THREE DIRECTORS FROM THE CORMAN RANKS

Jim Wynorski, Scott Levy and Jonathan Winfrey, three directors participating in Showtime’s Roger Corman movie series, all skipped the film school route. They learned their craft coming up through the ranks at Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons independent studio.

“I had no film school training,” says Winfrey, the director of “Black Scorpion,” an action-comedy about a female super-hero. Winfrey began his film career as a set painter on Corman’s production of “The Drifter” eight years ago. “I then became an assistant director and within less than two years, I was running his whole studio. Four years from when I pretty much stepped foot on his lot, I directed my first feature.”

Levy, who directed the thriller “The Alien Within” and the remake of the popular “Jaws” parody “Piranha,” says: “I just turned 30 and I’ve worked on 40 movies. It’s amazing.”

Wynorski, who directed the remake of the Corman classic horror flick “Wasp Woman,” was once his publicist. Wynorski now has his own company, Sunset Pictures, and directs between four and five pictures a year and produces another five.

Wynorski returned to the Corman fold because he’s a big fan of Corman’s early films. Especially 1960’s “Wasp Woman,” which starred Susan Cabot as a vain woman who turns into a killer wasp after using wasp royal jelly to look younger. Jennifer Rubin stars in the remake.

The new version, Wynorski says, is longer and sexier than Corman’s. “The original was only 65 minutes long,” he says. “Roger shot it on used sets. He’s a true genius when it comes to taking something that’s just sitting there and making a movie around it. He did a great job.”

Wynorski had a whopping 20 days to film “Wasp,” which also stars Daniel J. Travanti as a mad scientist. “There’s a lot of special effects and things they couldn’t do in six days. We have a giant 12-foot-long wasp with wings that fly. It’s a wasp with breasts actually. It’s quite an astounding thing to see.”

Corman “taught me all the lessons on how to make a film and how to make it look expensive when you don’t have a lot of money,” Wynorski says. “It’s all thanks to him I have my own company. That’s why I wanted to come back and make ‘Wasp Woman,’ partly out of nostalgia, partly out of respect to a man who really gave me my start. You don’t get to make a wacky crazy thing like ‘Wasp Woman’ all the time. Now if I could remake ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters,’ it would make my life complete.”

“Part of the reason we can work on lower budgets,” says Levy, “is that Roger owns his own studio. He owns several of his own 35mm cameras. The photographer I used on my last two films is a USC film graduate and technically he’s brilliant. The way for all of us to break in, including him, is to come up through these Corman ranks. The reason they look high budget is that we have really talented people working on them.”