By Erin Free
Famed producer Roger Corman – through his defining work at American International Pictures and his own New World Pictures – is famed for the platform he provided for noted talents like Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, the late Jonathan Demme, and many more. Corman was also instrumental in the careers of several Unsung Auteurs too, including Barbra Peeters, Katt Shea Ruben and Stephanie Rothman. Even more under-celebrated, however, are the screenwriters that Corman nurtured (and sometimes exploited too), and one of the most fascinating of this lot is playwright, novelist, poet and one-time-only director Robert Thom, who was keenly wired in to the youth counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies.
Robert Thom was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, and eventually graduated from Yale University in 1952, before going on to became a Rhodes Scholar, where he studied in Oxford University for a year. Thom sold his first play, The Minotaur, in 1954, the success of which quickly established as a major young talent on the theatre scene. After a slew of uncredited stage and screen work (Thom toiled on Meyer Levin’s play, Compulsion; and also contributed to 1960’s Jack Kerouac screen adaptation The Subterraneans, and the 1960 romance All The Fine Young Cannibals, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner), Thom achieved success writing for TV series like The Defenders, Mr. Broadway, For The People and The DuPont Show Of The Week (Thom’s episode “The Legend Of Lylah Clare” was later made into a 1968 film of the same name by the great Robert Aldrich).
Robert Thom made his first real splash as a screenwriter, however, in 1968 with his script (based on his short story The Day It All Happened, Baby) for Barry Shear’s Wild In The Streets, one of the most deliriously strange, sweetly disturbing, pointedly satirical, and absolutely unforgettable films released by American International Pictures…and that’s really saying something. A feat of truly tripped out imagination, this heady slice of dystopian mayhem stars the enigmatic Christopher Jones (a figure just as interesting as Thom himself) as Max Frost, a rock star who joins with Hal Holbrook’s duplicitous politician in working to lower America’s voting age to fourteen. With the kids taking over the polling booths, superstar Max is soon sworn in as President…and one of his first actions is to have everyone over thirty rounded up, thrown into concentration camps, and force-fed LSD!
Though much of the fun of Wild In The Streets comes from its joyfully demented casting (Christopher Jones is a revelation as Max; Shelley Winters is out-of-fucking-control as Max’s loopy mum; and Larry Bishop, Diane Varsi and Richard Pryor kill it as Max’s band) and colourful filmmaking from Barry Shear, this is really a film about ideas (pretty crazy ones at that), and they are all Robert Thom’s, with the screenwriter taking his loopy premise and really running with it. Wild In The Streets set Robert Thom up as a screenwriter of rare imagination and daring, and he followed it up with some equally bizarre work.
Thom delivered his sole directorial effort in 1969 with Angel, Angel, Down We Go, another tripped out tale of a fictional rock star, this time the excellently named Bogart Peter Stuyvesant, played by singer and occasional actor Jordan Christopher (once again, a figure just as interesting as Thom himself). A freaked-out psychodrama without rival, Angel, Angel, Down We Go sees debauched, dissolute rocker Bogart Peter Stuyvesant (who fronts a band featuring Lou Rawls and Roddy McDowell!) insinuate himself into a wealthy Hollywood family via its shy, awkward daughter Tara (played by another fascinating figure in Holly Near). In a truly demented casting coup nearly equal to that of Shelley Winters in Wild In The Streets, the matriarch of the family is played by a no-holds-barred Jennifer Jones, whose presence here is about a million miles away from Hollywood classics like Duel In The Sun and Love Letters. Angel, Angel, Down We Go is so singularly strange that it rates as near devastating that Thom didn’t direct another film.
In the 1970s, Robert Thom penned or co-penned a wonderfully salacious selection of exploitation films that would eventually become cult classics. Roger Corman’s 1970 violent miasma Bloody Mama is a gangster/bank robbing flick built on madness and perversity, with Shelley Winters bouncing off the walls as gun-toting lunatic “Ma” Kate Barker, who creepily lords it over her thuggish, subordinate sons (played by, amongst others, Don Stroud and Robert De Niro!), and makes a mess out of anyone who gets in her way. Thom injected some perfectly positioned social commentary into Jonathan Demme’s similarly themed and wonderfully rollicking 1975 crime romp Crazy Mama, which stars Cloris Leachman as a gun-toting outlaw decidedly less disturbing than Shelley Winters.
Thom’s 1976 horror film The Witch Who Came From The Sea is another bizarro effort from the writer (and loopy director Matt Cimber, of Butterfly and Hundra fame) in which his then-wife Millie Perkins (Thom was also married to actresses Joan Zell and Janice Rule) stars as a severely psychologically damaged woman who acts out by castrating and brutally murdering a number of men. A very nasty and downbeat piece of work (though undeniably and admirably complex in its themes, artful symbolism, and rich characterisation), The Witch Who Came From The Sea was followed by Thom’s final screenplay, 1978’s barely released complex family drama The Third Walker, directed by one-time helmer Teri McLuhan (daughter of famed philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan), and starring William Shatner and Colleen Dewhurst.
Robert Thom’s key work from the 1970s, however, is unquestionably the 1975 dystopian cult classic Death Race 2000 (co-penned by Charles B. Griffith), a big, crazy slab of sci-fi madness from the great Paul Bartel, the director of such cult favourites as Private Parts, Cannonball!, Eating Raoul, Lust In The Dust and Scenes From The Class Struggle In Beverly Hills. Starring David Carradine, Martin Kove, Mary Woronov and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, the film posits a crazed future where a car race requires contestants to run down innocent pedestrians to gain points that are tallied based on each kill’s brutality, with children and the elderly scoring the most. Hilarious in its satire, mesmeric in its action set pieces, and ingenious in its characterisation, Death Race 2000 not only pre-dates reality TV and social media, but it rates as a blackly comic exploitation classic.
When Robert Thom passed away prematurely in 1979 at the age of 49 from a heart attack (perhaps prompted by a variety of other health issues), the world of youth-focused exploitation cinema lost one of its most daring and unusual voices. Thom literally penned films unlike any other, and he should be remembered today with far more excitement for his truly fascinating and deeply cutting body of cinematic work.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, 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.