Devotees of American independent film, cult movie aficionados and exploitation film buffs are mourning the death of Roger Corman—mentor to the “New Hollywood” generation of filmmakers, distributor of Bergman, Truffaut, and Fellini, and the producer and/or director of upwards of 500 films, ranging from Little Shop of Horrors to his acclaimed cycle of eight movies based on stories by Edgar Allen Poe.
Corman, dubbed the “Pope of Pop Cinema,” died May 9 at his Santa Monica home, Variety confirms. He was 98 years old.
Corman’s staggering output encompassed nearly every film genre: adventure (She Gods of Shark Reef) biker (The Wild Angels), dystopia (Death Race 2000), film noir (1955’s The Fast and the Furious), gangster (The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre), horror (Pit and the Pendulum), monster (Attack of the Crab Monsters), psychedelia (The Trip), racing (The Young Racers), rock and roll (Carnival Rock), sci-fi (Not of This Earth), social drama (The Intruder), space opera (Battle Beyond the Stars), teenage rebellion (Rock and Roll High School), war (Von Richtofen and Brown), westerns (Five Guns West), women-in-prison (Caged Heat), and W.T.F. (Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf).
The end credits of Alex Stapleton’s 2011 documentary, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, distill the not-so-discreet charms of the Corman canon with an exhilarating montage of clips featuring cheesy monsters, fiery car explosions, party-crashing piranhas, Vincent Price, the leading man of his Poe cycle, kickass Blaxploitation, and Mary Woronov with a gun and a point-blank glare. But Corman may be best remembered for the budding talents he nurtured and the careers he launched. It is testament to his influence that the 47th Academy Awards ceremony, presented in 1975, was more like a reunion of the so-called Roger Corman School, with six of the top eight Oscars awarded to former Corman “graduates:” Francis Ford Coppola, Ellen Burstyn, Robert Towne, and Robert De Niro.
In addition, Jack Nicholson, nominated that year for Chinatown, made his film debut in Corman’s Cry-Baby Killer. Diane Ladd and Talia Shire, nominees for best supporting actress, also got their starts in Corman films (The Wild Angels and Gas-s-s-s, respectively). And Corman’s New World Pictures distributed that year’s best foreign film, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.
The sometimes-schlocky titles of Corman’s films belied a signature style, and a subversive wit and worldview. His most memorable work threw in with society’s outcasts, underdogs and rebels. In Corman’s 1990 autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, he playfully agreed with the suggestion that Creature from the Haunted Sea was his most personal film. “It’s got my favorite ending of all time,” he wrote. “We have always killed off our monsters…This time, the monster wins.”
Corman was born on April 5, 1926 in Detroit. The 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Depression informed his attitudes about money, Corman wrote in his memoir: “My film budgets have always been notoriously lean, while the waste and excess built into the major studios’ productions have tended to appall me.”
The family moved to Beverly Hills, CA when he was 14. He graduated from Stanford in 1948 with a degree in engineering; his career in the field lasted four days, according to Corman. “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he told his boss.
By this time, Corman’s interests had shifted to film and he was determined to break into the industry. His first break was a job as a messenger for 20th Century Fox. He would later quit the studio after his script suggestions for a Gregory Peck western, The Gunfighter, were used without credit.
Corman went rogue, making low-budget films with American-International and the Filmgroup, which he founded in 1959 with his brother, Gene. Necessity being the mother of invention, Corman preached the gospel of preparation and making the most of his meager resources. He famously shot Little Shop of Horrors in two days. Strapped for bodies, he cast Dick Miller as a Native-American and a cowboy in Apache Woman. He shot The Terror on sets from other A.I.P. productions.
He tended to work with actors at the beginnings and ends of their careers; see, for example, The Terror, one of Jack Nicholson’s first film credits and one of Boris Karloff’s last. As a producer for Ron Howard’s directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto, he would deny more extras for a crowd scene, telling him, “Ron, if you do a good job for me on this picture, you’ll never have to work for me again.” He agreed to greenlight Hollywood Boulevard after betting producer Jon Davison that Davison could make a movie for $60,000 in 10 days, the cheapest movie in New World’s history.
New World, which Corman founded in 1970, had a dual personality as the distributor of both esteemed foreign films—including Academy Award-winners The Tin Drum and Cries and Whispers—as well as genre films and drive-in fare such as The Student Nurses and The Big Doll House.
It was the latter category that may be his most enduring legacy. “A new generation of filmmakers,” Corman wrote in his memoir, “saw me as an uncompromised artist/entrepreneur who got his own movies made outside the establishment. They could learn from me not only the filmmaking skills… I also grounded them in marketing, advertising, and distribution. A Corman credit in the ‘minors’ was their fastest path to the majors.”
Among the future “call-ups” were Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, and Martin Scorsese. These and scores of others were given creative freedom by Corman as long as they didn’t go over budget, and they peppered their films with exploitable elements. (A typical Corman script note to filmmakers: “Breasts/nudity here?”) Several of his sexploitation films were directed by women, and they often had a feminist bent; Von Richthofen and Brown, for example, was shaped by Corman’s observation that “WWI was to a large extent the end of chivalry in warfare.”
Several of the filmmakers he nurtured would pay homage by giving Corman cameos in their alter work. That’s Roger on the Senate committee investigating Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II. He appears as another Senator in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. And that’s him on the phone to Scott Glen’s Jack Crawford in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.
Until his death, Corman continued to keep the product pipeline flowing with irresistibly-titled films such as CobraGator and Death Race 2050.
In 1990, Corman returned to the director’s chair after nearly 20 years with Frankenstein Unbound. He defined his sensibility in a 2016 interview with the website No Film School: “I try to find some personal statement as much as I can within my subjects. It doesn’t have to be political or earth-shattering, but it does have to be unique.”
In 2009, Corman, once dubbed the King of the Bs (a moniker he rejected), received an honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards ceremony. He was feted by Ron Howard, Quentin Tarantino, and Jonathan Demme—who had just one question for the Academy: “People, what took you so long?”
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