By Erin Free
With the recent writers’ strike illustrating the importance of this crucial role, we’re showing solidarity by focusing on screenwriters in the Unsung Auteurs column. In Hollywood, there are many husband-and-wife writing/filmmaking duos, but sadly in many of these pairs, the wife is too often minimised in the partnership, working behind the scenes while the husband receives the lion’s share of the credit. This has been famously detailed in the romantic/creative partnerships of the likes of Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt, and many others. One of the best cases of a genuine fifty-fifty duo is that comprised of John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington, whose dual screenwriting work remains largely under-celebrated.
Born in 1932, John William Corrington was a practicing personal injury lawyer in New Orleans who sidelined as an author and poet, penning a number of novels and short story collections. Born in 1936, Joyce Hooper Corrington was an academic who taught at a variety of American colleges before marrying John William Corrington in 1960. Joyce assisted John with his manuscripts, editing and refining many of his novels and short stories. John and Joyce Corrington eventually formed a writing team of a more equitable variety when they made the decision to move into the field of screenwriting.
Like so many others in Hollywood, John and Joyce Corrington received their break courtesy of prolific exploitation producer Roger Corman, who tapped the pair to write the screenplay for his 1971 directorial effort Von Richthofen And Brown, a WW1 aerial drama that told the highly fictionalised story of the infamous German pilot Manfred Von Richthofen aka The Red Baron (played in the film by John Phillip Law) and Canadian RAF pilot Roy Brown (Don Stroud), the man who for many years was credited with shooting him down. Filled with strongly drawn characters and punctuated with some stunning aerial sequences, Von Richthofen And Brown is considerably more large-scale than the usual Roger Corman effort (it was bankrolled by United Artists), and though not a huge success, it kicked off what would become a long and fruitful career for John and Joyce Corrington in film and television.
They next delivered a stellar adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, which was renamed The Omega Man, and shaped into a superb piece of apocalyptic dystopia by director Boris Sagal. Though the film avoids Matheson’s nihilistic ending, Sagal (a veteran and prolific director of TV series and telemovies who does his best work here) and John and Joyce Corrington do a great job with the material here, gifting leading man Charlton Heston with one of his best but most underrated roles as the imperious Neville, who believes himself to be the last man alive after a plague has turned everyone around him into night-dwelling albino monsters. John and Joyce Corrington pack the film with incident and intrigue, and really succeed in making the film’s largely lone protagonist truly fascinating.
Obviously impressed by their work on his Von Richthofen And Brown, Roger Corman booked John and Joyce Corrington to adapt Ben L. Reitman’s novel Boxcar Bertha after the success of his similarly themed 1970 exploitation flick Bloody Mama. The Corringtons’ lean, left-leaning, 1930s-set script was placed in the very capable hands of the young Martin Scorsese, who had impressed Corman with his 1967 debut feature Who’s That Knocking At My Door. In this tough, violent cult favourite, Barbara Hershey plays Bertha, who takes to the road after her crop-dusting daddy is killed in an accident. Drifting through the South via the burgeoning railroad line, she hooks up with both a Yankee cardsharp (Barry Primus) and charismatic union agitator Big Bill Shelley (David Carradine). Together with a black fugitive (Bernie Casey), the group harasses and commits robberies against the Reader Railroad and its tyrannical boss (David’s father, John Carradine), who sends his gun-toting deputies off on the trail of the bothersome group. Boasting a truly powerful climax, Boxcar Bertha is a cracking collision of exploitation and pure cinema.
When regular Planet Of The Apes franchise screenwriter Paul Dehn had to drop out of the final installment, Battle For The Planet Of The Apes, due to health reasons, John and Joyce Corrington were brought in by the series producers to pen the script, largely on the back of their work on the also post-apocalyptic The Omega Man. John and Joyce Corrington were not, however, seasoned science fiction writers, and they readily admitted to the fact that they hadn’t even seen the previous films in the popular series. Paul Dehn was brought in later to polish the duo’s screenplay, and he claims that he actually rewrote much of it. The Writers Guild Of America, however, ruled in favour of the Corringtons, who ultimately received sole screenplay credit, with Dehn copping the lesser “story by” mantle. Joyce Corrington has been on the record as calling some of Dehn’s script revisions “stupid”, and while 1973’s Battle For The Planet Of The Apes is hurt by a tight budget, it remains a fine installment in this very underrated film series.
For their final big screen credit, John and Joyce Corrington returned to the Roger Corman fold with the 1974 US-Italian co-production The Arena, which was basically a Roman female gladiator redux of Corman’s 1973 women-in-prison Defiant Ones rip-off Black Mama, White Mama. Sexy, sordid and action-packed, The Arena reunited that film’s stars, Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, to play two women enslaved and forced into gladiatorial combat who start out as adversaries but end up allies. With the film’s American director Steve Carver replaced by Italian Joe D’Amato, and all kinds of backstage rewrites and shenanigans going on, it’s difficult to determine how much of John and Joyce Corrington’s work remains in the film.
After penning the superior 1974 horror telemovie Killer Bees (directed by famed Night Tide and Queen Of Blood helmer Curtis Harrington and starring Kate Jackson and Gloria Swanson), John and Joyce Corrington then focused exclusively on the small screen, writing for series including Search For Tomorrow, Texas, General Hospital and One Life To Live. Though John William Corrington passed away in 1988 and Joyce Hooper Corrington (who worked on the likes of Guiding Light and The Real World after her husband’s death) is now retired, they remain a wonderful example of how truly effective a husband-and-wife creative team can be.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
