Charles B. Griffith est un acteur, producteur, réalisateur et scénariste américain, né le 23 septembre 1930 à Chicago, dans l'Illinois, et décédé le 28 septembre 2007 à San Diego, en Californie (États-Unis).

Biographie

Early life
Griffith was born into a family of actors and performers: his mother and grandmother were actors, his father was in vaudeville and his grandfather was a circus performer. His mother died in childbirth in 1941, and Griffith was raised by his grandmother and attended military school.

He broke into the industry writing scripts for the radio serial, Myrt and Marge, in which his mother and grandmother had appeared as actors. He then worked on the TV adaptation on the serial which ended up not being filmed.


Meeting Roger Corman
Griffith began writing film scripts, which an actor friend of his, Jonathan Haze showed to Roger Corman, who hired Griffith as a writer. He wrote two Westerns for Corman that were not made (Three Bright Banners and Hangtown) before being hired to do an uncredited rewrite on It Conquered the World (Griffith says he asked to take his name off). He received his debut credit with Gunslinger (1955).

"I got into the habit of writing very quickly without realising it and, because I was raised in a radio family, I didn't know that you were supposed to take a long time to write a film script," said Griffith.

For the next six years Griffith was Corman's most regular screenwriter. He wrote several of his early scripts with a partner, Mark Hanna, although Griffith later claimed that he did most of the writing while Hanna did the selling.


Columbia Films
Following his success with Corman, Columbia Pictures signed Griffith to a five-picture contract as producer and director. Griffith:


They told me to make a list of 100 titles to see if I could do it. Once I did that, they picked out two that would send me on a distant location in Hawaii because they knew I couldn’t make a picture out of the promised budgets: $85,000/black and white and $90,000/color. I really don’t want to get into the Columbia pictures because they thought I was putting them on. Roger thought I told them that I taught him everything he knew, whereas it was actually the other way around.
Griffith made two films for Columbia, directing one, but did not enjoy the experience:


They were really terrible. It stopped me for twenty years from ever directing again. They were really rank. You see, I got chicken and started to write very safely within a formula to please the major studios, and of course, you can't do that.
Reuniting with Corman
Griffith soon returned to Corman and wrote two script for him made in North Dakota, Beast from Haunted Cave (1958), Ski Troop Attack (1959). He says for Beast from Haunted Cave he reused the structure he developed for Naked Paradise (1957). (He would subsequently use this structure on Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) and Atlas (1962).}

After the North Dakota movies he persuade Corman to make a black comedy and wrote A Bucket of Blood. He later re-used the structure for his most famous script, The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). "That’s the most precious thing you can find is a new structure," he said later. Griffith was paid just $800 for his work.

Griffith says he was hurt that Roger Corman elected Richard Matheson to write House of Usher (1960), which was made in colour and for a considerably larger budget than Corman and Griffith were used to:


He [Corman] said that Matheson had a reputation. They were going to go with color and CinemaScope. It was irritating because I saw that he was making a value judgement based on how much people were making and he was the one making policy. He said that no screenwriter who gets lets than fifty thousand a script was any good.
Years overseas
In 1960 Griffith produced an Arab-Israeli war film with regular collaborator Mel Welles but they were picketed by unions and had to shut down. Griffith and Melles sued the union and settled out of court. Griffith moved to Israel to finish the movie but was unable to. He wound up living there for two years, writing a couple of films before Corman rehired him to work on the crew of The Young Racers (1963).

Griffith spent the next few years in Europe, working for Roger Corman and also with Michael Reeves before moving back to Hollywood. He worked for Corman sporadically until the late 1980s, as a writer, director and second unit director.

"I was lazy," he admitted later. "Instead of trying to write an A-picture and sell it on the market, I'd just go back and get another assignment from Roger."

His best known credit from this time as Death Race 2000 which Griffith was called in to rewrite for producer Corman and director Paul Bartel. Griffith:


Corman tried to make it serious. He was enraged with me for trying to make it funny, but he took me to see the cars and they were all goofy looking with decal eyes and rubber teeth. I said, 'You can't be serious,' and he tells me, 'Chuck, this is a hard-hitting serious picture!' Obviously, Bartel didn't think so either.
Later years
From the 1980s onwards Griffith concentrated on writing books and travelling as opposed to writing screenplays.

In 1982 a stage adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors premiered and went on to enjoy great success, with many productions all over the world. The producers secured the rights from Roger Corman but Griffith was originally not part of the arrangement. Griffith, sued the makers of the musical, and wound up being granted "one-fourth of one percent" of the takings as a royalty. "It has kept me going since 1983" said Griffith in the late 1990s - although in 1999 he was claiming the deal had lapsed.

Ses meilleurs films