and shoot in just two days. On Tuesday, December 22, Corman began filming at the former Charlie Chaplin Studios, on North La Brea Avenue, near Sunset Boulevard. On Wednesday, production wrapped.¹⁵ How did he do it? He shot with two cameras simultaneously to get more coverage in less time. The actors were engaged for one week; they rehearsed for three days and shot for two.¹⁶ All the scenes in the florist shop play out as if on stage; the editor cuts between angles, left and right. The film’s interiors are high key and low contrast; indeed, these scenes look more like a multicamera sitcom than a monster movie—appropriate for Corman’s blend of comedy and horror. The story also required about twelve minutes of exterior photography, which took place over four evenings, produced by a non-union crew. Since Corman was in the union, directing duties here were handled by Chuck Griffith.¹⁷ Hence the shoot was a few days longer than the legendary two days.

“My film budgets have always been notoriously lean,” Corman admitted. Beverly Gray recalled that he would “hire young unknowns who would work for almost nothing in exchange for the chance to learn their craft.”¹⁸ In A Bucket of Blood, the hero exclaims, “Gee, fifty dollars for something I made!” His coworker replies, “Now you’re a professional.” For the film that became The Little Shop of Horrors, the lead actor, Jonathan Haze, was paid $400 for a week of work; a prop company called Dice Incorporated charged $750 to construct four mechanical plants of increasing size and menace.¹⁹ Multitalented Chuck Griffith earned $1,800 for writing the screenplay, acting in the film, and directing the exterior scenes.²⁰ A young Jack Nicholson also appeared in the film, as a masochistic dental patient. When offering the role, Corman handed Nicholson only those script pages in which the actor would appear. “That’s what low budget was like,” Nicholson remembered.²¹ The total cost: less than $30,000.²²

Retitled The Little Shop of Horrors, the film opened at the Pix Theatre, in Hollywood. Nicholson attended, and there was a strong reaction, at least to his scene: “They laughed so hard I could barely hear the dialogue.”²³ Here’s what the audience saw: Business is bad in a low-rent florist shop on Skid Row, run by Gravis Mushnik. He has two assistants: Audrey and Seymour. Seymour, a budding botanist, discovers a new kind of carnivorous plant, which eventually eats four people. The remarkable plant grows and attracts business to the now-booming shop; as a result, Seymour wins popular acclaim and the love of Audrey. The police, however, investigate the murders and...