When Roger Corman Met Jack Sparks

Indie film-making veteran Roger Corman is 90 years old today!

This man's incredible CV stretches back to the 1950s. Since then, he's brought us the likes of The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960), The Pit And The Pendulum (1961), Dementia 13 (1963), Death Race 2000 (1975), Pirahna (1978), Galaxy Of Terror (1981), Frankenstein Unbound (1990) and so very many more. He continues to make films to this day, with Death Race 2050 in production as we speak.

​And here's a fact that only early adopters of my book The Last Days Of Jack Sparks will already know: Roger Corman and Jack Sparks once crossed paths!

Yes, I can finally reveal that the two men met briefly in November 2014, when journalist Jack was in Hollywood, obsessed with tracking down the creator of a mysterious and seriously creepy 40-second YouTube video that had appeared on his channel. I'll say no more here, but the meeting is documented in the book.

When it came to clearing his appearance in The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, Roger and his lovely representative Cynthia Brown at New Horizons Pictures could not possibly have been more accommodating. Over the years, I've found that the most successful people tend to be the easiest to deal with. So often, those who've achieved comparatively little are the ones surrounded by parasitic bureaucrats who just get in the way. I realised this as early as the year 2000, when dealing with Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons, who provided the afterword for my 2001 biography on the band Slipknot. Here were two absolute icons of rock who simply helped out, without any hint of contracts or red tape.

Two further film-makers appear in The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, who I also very much consider to be horror legends. I'm going to keep their identities to myself, however, so that maybe you can discover them for yourselves.

Happy birthday Roger Corman, you tremendous legend, you!

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