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    Roger Corman’s Best Movies: A Streaming Guide

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    The producer and director ran what was essentially a trade school for future stars and filmmakers like Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola and Pam Grier.It’s almost impossible to measure the impact Roger Corman, who died Thursday at 98, had on independent genre filmmaking and the careers of emerging young directors, performers and crew members who cut their teeth under his tutelage. As a producer, Corman mastered the economics of drive-in movies and B-pictures, turning out consistently profitable work that gave the audience what it wanted while allowing for a little creative flexibility. Directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Joe Dante and John Sayles didn’t exactly do their best work under Corman, nor did future stars like Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson, Pam Grier and Diane Ladd. But his productions were like a trade school for New Hollywood.The 13 films below only scratch the surface of Corman’s huge filmography, but they do provide a glimpse into his ambition and his sensibility as both a director and a micro studio boss. From the macabre comedy of early films like “A Bucket of Blood” and “The Little Shop of Horrors” to heady forays into science fiction and the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Corman’s work as a director signaled the dime-stretching ingenuity that would define his tenure at New World Pictures, where he developed a formula for making money while revealing a keen eye for recognizing talent. Beatniks, bikers, gear heads, voyeurs, outcasts and rebels — all had a place in Corman’s world, on both sides of the screen.1959‘A Bucket of Blood’Stream it on AMC+ and Shudder. Rent it on Amazon and Apple TV.From early in his career, Corman took a keen interest in the emerging counterculture, even as he personally understood himself as an outsider. That dynamic animates his fiendishly clever, ultra-low-budget comedy about a square who schemes his way into the cool crowd through macabre means. “A Bucket of Blood” would turn out to be a rare lead role for legendary character actor Dick Miller. He stars as the busboy at a beatnik bar who uses his incredibly lifelike sculptures to impress the hip clientele. His secret? Best not to break through the plaster and find out.1960‘The Little Shop of Horrors’Stream it on AMC+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Laura Dern and Diane Ladd Have Learned From Each Other

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      Ladd wasn’t sure she wanted her daughter to act. But Dern grew up going to work with her mother — and soon they were sharing the screen. Laura Dern: The great news about the endless challenges you had raising me as a single parent is that, when you brought me with you on location, I got an up-close view of what it really means to be an actor. Diane Ladd: When I was doing “A Texas Trilogy” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1976, you were 8 and sat with me during rehearsal. At one point the play’s director said, “Diane, you didn’t move there.” I said, “I know where I moved,” and you said, “No, Mother, he’s right.” You were really paying attention. I didn’t want you to go into acting. It’s a hard business for anyone but, as a woman, they really judge you, and for a lot more than the work. I said, “Laura, be a lawyer. Nobody cares if your backside’s too big when you’re a lawyer.”culture banner More

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      Book Review: ‘Honey, Baby, Mine,’ by Laura Dern and Diane Ladd

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      Laura Dern and her mother, Diane Ladd, both made careers in the movies. In “Honey, Baby, Mine,” they drop names, rehash arguments and lean on each other.HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding), by Laura Dern and Diane LaddWhen Diane Ladd is diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given six months to live, her daughter Laura Dern looks at her and thinks, “You can’t die.” Determined to increase her mother’s lung capacity and life span, Dern gets the doctor’s permission to take Ladd on daily 15-minute walks, distracting her mother by asking questions about the past.Transcripts of those conversations are the beating heart of “Honey, Baby, Mine,” the actresses’ joint memoir, which also includes photographs, recipes, memorabilia and short, interspersed chapters written by each woman.They commiserate over the timeless frustrations of their industry, while also reflecting on what has slowly changed. Dern recalls visiting her mom’s sets as a child, catching the acting bug when Martin Scorsese asked her to appear as an extra in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Allowing a child on the set was still frowned upon nearly two decades later, when they worked together on “Rambling Rose” (for which they became the only mother-daughter pair ever to have been nominated for Academy Awards for the same film) ‌and had to advocate for their director to be allowed to nurse her baby at work.By the time Dern co-starred in the 2017 TV mini-series “Big Little Lies,” actors’ children were so commonly present that, she writes, “we had effectively created a … day care.” Along the way, they toss about glittery names, among them Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Shelley Winters, Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon (who also provides the foreword). If you’re in it for the stargazing, you’ll be rewarded with plenty — but that’s not what lingers most after the telling.As actors, Dern and Ladd have spent decades peeling back layers to reveal their characters’ fears and desires. It’s when they turn that focus to each other and themselves that something remarkable emerges.At first it seems a bit repetitive. Mother and daughter reminisce, joke and bicker, circling back to the same topics: the craft of acting, the strange experience of fame, the infinite doubts and compromises of motherhood.On one walk-and-talk, they tell funny anecdotes about Ladd’s mother, “Grandma Mary,” a wisecracking Mississippi divorcée who assisted with Dern’s upbringing after Ladd divorced Dern’s father, the actor Bruce Dern. Mary defied her era’s Southern Belle stereotypes, rejecting racism and classism in favor of everyday advocacy for equality. Her daughter and granddaughter learned a lot about independence from her, they agree.Then the tone shifts. On a later walk, Dern admits that she often resented being left with her grandmother while Ladd was away for work. A suddenly emotional Ladd says she sometimes felt unfairly burdened with the responsibility of supporting not only her daughter but her mother, “working 12-hour days making the money to pay the rent, buy her clothes, put food in her mouth for her to go get entertained and travel and play with you.” Emboldened by each day’s revelations and driven by their abiding love for each other, they wade into deeper confessions. The book is at its most memorable and affecting when they work up the courage to excavate heavy, sharp-edged emotional artifacts.Neither has forgotten the time Ladd slapped a teenage Dern in the kitchen of their home, though each remembers the moment differently. They reopen a bitter argument about the time Ladd took Dern’s young son for a significant haircut without her permission; neither party is ready to back down, still. They revisit the time Dern, racked with grief over her divorce from the musician Ben Harper, yelled, “You have no idea what I’m feeling right now!” and upended a sofa — and how her mother responded by making tea and reminding her that her scoliosis made it unwise to lift such heavy things. Eventually they confront Ladd’s greatest pain, a nearly unendurable loss she experienced as a young mother. They yell, grow quiet, accuse and forgive, allowing us to witness their relationship evolving, walk by walk. Ladd’s health improves. Dern draws even closer to her mother. For them, the experiment proves successful. For readers, it may depend on what we come for. I recommend going into “Honey, Baby, Mine” curious about the origin stories, separate and intertwined, of two prolific artists who pushed through private challenges — are pushing through still — while forging lives in the public eye.Mary Laura Philpott is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives.”HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding) | By Laura Dern and Diane Ladd | Illustrated | 256 pp. | Grand Central Publishing | $32 More

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      Home-Cooked Spaghetti Dinners and a Glam Photo Shoot: Eight Unusual Oscar Bids

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      The campaign on behalf of Andrea Riseborough is the latest to provoke controversy, but it’s hardly the most memorable.When the actress Andrea Riseborough wrapped a 19-day shoot on the microbudget indie “To Leslie” in Los Angeles during the height of the pandemic, her hopes probably extended to positive reviews from critics and indie film enthusiasts.But now, after a social media campaign on her behalf by some famous friends, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton and Sarah Paulson, she’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actress — an honor she can keep, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled Tuesday after reviewing the unorthodox lobbying on her behalf.While the regulations around campaigning have become ever murkier in the age of social media, the Riseborough campaign was hardly the first to stretch the rules, which forbid, among other things, mentioning competitors or their films directly or calling academy members personally.Here are eight memorable bids for a statuette that went rogue.1961Chill Wills, ‘The Alamo’After Chill Wills was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Davy Crockett’s buddy Beekeeper in “The Alamo,” he hired the veteran publicist W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz to run his campaign. Wojciechowicz submitted an ad to Variety with a photo of the film’s cast and text that read, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder — than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo — for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor.”Variety refused to run it, and John Wayne, the film’s director and star, took out his own ad rebuking Wills that said neither he nor his production company were in any way involved in the effort. (“I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” Wayne wrote of Wills, who later blamed Wojciechowicz.) After this fiasco — Wills lost to Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — it became rare for actors to run their own campaigns, which have since mostly been the purview of studios and teams of publicists.Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.1974Candy Clark, ‘American Graffiti’Candy Clark with Charles Martin Smith in “American Graffiti.”Universal PicturesThe nostalgic coming-of-age feature “American Graffiti” included some future big names like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford among its ensemble cast, but Candy Clark, then a little-known actress, was the only one to embark on an Oscar campaign. She paid $1,700 to take out a series of quarter-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — a strategy that paid off when she was the only member of the film’s cast to be nominated, for best supporting actress. (She lost to a 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for “Paper Moon.”)1975Liv Ullmann, ‘Scenes From a Marriage’The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann delivered a standout performance in Ingmar Bergman’s domestic drama “Scenes From a Marriage,” but a potential nomination was tripped up by a technicality that The New York Times likened to a situation “one usually encounters at obscure border stations in Central Asia.” Because a television cut of “Scenes From a Marriage” had premiered on Swedish TV in 1973 — the year before its American theatrical release — it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars thanks to an academy rule that prohibited the film’s being shown on television during the year before its theatrical release.Three of that year’s eventual best actress nominees — Ellen Burstyn (who went on to win), Diahann Carroll and Gena Rowlands — took up Ullmann’s cause, even signing an open letter supporting her right to compete, but the academy stood firm. (Ullmann, now 84, did receive an honorary award from the academy last year.)1986Margaret Avery, ‘The Color Purple’Margaret Avery with Bennet Guillory in “The Color Purple.”Warner Bros.After being nominated for best supporting actress for “The Color Purple,” Margaret Avery used $1,160 of her own money to pay for a Variety ad promoting her performance. Intended to suggest the voice of her character, Shug Avery, it read: “Well God, I guess the time has come fo’ the Academy voters to decide whether I is one of the best supporting actresses this year or not! Either way, thank you, Lord for the opportunity.” Avery was criticized for the ad, which did not reflect the way her character actually spoke in the film. (She lost to Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”)1988Sally Kirkland, ‘Anna’Sally Kirkland took a letter-writing fiend approach in an effort to score a best actress nomination for her role as a once-famous Czech actress in the small indie “Anna.” Kirkland not only personally wrote letters to academy voters, she also financed her own ad campaign — the film had no budget to do so — and spoke to any and every journalist who asked. Her persistence paid off with a nomination, though she eventually lost to Cher for “Moonstruck.”1991Diane Ladd, ‘Wild at Heart’After she was nominated for David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Diane Ladd — Laura Dern’s mother — decided that the way to voters’ hearts was through a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. She embarked on a one-woman blitz that involved not only writing personalized letters to voters, but also inviting 20 academy members to a screening of her film, accompanied by a spaghetti dinner that she prepared herself. She might have wanted to spend more time perfecting that spaghetti recipe, though — she lost to Whoopi Goldberg, who won for “Ghost.”2011Melissa Leo, ‘The Fighter’Melissa Leo, fourth from right, in a scene from “The Fighter.”Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesUnlike other nominees who took matters into their own hands, Melissa Leo was considered the front-runner when she began her campaign to secure a best supporting actress win for the boxing drama “The Fighter.” But she took out her now-infamous “Consider” ads anyway, she told Deadline in 2011, because she was frustrated at not being able to land magazine covers as a 50-year-old woman. The ads, which showed off her glamorous side as she leaned forward in a low-cut black evening gown, presented a stark contrast to the gritty, blue-collar mother and fight manager she played in the film (which was not even mentioned in the ad). There’s no way to say for sure if the strategy helped her chances, but it certainly didn’t hurt — she beat out her co-star Amy Adams, as well as Helena Bonham Carter of “The King’s Speech,” to claim the Oscar.2013Ann Dowd, ‘Compliance’Ann Dowd received stellar reviews for the Craig Zobel thriller “Compliance,” a flop of an indie with such a tiny budget that Dowd was paid just $100 per day for her role. But she believed in her performance, and after raising $13,000 by dipping into her bank account, borrowing money from friends and colleagues and maxing out her credit cards, she mailed DVDs to academy members and placed ads in trade publications in an effort to secure a best supporting actress nomination. While the Oscar recognition proved elusive — Anne Hathaway won that year for “Les Misérables” — the media coverage of her efforts may have helped put her on the radar of directors. (And now she has an Emmy for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”) More