Unfortunately, that would be the last time that Miller would ever really have the lead role in a film, although the next time that Corman came to him with a project, he did offer Miller the lead in that one as well. Alas, Miller read the script, felt that it was largely a rehash of “A Bucket of Blood” and decided to pass on playing the lead in the talking man-eating plant opus “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960). In later years, he would lament passing on that part but as much as I love that movie, I think that he may have made the right decision in the sense that the lead role in that one was maybe a tad too much of a Jerry Lewis-style schnook for him to believably portray. Besides, the part that he did wind up playing, that of a plant-eating man, supplied it with some of its biggest laughs. For the next decade or so, however, his career was a bit of a struggle. There were always appearances to be had in Corman productions—the most notable of which found him kibitzing with Don Rickles as a carnival heckler in “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” (1963), desperately attempting to explain the plot of “The Terror” to co-star Jack Nicholson in a fit of wild exposition and squaring off against dirty bikers in “The Wild Angels”—and small roles on the small screen in shows like “Dragnet 1967,” “Combat” and “Mannix.” However, roles in major studio films were few and far between and when he did turn up in something bigger like “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), “The St. Valentines Day Massacre” (1967) or “The Legend of Lylah Clare” (1968), they were in bit parts that received no formal credit.
In the 1970s, Miller still found himself doing the occasional small part for Corman, who had just formed his new production company New World Pictures and who perhaps looked upon Miller as some kind of good luck talisman. As it turned out, a number of the young filmmakers who Corman began hiring to work for him—people like Jonathan Kaplan and Jonathan Demme—were people who recalled seeing and liking Miller’s past work and leaped at the chance to included him in their own films. The most notable of these was Joe Dante, a movie-mad trailer editor who, along with colleague Allan Arkush, made a bet with Corman that they could make the cheapest movie in New World’s history. The film they came up with was “Hollywood Boulevard” (1976), an amiably silly satire of the world of B-movie production in which the comely cast of a low-budget schlock-fest is bumped off one by one by a masked killer. The film, not surprisingly, was filled with in-jokes. But perhaps the funniest one came when Miller was cast as the amiably sleazy agent of the lead, a character who was then given the name Walter Paisley. Not only was it a funny joke but it was one that stuck. Throughout the rest of his career, he would play additional characters named Walter Paisley a number of times.
“Hollywood Boulevard” marked the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration with Dante, who would go on to include him in practically every single thing he made. In “Piranha” (1978), Miller was a sleazy water park owner not especially concerned with reports of a pack of deadly piranha heading his way. He turned up as the owner of an occult-themed bookshop dispensing werewolf lore in “The Howling” (1981), a diner counterman in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), Mr. Futterman, a snowplow driver who meets a seemingly ugly end at the hands of the “Gremlins” (1984), a starry-eyed cop in “Explorers” (1985), a cabbie in “Innerspace” (1987), a ventriloquist stuck with an unfamiliar dummy in a deleted sequence from “Amazon Women on the Moon” (1987), a garbageman in “The Burbs” (1989), the not-so-dead Mr. Futterman in “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” (1990), a for-hire agitator working for a B-movie magnate in “Matinee” (1993), a detective looking for “Runaway Daughters” (1994), a deliveryman in “Small Soldiers” (1998) and a studio security guard in “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” (2003) among them. Some of these parts were bigger than others (his appearances in later Dante films like “The Hole” (2011) and “Burying the Ex” (2014) were barely cameos) but no matter how big or small, they were eagerly anticipated and would often inspire cheers from viewers in the know.
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