Seeking distribution for The Fast and the Furious were Columbia, Republic, and Allied Artists, but Corman held out for something more because he wanted to set a precedent for a multi-picture deal. James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff were in the process of forming American Releasing Corporation and agreed to give Corman a three-picture deal, with The Fast and the Furious filling in the first slot.

The Fast and the Furious was crucial to the start of American Releasing Corporation, which later evolved into American International Pictures. A.I.P. went on to become the largest and most financially successful independent production and distribution company of the 1950's and 1960's.

The success of both A.I.P. and Roger Corman was made possible, in part, by the new markets that opened up in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in May of 1948 that ruled in favor of theater divestiture from the major studios and brought with it an end to the monopolizing practice of block-bookings that had had a stranglehold on exhibition and distribution patterns. In the years that followed the big studios voluntarily divested themselves of their theaters rather than submit to court-ordered liquidations.

Samuel Z. Arkoff: "The early 1950's was the worst time for cinemas because of TV, the breakup of chains after the Consent Decree, and the fact that many of the old studio chiefs were dying or retired. Lots of exhibitors said there was no market for small pictures because TV would buy them up and show them to fill programming needs. Thousands of theaters went under –a downtime for the industry. That's when we moved in."

Jonathan Haze is an actor with a long career working almost exclusively with Roger Corman, from his debut in Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954) to a cameo in Corman's The Phantom Eye (1999). He had an uncredited part in The Fast and the Furious as Connie's rescuer, and has this to say about the film: "It was a sports car racing picture. At the time, racing cars were gonna be big in movies, with a lot of big studio movies about car racing and Roger managed to get together this little old car-racing film with John Ireland... We went and borrowed sports cars from our friends and used car dealers and stuff and took 'em out, took the windshields off, and put numbers on them and shot racing scenes. In those days, it would have been impossible to go out and buy or rent those cars, so we borrowed them. There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on."

The racing footage in The Fast and the Furious made use of the Jaguar Open Sports Car race at Monterey, Port Dume and Malibu.

In what might seem an uncharacteristic move, the famously frugal Corman confesses to one scene that he deliberately botched in The Fast and the Furious: "I was driving the car in the final sequence where the lead heavy instigates a really manic auto race. John Ireland was supposed to pass me in his car while we were both going through a turn. After that, I was supposed to pass him and he, being the hero, was supposed to pass me back. Well, I passed him... but he never caught up with me to pass me back. The shot was ruined. Everyone was furious with me because we were working with so little time and money. They accused me of actually trying to win the race. I got very angry. 'I wasn't trying to win the race!' I yelled, 'But I wasn't about to slow down so some...some hero could pass me! It would look funny! It would look fake!' The fact of the matter is that I got so excited about driving a real race car that I drove to win the race. I wouldn't admit that to anybody at the time, of course, but I wasn't about to come in second just because the script said so. We had to retake the shot."

The Fast and the Furious inspired Roger Corman to direct films himself. The most obvious perk associated with this career movie is usually that of having more artistic control, but for Corman it might be said that the main advantage to being director was that it meant saving money on one of the major expenses normally associated with filmmaking.

Compiled by Pablo Kjolseth

SOURCES:
The films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, by Ed Naha.
The Films of Roger Corman, by Alan Frank
How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome.
Psychotronic Video, Number 27 (Jonathan Haze, interview by Justin Humphreys)