The “King of the Bs,” Roger Corman, passed away. He contributed to producing low-budget hits like “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Attack of the Crab Monsters.” He provided early opportunities for many of Hollywood’s most well-known actors and filmmakers. He was ninety-eight.
Roger Corman Cause of Death:
Roger Corman, the unashamedly low-budget horror, science fiction, and crime picture producer and director who controlled the B movie industry for decades, has passed away. He was ninety-eight.
According to a statement his family made late on Saturday on his official Instagram page, he passed away on Thursday at his Santa Monica, California, home. The reason for death was not mentioned in the statement.
Roger Corman, Who Was He?
More than 300 films were produced by Mr. Corman, of which he directed about 50 (it isn’t easy to pinpoint how many because he directed or co-directed some without receiving credit). These included beloved films like the 1960 original “The Little Shop of Horrors,” which he shot for $355,000 in two days on a set left over from another movie. After he grew weary of directing, he let gifted young protégés like Ron Howard (“Grand Theft Auto”), Jonathan Demme (“Caged Heat”), Peter Bogdanovich (“Targets”), Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”), and Martin Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”) into Hollywood.
Mr. Scorsese told Mr. Corman that he “was able to nurture other talent in a way that was never envious or difficult, but always generous.” “Martin, you need to have a solid opening reel because people are curious about what’s happening,” he once said. People are interested in hearing how everything works out; therefore, you need an excellent final reel. The rest is irrelevant. It is most likely the most extraordinary movie-related sensibility I have ever heard.
Jack Nicholson was 21 when Mr. Corman offered him his first movie job as the lead in “The Cry Baby Killer” (1958), and 23 when he got a tiny part as a dental patient in Little Shop of Horrors as one of the others that Mr. Corman fostered. Mr. Nicholson authored three of the eight Corman films he starred in before becoming famous, including “The Trip,” a cautionary story about LSD.
Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern starred in “The Trip” and “The Wild Angels” as members of the Corman repertory company. In the 1970 film “Bloody Mama,” an unidentified Robert De Niro portrayed Shelley Winters’ heroin-addicted son. The first script written by Robert Towne, who would go on to compose the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Chinatown,” was for “The Last Woman on Earth,” Mr. Corman’s nuclear-catastrophe love triangle (1960). To get paid, Mr. Towne had to play the film’s second protagonist, a dashing young guy assassinated by the Last Woman’s envious husband.
Mr. Corman was well known for his ability to create films with nearly no money and much less time, and he will consistently be recognized for the opportunities he provided to aspiring filmmakers. Boris Karloff, for instance, owes Mr. Corman two days’ work in 1967. Mr. Bogdanovich reported that Roger instructed him to “take 20 minutes of Karloff footage from “The Terror,” then shoot another 20 minutes with Boris, and then shoot an additional 40 minutes over ten days with some other actors.” With the 20, the 20, and the 40, I can make a brand-new, 80-minute Karloff movie.
The outcome was the highly acclaimed film “Targets,” in which Mr. Karloff portrayed an elderly horror movie star who, while watching one of his films at a drive-in cinema, encounters a crazy Vietnam veteran who is going on a killing spree.
Mr. Corman produced or directed scores of films for American International Pictures between 1954 and 1970, many of which were made under a handshake agreement with the legendary B-movie mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff. Starting budgets were $29,000. “The Wild Angels,” a noteworthy film, came with a $360,000 price tag.
Bergman Visited the Drive-In:
Mr. Corman established New World Pictures, his own production and distribution business, in 1970. His next move startled Hollywood: he agreed to distribute Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” in the United States. Bergman was nominated for the 1974 Academy Awards for writing and directing the picture; Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer, took home a prize.
In 1990, Mr. Corman and Jim Jerome co-wrote the book “How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.” They said they did not want their new firm “to be identified, even stigmatized, by exploitation filmmaking.” Thus, he secured drive-in theaters for Bergman, and after that, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini’s films were distributed by New World.
Over $1 million was profited by “Cries and Whispers” in US cinemas. Still, the name Roger Corman was, in the words of critic David Thomson, “a synonym for blithe exploitation” for all time.
Detroit was the place of Roger William Corman’s birth on April 5, 1926. Given that he was the son of an engineer, he expected to follow in his footsteps.
His parents, William and Anne (High) Corman, and their two boys, Roger and Gene, who were 18 months apart, lived comfortably even throughout the Great Depression. However, Roger could see that a wolf was waiting around the next corner when his father was forced to accept a significant wage reduction.
In his memoirs, Mr. Corman said, “I have always assumed that somehow shaped my attitude toward money.”
The severe Michigan winters forced the family to relocate to Southern California. Roger attended Stanford University for a year as an engineering student amid World War II after excelling at Beverly Hills High School. He subsequently attended the University of Colorado for his sophomore and junior years as a cadet in the Navy program.
After the war, he went back to Stanford, where he earned his industrial engineering degree in 1947. However, he permanently left engineering after just four days of employment as an electrical engineer.
At 20th Century Fox, he was employed for $32.50 a week as a messenger and eventually advanced to the position of story reader. However, he stated in his biography, “I needed more background in the arts of the 20th century because I knew I was going to be a writer, producer, or director of motion pictures.” With that in mind, he used the G.I. Bill to enroll at the University of Oxford to study the writings of D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot.
He spent six months in Oxford and another six months in Paris before returning home and selling a $3,500 chase-across-the-desert script to Allied Artists. He became his producer since he was dissatisfied with Nathan Juran’s final product, “Highway Dragnet.”
An Unlucky Beginning:
With the $3,500, a one-person submarine he borrowed, and the $6,500 he obtained from twelve friends, he was nearly ready to start filming “Monster From the Ocean Floor,” a film about an atomic testing-induced man-eating monster. But he needs a director and an additional $2,000. He obtained both by promising Wyott Ordung, a young actor who also starred in the movie, the directing job in exchange for Mr. Ordung contributing the final $2,000.
Mr. Corman produced, storyboarded, drove the equipment truck, and performed stand-in stunt driving for his first three films. He didn’t know anything about directing, but he needed a way to release his energy, so in 1955, he became his director with “Five Guns West.” He directed nearly all the movies he produced during the following fifteen years.
A string of horror movies, primarily starring Vincent Price, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s writings gave him his first taste of legitimacy and the goodwill of European reviewers. Science fiction author Richard Matheson wrote the narrative for the first episode of “House of Usher,” which debuted in 1960. Nicolas Roeg’s photography for “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Tomb of Ligeia” marked the series’ conclusion in 1964. “The Raven,” a 1963 horror comedy starring Peter Lorre, Mr. Price, and Mr. Karloff, is occasionally seen as a part of the Poe series despite having only a passing connection to the same name poem.)
Mr. Corman liked to refer to himself as an outlaw filmmaker, and many of his films honored outlaws: in “The Wild Angels,” starring Shelley Winters as the incestuous head of a murderous family; in “Death Race 2000,” starring Peter Fonda as the leader of a nihilistic motorcycle gang, absolute Hells Angels riding alongside the actors; and in “Bloody Mama,” starring Fonda as the driver who gets rated based on how fast they drive and how many pedestrians they kill. (That movie was redone in 2008 under the new title “Death Race,” with Mr. Corman serving as executive producer.) There were then many direct-to-video sequels.
He said that during his seven-hour preparation for “The Trip” (1967), he experienced his first and only LSD trip while hugging the ground beneath a redwood tree in Big Sur.
Despite receiving negative reviews, “The Wild Angels,” “Bloody Mama,” “Death Race 2000,” and “The Trip” were all profitable. In 1962, Mr. Corman’s most profoundly felt picture, “The Intruder,” which told the narrative of a rabble-rousing white nationalist, became one of his rare commercial flops. Mr. Corman cast young stage actor William Shatner in the part of the Northern bigot who sows animosity in a Southern community. Mr. Corman, a self-described lifelong liberal, supplied the majority of the $80,000 budget and marketed “The Intruder” alone after no studio would work with him.
New World, New Honors:
By 1970, Mr. Corman’s nomadic bachelor lifestyle and directing had worn him out. The Red Baron, a German aviation ace from World War I, and the Allied pilot who shot him down are the subjects of “Von Richthofen and Brown,” the final film he would make for twenty years, which he finished that summer. (His final directing project was the science fiction/horror combination “Frankenstein Unbound,” which he directed in 1990.)
After six years of intermittent dating, Mr. Corman married Julie Halloran, a former researcher for the Los Angeles Times, on December 26, 1970, at the age of 44. He founded New World Pictures as a co-producer alongside his brother and wife.
He oversaw the development of “The Student Nurses,” “Private Duty Nurses,” and “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” at New World. The latter was a wise and unsettling adaptation of Hannah Green’s semi-autobiographical novel about a teenage girl who has schizophrenia; screenplay writers Gavin Lambert and Lewis John Carlino were nominated for an Academy Award.
In 1983, he sold New World, maintaining the priceless film collection, and instantly founded Concorde-New Horizons, a new production and distribution firm. He received $100 million for the sale of Concorde-New Horizons and its archive in 1997.
According to his family’s statement, he is survived by his wife Julie and his children Catherine and Mary.
Mr. Corman continued to work far into the twenty-first century. He created the three-part online horror series “Splatter” (2009) for Netflix, in which the audience voted to decide which characters would perish. For the Syfy channel, he made purposefully corny monster films like “Sharktopus” (2010), “Piranhaconda” (2012), and “CobraGator” (2016).
In addition to winning an honorary Oscar in 2009, he was the focus of the highly regarded Alex Stapleton documentary “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” in 2011.
In a 2013 interview with The Reporter, Mr. Corman philosophically discussed his life’s work. “Motion pictures have always been a combination of art and commerce,” he stated. “I have to keep working if I have a burning vision.”
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