Charles B. Griffith, a screenwriter and director best known for writing low-budget Roger Corman movies, including "The Little Shop of Horrors" and "The Wild Angels," has died. He was 77.
Griffith died Friday at his home in San Diego, said his cousin, Ron Fellows. The cause of death has not been determined.
In a Hollywood screenwriting career that began in the mid-1950s, Griffith wrote more than two dozen films. Many were directed by Corman, including "Attack of the Crab Monsters," "Not of This Earth," "A Bucket of Blood," "Teenage Doll," "Creature from the Haunted Sea" and "Rock All Night."
"Griffith's scripts were very imaginative and often quirky and kind of subversive, and when you look at any list of Roger Corman's early pictures, those were the ones that put Corman on the map," said Tom Weaver, a science fiction and fantasy film expert.
Griffith's most memorable screenplay may be "The Little Shop of Horrors," the outrageous black comedy about a dimwitted flower shop flunky named Seymour who breeds a giant man-eating plant.
The 1960 film is also remembered for Jack Nicholson's small role as a masochistic dental patient.
Even Griffith got into the act, playing several uncredited characters, including a screaming dental patient and a burglar. He also provided the voice of the carnivorous plant, Audrey Jr., whose signature line throughout the movie is "Feed me!"
Although only moderately successful at the time, "The Little Shop of Horrors" became a cult favorite that Corman has said enhanced his reputation in Europe.
A musical version by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken became one of off-Broadway's biggest hits in the 1980s and was followed by a 1986 feature film musical version directed by Frank Oz. The "Little Shop of Horrors" stage musical also ran on Broadway in 2003 and 2004.
Corman was out of the country and unavailable for comment Tuesday. But in discussing his career in the '50s in his 1990 autobiography "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime," he referred to Griffith as his "main writer."
Jonathan Haze, who appeared in numerous Corman films and played Seymour in "The Little Shop of Horrors," introduced Griffith to Corman in 1954.
"He was very creative. He wrote really funny dialogue, and he was fast -- really fast," Haze said of Griffith's screenwriting skills.
