Roger Corman

THAT GUY DICK MILLER: putting the “character” in “character actor”

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Photo caption: THAT GUY DICK MILLER

The entertaining documentary That Guy Dick Miller is about an actor whose name you may not place, but that you’ve seen. It’s a straight-ahead documentary about a delightfully offbeat guy.

Dick Miller amassed 184 screen credits as a protégé of legendary independent filmmaker and schlockmeister Roger Corman.  Along the way, he rubbed shoulders with indie film icons Jack Nicholson, Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.

Miller’s career started in 1955 as an Indian in the Roger Corman-directed Western Apache Woman and then Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors, The Terror, The Wild Angels and The Trip. Continuing as the king of the low budget movies, Miller went on to work for a second generation of Corman acolyte directors and then plunged full throttle into horror films.  Miller was the unfortunate Murray Futterman in Gremlins and Uncle Willie in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight.

On the screen and off, Dick Miller was glib and Bronx-accented, the quintessential wiseacre. In That Guy Dick Miller, we get to meet Miller and his wife Lainey; it’s clear the the two of them were lots of fun to be around. Irresistibly a card, Miller is even bawdy when he recalls his appearance in Night Call Nurses, a 1972 sexploitation film (that I actually saw in a drive-in 1972). 

On screen, Miller always swung for the fences, no matter how small the part.  Lots of actors play the ticket-taker or the security guard, but it’s Dick Miller that you remember for those minuscule roles.

Dick Miller as Walter Paisley, getting smooched in A BUCKET OF BLOOD

Miller is most well known for the lead character, Walter Paisley, in the beatnik-flavored cult film A Bucket of Blood. Miller appeared over ten more times as different characters named with some version of Walter Paisley. In fact, his final role was as Rabbi Walter Paisley in Hannukah, which opened after his death in 2019.

That Guy Dick Miller was recommended to me by Sandy Wolf, who had screened it as a Cinequest submission. However, That Guy Dick Miller premiered at SXSW instead of at Cinequest.

That Guy Dick Miller can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).

DVD of the Week: The Trip

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It’s Roger Corman Week at The Movie Gourmet, but our DVD is NOT the just released Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics.  Instead, I’m going with an unintentionally hilarious movie that Corman himself directed, The Trip (1967).  It’s a time-capsule exploitation film written by Jack Nicholson.   TV director Peter Fonda decides to take LSD.  After buying acid from Dennis Hopper (there’s a stretch!), the plan is for Fonda to trip at his friend Bruce Dern’s house.  Now is it a good idea to entrust someone tripping for the first time to Bruce Dern?  Of course not!  Fonda wanders off and wall-bangs nightmarishly down Sunset Boulevard.  The DVD is available from Netflix.

The Trip is on my list of 10 Movies So Bad They Are Fun.

Congrats, Roger Corman!

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This week’s DVD release of Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics is my occasion for celebrating the prolific low-budget producer Roger Corman.  So far, Corman has produced 395 titles –  mostly shameless and delicious exploitation movies for the teen market.  In one four-year period, he produced The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses – and 21 other movies!

Corman’s great gift to us all is his mentorship of young and talented filmmakers.  Filmmakers who got their first assignment from Corman (called “the Corman Film School”) include Oscar winning directors James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese.  Not to mention cult directors Paul Bartels and Monte Hellman (Corman produced Hellman’s Warren Oates classic Cockfighter).  And Chinatown screenwriter Robert Townsend.

Jack Nicholson first got some attention playing the masochistic dental patient in Corman’s 1960 Little Shop of Horrors.  Nicholson showed up again in Corman’s 1967 The Wild Angels (biker gangs), 1967 The Shooting (trippy Western) and 1967’s LSD flick The Trip (more on that tomorrow).

Probably the best movie that Corman has produced was St. Jack (1976), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.  Corman had given Bogdanovich his start, and in the intervening 12 years Bogdanovich’s star had risen (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon) and fallen (Daisy Miller).   Ben Gazzara and Denholm Elliott delivered great performances in this story of a hustling American expat running a GI brothel in Singapore during the Vietnam War.

Roger Corman’s Sci Fi Classics includes three films that I haven’t seen (or don’t remember seeing): Attack of the Crab Monsters, War of the Satellites and Not of this Earth.  Although I may not have seen them, I can tell you that 1) they don’t have fancy production values; 2) they are fast paced and not too long; and 3) they’re a kick.