Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) typifies the maverick independent producer-director's singular house style in the days before his career-defining cycle of Technicolor Edgar Allan Poe adaptations - and yet if the decision had been left up to Corman the film would not have been made at all. A former engineering major at Stanford University, Corman took a dead-serious approach to making such fun films as It Conquered the World (1956) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and, according to his collaborators, had no affinity for comedy. Screenwriter-for-hire Charles B. Griffith, who had written both of those films for Corman and performed another half dozen behind-the-scenes tasks, is said to have been the most eager to coach his boss on crafting satire and farce. The son of vaudeville and circus performers, Griffith imbued his scripts with a palpable lunacy, however Corman played them straight in the end. A proto-beatnik, Griffith dragged Corman from one Sunset Strip coffee house to another to research their art world horror comedy A Bucket of Blood (1959). Though that film was not a success on par with his earlier releases, Corman was impressed by the speed with which the project came together (five days) and resolved to beat his own record - to make a motion picture in just two days.

The use of a standing set at the old Chaplin Studios set the project in motion. Griffith had proposed a detective story lampoon whose villain was a music critic turned vampire; when Corman rejected that logline, Griffith countered with the idea of a professional chef who uses his regular customers as soup stock. Stymied by a Production Code resistance to cannibal stories, Griffith proposed making the bogey-in-question a man-eating plant. (Early on, the insatiable sapling bore the vaguely Joycean moniker of Oriole Bloom and future Beverly Hillbillies cast member Nancy Kulp was considered to provide the voice.) The Little Shop of Horrors went into production under the title The Passionate People Eater, with principal photography set for the week between Christmas Day 1959 and New Year's Day 1960. (One of the film's often contradictory origin stories avers that Corman was eager to wrap before the adoption of new union rules that would make his style of filmmaking more cost-prohibitive.) The film's cast was rehearsed between Monday December 28th and the 30th before shooting began at 8:30pm on the night of Thursday, December 29th. Having grabbed all of his interiors in two days, Corman allowed three days for pick-up shots and second unit work, some of it shot by writer Charles Griffith on LA's Skid Row.

Shooting at around the same time in another part of Hollywood (albeit at a much more leisurely pace) was Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), which shares with The Little Shop of Horrors certain key plot points and also foregrounds as a problematic protagonist a mother-dominated manchild who, though he lacks conscious ill intentions, leaves a corpse-pile in his passing. Griffith's conceit of a man-eating plant has known antecedents, among them the 1932 John Collier novella "Green Thoughts," John Wyndham's 1951 science fiction classic Day of the Triffids (adapted for films in 1963), Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 short story "The Reluctant Orchid," and such killer tree movies as From Hell It Came (1957) and The Woman Eater (1958). Yet as written by Griffith, The Little Shop of Horrors is entirely its own creation, occupying a world guided by neurosis in a manner that would not become fashionable until Robert Altman switched focus from documentaries to quirky, character-driven social comedies of manners. (It would not be unreasonable to imagine that Griffiths' Seymour Krelboyne and Altman's Brewster McCloud would, in another life, be at least Facebook friends.) Speaking of Altman, one of Little Shop's many contributors went entirely uncredited: before she scored as an actress, future M*A*S*H* (1970) star Sally Kellerman allowed customers Corman and Griffith to try out their ideas on her as she toiled as a waitress at the Sunset Strip coffee house Chez Paulette.

In retrospect, the film's biggest casting coup came with the hiring of Jack Nicholson, then veteran of only a few feature films. (Nicholson was then a student of acting coach Jeff Corey, whose class also included Kellerman, Robert Blake, Roy Thinnes, and Corman himself, who audited in order to understand how actors worked.) Denied a shot at the starring role because Corman felt he lacked experience (the part of Seymour went instead to another Corey mentee, Jonathan Haze), Nicholson was slotted into the part of Wilbur Force, a masochist whom Seymour encounters in a dentist's office, leading to Little Shop of Horrors's most talked-about scene. Recalling the assignment in later years, Nicholson maintained that the setpiece was almost entirely ad libbed and that Corman called "cut" well short of the scripted fadeout due to the accidental knocking over of an expensive dental drill (which belonged to his dentist at the time). Nicholson also recalled that Corman was so budget-conscious that he printed only one or two copies of the script, tearing out pages to give to actors with speaking parts rather than pay for multiple copies. Shot for $27,000, The Little Shop of Horrors made back its negative cost but its true dividends would come in later years, with its acceptance as a cult classic and then as the source of both a long-running Off-Broadway musical and Frank Oz' 1986 film adaptation.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

Here Lies a Man Who Was Not of This Earth: A Eulogy for Charles B. Griffith by Justin Humphreys (Video Watchdog no. 141, 2008)
How I Made 100 Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime by Roger Corman (Da Capo Press, 1998)
Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Life by Beverly Gray (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000-2004)
The Films of Roger Corman: "Shooting M Way Out of Trouble" by Alan Frank (BT Batsford, Ltd. 1998)
Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring by Alain Silver and James Ursini (Silman-James Press, 2006)
Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson by Patrick McGilligan (W. W. Norton & Co., 1994)
Five Easy Pieces: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times by Dennis McDougal (Wiley, 2008)
"Wild Imagination: Chuck Griffith, 1930-2007" by Roger Corman, Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2007
Profile of John Collier by Christopher Fowler, The Independent, May 24, 2009