He was the son of Donna Dameral, radio star of Myrt and Marge, along with Charles' grandmother, Myrtle Vail, and was best known for writing Roger Corman productions such as A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and Death Race 2000 (1975).
During the late fifties and early sixties, Griffith created both redneck classics such as Eat My Dust!
He broke into the industry writing scripts for the radio serial, Myrt and Marge, in which his mother and grandmother had appeared as actresses.
For Edward L. Cahn they did a Western, Flesh and the Spur (1957) then went back to Corman for The Undead (1957), based on the Bridey Murphy story.
He and Corman had their biggest hit to date with Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957); Griffith was associate producer and had a small role.
Once I did that, they picked out two that would send me on a distant location in Hawaii because they knew I couldn't make a picture out of the promised budgets: $85,000/black and white and $90,000/color.
[6]Griffith wrote and produced two films for Columbia in Hawaii, Ghost of the China Sea (1958) and Forbidden Island (1958).
According to Variety "Columbia noted that Griffith seemed to be having continuing production difficulties" and sent out one of its contract directors, Fred Sears, to direct the second movie Ghost of the China Seas.
"[5] Griffith returned to Corman and wrote two scripts for him made in North Dakota, Beast from Haunted Cave (1958), Ski Troop Attack (1959).
[6] After the North Dakota movies he persuaded Corman to make a black comedy and wrote A Bucket of Blood.
[6] Griffith was paid just $800 for his work, which included voicing Audrey Jr. Roger Corman went up to bigger budgeted pictures when he made House of Usher (1960), shot in color and considerably more prestigious than the Corman-Griffith collaborations.
[10]However Corman continued to use Griffith on other projects: a third black comedy, Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) – which used the Naked Paradise structure – and Atlas (1962), a sword-and-sandal movie shot in Greece.
In 1960 Griffith produced an Arab-Israeli war film with regular collaborator Mel Welles but they were picketed by unions and had to shut down.
He wound up living there for two years, writing a couple of films before Corman rehired him to work on the crew of The Young Racers (1963).
He did some second unit work on Corman's The Secret Invasion (1964) and co-wrote The She Beast (1966), the debut feature for director Michael Reeves.
Griffith, sued the makers of the musical, and wound up being granted "one-fourth of one percent" of the takings as a royalty.
[17]Quentin Tarantino was once asked what writers he admired; he listed Robert Towne, Elmore Leonard and Griffith.
[17] Tim Lucas later praised Griffith's writing as: Irreverent, acerbic, edgy, well-read, flippant, disdainful of the hoi polloi yet also generous, transcendent.
Griffith was an unpolished gem of a screenwriter, a beatnik/stoner/outsider who smuggled those crazed and (then) highly individual sensibilities into the mainstream via Corman's commercial cinema.
by dashing off a non-conformist vampire script like Not of This Earth and make room in it for Dick Miller to shine as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, or to introduce a character like Jack Nicholson's masochistic dental patient into the midst of the two-day mayhem of The Little Shop of Horrors; who could write a whole movie like Rock All Night that more or less took place in a single room; who had the audacity to write the dialogue for The Undead and Atlas and A Bucket of Blood that ran the gamut from mock-Shakespearean to quasi-Homeric to Beat poetic ...
His offbeat humor was undoubtedly a big part of the reason a few of my early films... acquired "cult classic" status.