them. Eventually, God intervenes. Coel and Cilla are reunited with all their friends and there is a big party where everyone gets along. Cast Production Development George Armitage had met Roger Corman at 20th Century Fox when the latter was making The St Valentine's Day Massacre. Armitage later recalled he wrote a script — "it was called either Carrot Butts or A Christmas Carrot — which had animated cartoon characters, Bugs Bunny and so on, coming to life. It was about the studio systems and all this stuff." His agent gave the script to Gene [Corman, Roger's brother], who gave it to Roger, "and he loved it, so they submitted it to UA (United Artists) where they had a deal — Mike Medavoy was just taking over there and he was younger than I was. From there, Roger said: "Well, that didn't work, why don't we try something else?" Usually he has a title or something and he'll say: "Go ahead, write something, just keep the title."" Gas-s-s-s was an idea of Corman's, about a world where everybody over 30 had died. Corman later said "my first thought was to do a science fiction film with allegorical overtones." Armitage remembers the concept just being "a sentence, and that's what we went with...He let you make it your own, and I did." Corman said that although "there was some good work in" Armitage's first draft, "the points I was trying to make in the script either did not come through or came through too obviously different parts, and it became less science fiction and more and more a direct liberal left wing statement picture. I didn't want to be quite that obvious about what I was doing. So I then decided to switch to a comedy, thinking back to Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors." United Artists had financed the script, but Corman says they felt it was too risky to finance, as they believed it needed a budget of 2 million dollars. Corman bought the script back off them and decided to finance the film himself, at around $300,000. Shooting Corman says filming commenced using a first draft, which was rewritten constantly throughout the shoot. "Winter was coming and I wanted to do the film", said Corman. "I was going to be shooting in New Mexico. I actually shot in December and to wait one more month would