The “fortunate accidents” that helped Jonathan Demme become a director
While there are plenty of filmmakers who obsessively dream of becoming directors from a very early age, Jonathan Demme wasn’t one of them. He still managed to reach the top of his chosen profession, but by his own admission it wasn’t something he was actively planning on.
Like so many future greats both in front of and behind the camera, though, Demme’s career path was foisted upon him by one of the most important figures in independent cinema history. A talent spotter like no other, the laundry list of names to have worked under Roger Corman in their early days in the industry reads like a Hall of Fame induction list for cinema.
Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and William Shatner are merely a selection of the future legends who sat under Corman’s learning tree, and every single one of them went on to enjoy a phenomenal career of their own.
Demme’s feature-length debut, the 1974 prison thriller Caged Heat, and sophomore effort Crazy Mama – which also marked the first film credits for both Bill Paxton and Dennis Quaid – were backed by Corman’s New World Pictures production company. Still, he was already well on his way to becoming the latest in a long line of Corman proteges before he even picked up the megaphone.
The filmmaker’s first movie credits of any kind came when he co-wrote Joe Viola’s 1971 biker flick Angels Hard as They Come and the following year’s prison-set story The Hot Box alongside the director, which were also Corman productions. That’s how he started out, but before that, Demme required some dominoes to fall in a certain order.
As he admitted to the BBC, “I became a director through a series of fortunate accidents.” Starting out as a critic, his father introduced him to Joseph E. Levine, “a man who ran a film distribution company”. From there, he started writing publicity releases, which eventually led to the opportunity to become the publicist on a Corman film.
“On my first encounter with him, he said, ‘I’ve just started a distribution company, and I need scrips. Will you write a motorcycle movie for me?’ Which I did,” Demme continued. “And then he said, ‘Will you produce it?’. So suddenly, I fell backwards into filmmaking.”
Less than two decades later, he was taking the stage at the Academy Awards after being named ‘Best Director’ following The Silence of the Lambs, becoming the third and so far final movie to complete a clean sweep of the ‘Big Five’ categories. It was a position Demme never imagined finding himself in when he started out penning reviews with no inclination that his future lay in either writing, producing, or directing features until Corman came long.
