Unsung Auteurs: Frances Doel

by Erin Free

FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: writer and script editor Frances Doel, who penned Big Bad Mama, Deathsport and more.

Much has been written over the years about late budget conscious exploitation producer extraordinaire Roger Corman’s extraordinary eye for talent and the essential career boosts that he gave to eventual major players like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron and many, many more. There is also, however, a whole host of less well-known filmmakers that have benefited from the unofficial “Roger Corman Filmmaking School”, several of whom (George Armitage, Michael Pressman et al) have been discussed in the Unsung Auteurs column.

Despite the fact that many of his films were dotted with female nudity and marred by misogyny, Corman – via his production companies New World Pictures and New Concorde – was also a great supporter of female talent, aiding immeasurably in the careers of Unsung Auteurs like Stephanie Rothman, Barbara Peeters, Katt Shea, Amy Holden Jones and more. Undoubtedly one of the most important and under-celebrated of the Unsung Auteurs in Roger Corman’s employ was the late Frances Doel. First introduced to FilmInk readers via Stephen Vagg’s excellent article Top Ten Corman – Part Two: Top Ten Screenwriters, Doel (along with writer/director Charles B. Griffith) was an essential influence on Corman with regards to the type of films that his companies released.

Roger Corman and Frances Doel in LA in 1967.

As Corman’s chief script editor and head of the script department, Doel was the unofficial gatekeeper of what product came out of New World and New Concorde in the 1970s and 1980s. Though Corman deservedly gets most of the credit for his bravura brand of exploitation filmmaking, Doel was instrumental in its creation. “Frances was a fantastic mentor to so many of us Corman grads,” producer Gale Ann Hurd said upon Doel’s passing in May 2025. “Without her, The Terminator would’ve never been made. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for her support, her remarkable story sense, and most importantly, her friendship over these past 45 years.” Though her actual credits belie it, Frances Doel’s involvement was essential to the making of many important (and not so important) films. Fellow Corman alumni Jon Davison said that at one stage Doel “wrote just about every first draft of every picture” at New World.

Frances Doel was born in London, England in 1942. Her unlikely entrée into the world of Roger Corman and exploitation cinema came when the American producer was looking for an assistant. Never one to go the usual route, Corman recounted in his highly entertaining autobiography How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime that he contacted a tutor at Oxford University and asked him who his finest student was; the tutor instantly suggested Doel. Doel was a graduating scholarship student of St. Hilda’s College, and Corman invited her to work with him. Doel agreed and moved to Los Angeles, where she worked with the producer as an assistant, and then became even more valuable when Corman set up New World Pictures, from where he would corner the market on B-movies, exploitation flicks, and drive-in fare.

The literate and intelligent Frances Doel made for a surprisingly perfect fit in the New World Pictures environment, largely because Corman had a highly unusual take on sourcing content and talent. “Roger believes that a real writer does not sit down and write a screenplay, but prefers to write short stories, novels and plays,” Doel said of her boss, who encouraged her to look in unconventional places for creators and potential filmmakers. One of Doel’s greatest discoveries was writer/director John Sayles, whose short stories had caught her eye. Doel arranged for him to rewrite the horror flick Piranha, and Sayles became an important filmmaker at New World Pictures before eventually going on to emerge as an indie arthouse hero. “The great thing was between Roger Corman and Frances Doel, the story conferences were very compact and very specific,” Sayles has said of his time as a New World scribe. “I never got these very vague directions like ‘We’ve got problems with the second act,’ or something like that. I did a lot of re-writes based on very specific notes.”

Though Frances Doel was all over everything that came careening out of New World Pictures, she had a particularly expanisve hand in the 1974 crime spree flick Big Bad Mama, which she co-wrote with fellow Unsung Auteur William Norton. Wild, funny and with a strong feminist bent, it’s one of the best of the New World flicks, and it has a lot to do with Frances Doel. “Roger wanted a seriocomic rural crime thriller à la Bonnie and Clyde,” explained Beverly Gray, who worked at New World. “Back then, he was obligated to use Writers Guild writers, and it was a lot cheaper to hire a union writer for a re-write than for an original script. That’s why he gave Frances an entire weekend to crank out a workable first draft. Of course, she came through with flying colours, devising a story about a poor but feisty mother and her two nubile daughters who take up robbery in Depression-era Texas. She slapped a fake name on the draft, and we hired a veteran screenwriter to take over.” The aforementioned William Norton (“a very nice guy,” said Gray) insisted that Doel take the credit.

Doel also played a major part in New World belters like Crazy Mama (1975), Deathsport (1978) and Avalanche (1978), and then moved over to Orion Pictures in the early 1980s, where she worked as an executive under Mike Medavoy, supporting and guiding such films as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), The Falcon And The Snowman (1985) and Desperately Seeking Susan (1985). Doel worked as a development executive at Disney under Jeffrey Katzenberg, and co-produced Starship Troopers (1997) with the aforementioned Jon Davison, who had worked at New World. Doel eventually returned to Corman to work for his company Concorde-New Horizons, where she got full credit on bottom-feeders like Raptor (2001), Dinocroc (2004), Supergator (2007) and Dinoshark (2010). Frances Doel passed away after a long illness on 26 May 2025, at the age of 83, and stands as one of the most important and essential figures in the enduring mythology of the late, great Roger Corman.