The Little Shop Archive's video: Roger Corman Introduces The Little Shop of Horrors 2006

Here is Roger Corman's introduction to The Little Shop of Horrors, included on the November 2006 release The Cry Baby Killer: Back-to-Back Jack Edition (which included The Little Shop as a bonus film). The DVD was released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment, who had signed a 12-year distribution deal with Corman's New Horizons in 2005, though the deal would be ended in early 2008 by Buena Vista largely due to poor sales and poor masters. Also of note: Mentioned in the intro is a possible remake of the original film to be produced by Corman, which has yet to come to fruition. Produced under the title The Passionate People Eater, the film was infamously shot in just two days with a budget of around $30,000 according to Corman (though other sourced estimate the budget to be between $22,000 and $100,000), with sets remaining from his previous film A Bucket of Blood. Though Comran originally wanted to develop a story about a private investigator, screenwriter Griffin wanted to write a horror-themed comedy. Though not impressed with the box office performance of A Bucket of Blood, Corman eventually relented and the two began to work. According to Corman, "We ended up at a place where Sally Kellerman (before she became a star) was working as a waitress, and as Chuck and I vied with each other, trying to top each other’s sardonic or subversive ideas, appealing to Sally as a referee, she sat down at the table with us, and the three of us worked out the rest of the story together." [Roger Corman, "Wild Imagination: Charles B. Griffith 1930-2007", LA Weekly 17 October 2007] After Griffin's first screenplay for the project "Cardula" (a Dracula-themed story involving a vampire music critic) was rejected by Corman, he wrote a screenplay under the title "Gluttony." According to Griffin, the script was about "a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that, you know? We couldn’t do that though because of the code at the time. So I said, 'How about a man-eating plant?', and Roger said, 'Okay.' By that time, we were both drunk." [Graham, Aaron W. "Little Shop of Genres: An interview with Charles B. Griffith". Senses of Cinema.] Jackie Joseph later recalled "at first they told me it was a detective movie; then, while I was flying back [to make the movie], I think they wrote a whole new movie, more in the horror genre. I think over a weekend they rewrote it." [Tom Weaveer, Jackie Joseph interview, B Monster] In a 1980s interview with the radio station WBMI, playwright Howard Ashman talked about his relationship with the film, saying, "I saw the film when I was about 13 years old, 14 years old, could have been as young as 12. But I think I was around 14. I think it was past my bedtime, and I was laying in my room down in the basement, and it came on. It's a tongue-in-cheek horror film, it was a horror spoof, and I thought it was maybe the wittiest thing I had ever seen at age 14. I've subsequently talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of people who also thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen when they were 14 years old. [...] I forgot all about LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, but two years later, wrote something while I was in school called THE CANDY SHOP, about a man who feel in love with a plant, and I din't know that I was plagiarizing anything. That was sort of an adolescent thing, and that went the way of adolescent things. And then, right after Alan and I finished writing GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER [...] LITTLE SHOP came back to me. I realized that I had actually plagiarized it two years after I had seen it when I was a teenager, and that now I was all grown up and could probably acquire the rights and do it for real." Howard's musical adaptation, shortened to simply Little Shop of Horrors, would open off-Broadway in 1982 and would be adapted into it's own film in 1986, which has gone on to become a cult film itself.