The so-called “Roger Corman Film School” has produced a number of distinguished graduates over the years, with an alumni list rivaling any of your more officially recognized filmmaker training grounds. It’s where James Cameron got his start. Ditto for Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese. And before Joe Dante went on to deliver his own string of beloved classics, the director first cut his teeth cutting trailers for Corman’s New World Pictures.
Dante would later get a chance to go behind the camera directing Hollywood Boulevard (famously shot for under $60,000 in 10 days) for the B-movie magnate, followed by the Jaws rip-off Piranha. From there, the director went from spoofing Spielberg to working with him, developing a singular style that mixed his B-movie influences with family blockbusters, crossing creature features with comedies, along with a healthy dose of satire and his trademark subversive sense of humor. If there’s one distinguishing feature of Dante’s movies—from Gremlins to Small Soldiers—it’s that they have personality, a trait all too rare in Hollywood these days, when it seems like there are more movies coming out that are based on apps than on original ideas.
In recent years, Dante has seen his career come full circle by launching Trailers From Hell, a web series in which the filmmaker and his famous friends talk up their favorite underappreciated classics. And this week, Dante will be honored for his own cinematic contributions at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, receiving the fest’s inaugural Sierra Spirit Award, followed by a special screening of his 1987 sci-fi/comedy classic Innerspace.
With the festival running May 25-29, Paste had a chance to speak with Dante about his career, how much Hollywood has changed since the ’70s and ’80s, and the state of his long-awaited Roger Corman biopic, an ode to the man who helped him and so many others get their start.
Paste Magazine: Is it surreal for you to be talking about Innerspace some 30 years later? Did you ever expect that when it first came out?
Joe Dante: It is odd. Because you know, in 1987, they weren’t talking about Innerspace. [Laughs] Because it came out and didn’t make any money. The trajectory of the fame of that movie, and a lot of movies made by directors in the ’80s, were that even when they weren’t successful theatrically, they were big hits on home video. And cassettes being passed from one household to another eventually led to some of these movies that were pretty much considered flops becoming very beloved. And in the minds of many people today, they assume that they were big hits theatrically because they’re so well known today.
Paste: Why do you think that is? Because genre movies and comedies historically don’t tend to get the same respect as the so-called prestige pictures, but they’re the ones that end up having that second life and really sticking with us.
Dante: The problem is, try to ask somebody what won the Academy Award last year. Who was the Best Supporting Actor? What movie won for Best Screenplay? Nobody remembers. I mean, when you look back at the list, the whole Academy list of things that did win—and there are, of course, many worthy movies on there—but they may or may not be the most popular movies. The most popular movies are the movies that people watch over and over or turn their kids onto, or turn their friends onto, and those are the movies that have a shelf life—much more so than some of the movies that were of the moment when they came out, but that moment has passed. And I’m a firm believer that you really don’t know the worth of a movie until at least a couple of years have gone by.
There’s a movie called Idiocracy that Mike Judge made a couple of years ago, which came out to no particular notice, because the studio hated it and they buried it, but it has come true. It’s a predictive comedy about how awful the future’s going to be, and so many aspects of this movie have actually taken place, and are actually happening as we speak, that it’s almost not funny. [Laughs] But I guarantee you that movie is gonna be better remembered than a lot of other movies that were very famous that year [2006]. And I did a picture called The Second Civil War for HBO, which was a political satire made in 1997, and every time I see it [again], it’s more and more comical and more and more prescient. And more things from the movie that were presented as “Oh, this is absurd, this could never happen” have now happened.
Paste: Do you think that it’s harder to get a movie like that made nowadays than when you were making something like The Second Civil War, or Innerspace?
Dante: Well, Innerspace, it’s an Amblin picture, which means it’s a Spielberg movie, which puts it in a higher rung of movies. It’s not a B picture, it’s an A picture. But those kind of movies were sort of a trend in the ’80s, they were making family-oriented comedy/special-effects movies. That’s kind of gone by the wayside because, with the rise of CGI and the ability to show people flying around and doing things that were very difficult to present years ago, the movies have become a spectacle business. It’s all about how many cities can you destroy, how many planets can you blow up?
Paste: It seems like there’s become this split, where you’ve either got a $100-million-dollar movie or a microbudget movie, and that middle-range that people like you were working in has all but disappeared.
Dante: That’s pretty much true. The middle-range movies that I was doing have largely either stopped being made, or they’ve moved to television, now that television is a go-to medium for directors who can’t get work in theatricals, because there are so few theatricals being made … [Laughs] But also with the new miniseries concept, you can tell a long story in detail without having to cram it all into 90 minutes. You don’t have to cut the characters and take out the secondary people. You can actually put them all on a big canvas. And it is a big canvas, because people have bigger screens now, so there’s no aesthetic difference between the way you shoot a movie and the way you shoot a TV show.
Which is all for the good. But what’s happened in the interim is that theatrical movies being a spectacle business are now either giant blockbuster movies that run three hours—even superhero movies run three hours, they used to run like 58 minutes!—and the others, which are dysfunctional family independent movies or the slob comedy or the kiddie movie, and those are all low-budget. So the middle ground of movies that were about things, they’re just gone. Or else they’re on HBO. Like the Bryan Cranston LBJ movie [All the Way], which years ago would’ve been made for theaters.
You’ve got people like Paul Schrader and Walter Hill who can’t get their movies theatrically distributed because there’s just no market for it. So they end up going to VOD, and VOD is a model from which no one makes any money, because most of the time, as soon as they get up on the site, they’re pirated. So the whole model of the system right now is completely broken. And whether or not anybody’s going to try to fix, or if it even can be fixed, I don’t know. But it’s certainly not the same business that I got into in the ’70s.