Low-budget cinema maestro Roger Corman cranked out hundreds of outrageous films over six decades and helped launch the careers of acclaimed Oscar-winning directors Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron and Ron Howard.
Attack of the Crab Monsters, A Bucket of Blood, Slumber Party Massacre II, Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader and Sharktopus vs Whalewolf were just some of the many films Corman directed, produced or executive produced.
While his movies were far from arthouse and seldom likely to trouble those handing out serious movie awards, to quote Corman himself they never lost a dime.
As well as launching many an aspiring director, Corman’s movies were a pay cheque for struggling actors — Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock, Talia Shire, William Shatner, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are among the hundreds of performers who partly owed their subsequent careers to getting an early credit on a Corman film.
James Cameron was art director for Corman's 1980 film Battle Beyond the Stars, before moving on to make Titanic and Avatar.
Corman produced more than 300 films and directed about 50. The movies were shot swiftly, on the cheap, and many ended up on drive-in cinema screens rather in than movie houses.
Hailed as the ‘‘king of the B movies," Corman’s films were often complete schlock, filled with crazy effects, bizarre plots, bare breasts, ridiculous monsters or women behind bars.
But he also had genuine moments of artistic quality, notably the series of films he made based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, many of which have withstood the test of time.
Perhaps his most successful film was 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors. Shot for a pittance in two days, re-using the sets from A Bucket of Blood , it spawned an off-Broadway musical which was later made as a feature film.
But Corman’s lasting legacy will be the generations of film-makers he inspired.
One of them, Quentin Tarantino, presented an honorary lifetime Academy Award to Corman in 2009 for his ‘‘rich engendering of films and film-makers".
After a detour studying modern English literature at the University of Oxford, he returned to the United States intent upon making his mark in the film industry.
Starting in 1955, Corman helped create hundreds of B-movies as a producer and director, among them Naked Paradise, The Wasp Women and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. A remarkable judge of talent and a renowned deal maker, he paid peanuts but hired few monkeys.
"There are many constraints connected with working on a low budget, but at the same time there are certain opportunities,” Corman said in 2007.
"You can gamble a little bit more. You can experiment. You have to find a more creative way to solve a problem or to present a concept.”
Corman, who early on stepped into movie production, essentially stopped directing films in 1971 and relied on hired hands. His directors were given minuscule budgets and often told to finish their films in as little as five days.
When Ron Howard pleaded for an extra half day to reshoot a scene in 1977 for Grand Theft Auto, Corman told him, "Ron, you can come back if you want, but nobody else will be there.”
Sometimes his proteges thanked Corman by giving him cameo roles: he played the FBI director in The Silence of the Lambs, a congressman in Apollo 13, and also popped up as a senator in The Godfather Part II.
Corman’s many horror films featured luminaries such as Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff, and included the eight-film ‘‘Poe cycle" series.
When not making his trademark low-budget stuff, Corman also dabbled in international arthouse cinema, serving as the US distributor of films by fabled directors Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut and others.
‘‘I believe to be successful over the long run, unless you're a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a true genius in film-making, you have to understand that you're working in both an art and a business," Corman said in 2010.
His last producer credit was 2017’s Death Race 2050 and he was executive producer of the 2018 film Death Race: Beyond Anarchy.
Roger Corman died on May 9, aged 98. — Agencies.
