Having brought in Five Guns West for $60,000 (ten grand more than his previous picture, The Fast and The Furious), Corman was left with less than $30,000 (and perhaps as little as $23,000) to spend on The Unseen, a budget entirely insufficient to pay union scale. Knowing that he had to cast non-union actors and crew and unable to helm the movie himself because of his membership in the Director's Guild of America, Corman availed himself of stage players and Hollywood newcomers and assigned the director's credit to his production manager, Lou Place. (Ultimately, Place would also disown the film and let production assistant David Kramarsky sign the film.) Though scenarist Tom Flier's concept for The Unseen - an alien energy form uses humans and the lower forms as its eyes on Earth - meant that Corman did not have to pay out for a monster suit, Jim Nicholson at ARC had other ideas. Rebranding the production The Beast with a Million Eyes and ordering up a one sheet that depicted a fish-eyed, jaguar-fanged, and catfish-whiskered behemoth bearing down on a bikinied ingénue, Nicholson and Arkoff shopped their own concept to would-be exhibitors, who liked what they saw... even as the whole point of The Unseen was that the audience was never supposed to see anything.
To avoid the scrutiny of union officials, Corman had Lou Place do most of the filming for what was still being called The Unseen out in the desert scrub of Indio, California, more than a hundred miles southeast of Hollywood. (Instead of union cinematographer Floyd Crosby, Corman hired Everett Baker, a professor at UCLA's film school, to man the camera.) To fill a supporting role in Five Guns West, Corman had borrowed Pasadena Playhouse instructor Paul Birch and he called upon Birch again to head the cast of The Unseen, as a the Job-like head of a farming family assailed by unseen forces via the remote controlled agency of predatory birds, cattle, a pet dog, and a once-docile handyman; an occasional Hollywood bit player, Birch had unbilled roles as an MP in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and as a foolish mortal blasted to ash in the first act of Byron Haskin's The War of the Worlds (1953). Corman rounded out his dramatis personae with stage and TV actress Lorna Thayer, 1953 Deb Star Dona Cole (also one of six "T-Venuses" chosen that year NBC to appear on The Colgate Comedy Hour), Stanford University Players alumnus Richard Sargent, and silent movie comedian Chester Conklin (minus his trademark walrus mustache).
Notable now for plot points that anticipated Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) by nearly a decade, Corman's 78-minute cut of The Unseen cut no slack with would-be investors, who wanted a damned beast and, if not a million eyes, certainly a lot more of them. Facing a potential write-off, Arkoff and Nicholson urged Corman to arrange reshoots that would work in some kind of actual creature. When a $200 offer to commission such a thing was turned down by "Dynamation" specialist Ray Harryhausen (then fresh from animating a rampaging rhedosaurus for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), Corman turned to reclusive artist Paul Blaisdell, then making a name for himself for his wildly imaginative cover illustrations for science fiction pulp magazines. Despite having no experience in special effects, animation, or monster-making, Blaisdell and his wife/partner Jackie sculpted and cast a quarter-scale puppet extraterrestrial to be filmed in miniature and edited into The Beast with a Million Eyes. Dubbed "Little Hercules" by Blaisdell, the creation was not meant to be The Beast with a Million Eyes (who was, by nature, invisible) but its slave; the distinction would be lost on moviegoers at the time of the film's release in June 1955, especially after Corman superimposed a floating, disembodied eyeball over footage of Blaisdell's bogie.
If The Beast with a Million Eyes was far from his finest hour (and a quarter), Roger Corman continued to learn from his mistakes and to pioneer an independent filmmaking model that would be carried forward by the architects of the New Hollywood. While the Corman-ARC/AIP axis would endure through production of the counter culture satire Gas-sss (aka Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It , 1970), many of those involved in making The Beast with a Million Eyes added value to their resumes. Star Paul Birch would continue with Corman in Day the World Ended (1956) and Not of This Earth) (1957), headline the syndicated TV series Cannonball, and recur as a regular character in the first two seasons of The Fugitive. (Birch was also an early "Marlboro Man" for cigarette maker Philip Morris.) Nominal director David Kramarsky would later partner with Corman to produce The Cry Baby Killer (1958), which marked Jack Nicholson's first starring role, while leading lady Lorna Thayer would achieve a kind of cult immortality as the diner waitress sassed by Jack Nicholson in the infamous "chicken salad scene" of Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970). The son of a silent film actress and a shipping magnate, Richard Sargent would go on as Dick Sargent to replace Dick York as Darrin Stevens on the long-running Screen Gems sitcom Bewitched.
by Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants by Sam Arkoff with Richard Trubo (Birch Lane Press, 1992)
Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker: A Biography of the B-Movie Make-Up and Special Effects Artist by Randy Palmer (McFarland & Company, Ltd., 1997)
Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts by Mark Thomas McGee (McFarland & Company, Ltd., 1997)
Cheap Tricks and Class Acts: Special Effects, Makeup, and Stunts from the Films of the Fantastic Fifties by John Johnson (McFarland & Company, Ltd., 1996)
Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, The 21st Century Edition by Bill Warren (McFarland & Company, Ltd., 2010)
By Richard Harland Smith
