‘You mean to say we spent £80 and we don’t even get to see her tits?’: Roger Corman’s Irish studio was from another age

Few obituaries published outside Ireland of Roger Corman, who died on May 9th at the age of 98, recalled the legendary exploitation film-maker’s Connemara adventure in the mid-1990s. Understandably enough, they focused instead on Corman’s remarkable 70-year career, his groundbreaking approach to low-budget independent film production, the influential aesthetic of his bare-boned exercises in pulp genres and the launch pad he provided to a glittering array of directors, from Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola to Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Demme. Corman was also instrumental in bringing the films of European auteurs including Truffaut and Bergman to American audiences.

But the story of Concorde Anois, the studio he set up in a disused factory in Baile na hAbhann, 30km outside Galway city, with generous subsidies, courtesy of the then minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht (and, by a remarkable coincidence, a local TD), Michael D Higgins, is in some ways the perfect parable of Ireland’s then nascent film industry.

[ Donald Clarke remembers Roger Corman, a cult film-maker whose legacy can be seen in the Irish movie business today ]

By the time he arrived in Connemara, Corman was in his 70s, a genial, cultured figure with a secure place in the pantheon. One might have thought that the creator of such trash classics as Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Caveman and Slumber Party Massacre might have been mellowed by all those lifetime-achievement awards and honorary doctorates. After all, there are many examples of former pop culture enfants terribles subsiding into middlebrow respectability in their later years. Maybe that’s what Ireland thought it was getting.

It wasn’t. ”Irish agency funding porn film” ran the Sunday Times headline following the premiere of Concorde Anois’s erotic thriller Criminal Affairs to an agog audience at the 1997 Galway Film Fleadh. Michael Foley reported in The Irish Times that questions were being asked about whether what was reportedly a “soft porn” film had been in receipt of tax incentives or, even worse, funding from Údarás na Gaeltachta.

Things can only get better? Rishi Sunak’s election chant reckoning was perfection

---

‘You mean to say we spent £80 and we don’t even get to see her tits?’: Roger Corman’s Irish studio was from another age

---

There’s nothing very dramatic about That They May Face the Rising Sun. Which is why it’s such a good film

---

Who watches the watchers when it comes to disinformation?

---

Young people with zero experience were hired to do jobs they’d never done before and worked 72-hour weeks for a pittance. Titles such as The Game of Death, Knocking on Death’s Door and Bloodfist VIII were shot in three weeks

In a letter to The Irish Times the fleadh’s director, Anthony Sellers, disputed Foley’s claim that the film had been “inexplicably chosen”, saying it was “entirely appropriate that an Irish audience should have an opportunity to view and react to a movie such as Criminal Affairs”, which he described as “a relatively lacklustre B-movie that shows emerging flair, but demonstrates hopelessly mishandled sexual politics”.

It is a source of eternal regret that I was not present at that historic screening. But I did get to follow up with an article exploring the background to the controversy, including an explanation of what the word “exploitation” actually meant. The Macmillan International Film Encyclopaedia (my bible in the days before IMDB) defined it as “films made with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasising some sensational aspect of the product”. It went on helpfully to define “sexploitation” as “films whose erotic or pornographic subject matter is thus exploited”.

[ Roger Corman: The maker of 100 Hollywood movies who never lost a dime ]

Nobody who was even faintly aware of the Corman method should have been surprised at the film-making approach he brought to Baile na hAbhann. Young people with zero experience were hired to do jobs they’d never done before and worked 72-hour weeks for a pittance. Titles such as The Game of Death, Knocking on Death’s Door and Bloodfist VIII were shot in three weeks. The company imported second-hand American cars for its US-set stories. These would be painted a different colour on each side so they could drive by the camera in one direction and then back in the other as if they were different vehicles.

With a high turnover of staff, and without the ever-replenishing pool of film-school graduates available in the United States, he may also just have run out of people to exploit

Work practices fell more than a little short of modern HR standards. In It Came from Connemara, Brian Reddin’s 2014 documentary, Jeremiah Cullinane, the director of the 1997 film Criminal Affairs, recalls being admonished by a Corman henchwoman. “She said to me, ‘Do you mean to say we spent £80 for this actress to come all the way from Dublin and we don’t even get to see her tits?’”

Much water has passed under the bridge since 1997, not least in the politics of gender representation. But, in retrospect, Corman was already a man out of time when he arrived in Galway. The grindhouses, fleapits and drive-ins that had been the market for exploitation movies were being displaced by the DVD. With a high turnover of staff, and without the ever-replenishing pool of film-school graduates available in the United States, he may also just have run out of people to exploit. By the end of the century, Concorde Anois had folded its tent and departed Connemara, leaving behind a sprinkling of people who would go on to work in film and TV production in Galway and Dublin and a chapter to be cherished in Irish film history.

This article was amended on May 20th, 2024, to attribute to Jeremiah Cullinane a quote incorrectly attributed to John Brady