B-movie king Roger Corman died at 98, on 9 May at his home in Santa Monica, California, surrounded by family members. Corman has directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered future industry stars such as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,’” the family said in a statement.
Corman’s empire, which existed in several incarnations, including New World Pictures, and Concorde/New Horizons, was as active as any major studio and, he boasted, always profitable. He specialised in fast-paced, low-budget genre movies – horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare – and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (Little Shop of Horrors) and De Niro (Boxcar Bertha) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13) and Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha).
Over almost half a century, he took over the B-movie market, which had largely disappeared in the wake of television, and kept it alive almost single-handedly (along with 2023 VES Hall of Fame inductee Sam Arkoff of American Intl. Pictures, who financed most of Corman’s early directing/producing efforts). Well into his nineties, he was producing Bs for US$5 million and under and rolling them out for video and television release.
Born in Detroit, Corman moved with his family in 1940 to Los Angeles. He attended Beverly Hills High School and then Stanford U., majoring in engineering. He admitted to being infatuated by movies from the time he came to California. “There was no way I couldn’t be interested in movies, growing up where I did,” he once said.
Service in WWII and his education (he also attended Oxford for a term, studying English literature) slowed him down. When he returned from Oxford (and a short stay in Paris) he became, in his own words, “a bum.” From 1951-53 he did odd jobs and collected unemployment. He briefly worked as a script reader; convinced he could do better, he wrote Highway Dragnet and sold it to Allied Artists for US$4,000.
With the money he made from the 1954 release and contributions from family and friends, he produced The Monster From The Ocean Floor and struck a deal with Arkoff’s AIP. In return for cash advances, Corman agreed to make a series of movies.
From 1955-60 he produced or directed more than 30 films for AIP, all budgeted at less than $100,000 and produced in two weeks or less. There were Westerns (Five Guns West, The Gunslinger); horror and science fiction (The Day The World Ended, The Undead in 1956 and 1957); as well as teen movies like Carnival Rock and Rock All Night.
Critically, it wasn’t until Machine Gun Kelly in 1958 that Corman was noticed. That pic was followed by a studio film I Mobster for Fox. After Little Shop Of Horrors in 1960, Corman convinced Arkoff to bankroll some more ambitious projects, in particular, a series of films based on the works of one of Corman’s favourite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. The horror series, which starting with Fall of the House of Usher in 1960, spawned eight low-budget hits including The Tomb of Ligeia and The Masque of the Red Death.
In 1970 he formed New World Pictures to produce and distribute the kinds of films Arkoff had once bankrolled. By the end of his first year, with releases like Women In cages and Night Call Nurses, he was in the black. Later he would produce such films as Piranha, Eat My Dust and Death Race 2000.
Corman had produced a movie called The Fast And The Furious in 1955, and when producer Neal Moritz discovered the film back when he was launching a car-fueled franchise of his own starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, Moritz decided that he had to have that title for the movie. The two men came to an agreement under which Moritz swapped stock footage for name rights to the 2001 film and its successors.
In 1983 he sold New World for US$16.5 million and started Concorde/New Horizons. In 2005, Concorde signed a 12-year deal with Buena Vista Home Entertainment giving the latter distribution rights to more than 400 Corman-produced pics. In 2010, he signed a deal with Shout Factory giving the latter exclusive North American homevid rights to 50 Corman-produced films.
In 1990 he published his memoirs Maverick: How I Made 200 Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. In 1998 he received the first Producers Award ever presented by the Cannes Film Festival. In 2006, he received the David O. Selznick Award from the Producers Guild of America. The same year, his film Fall of the House of Usher was among the 25 pics selected for the National Film Registry, a compilation of significant films to be preserved by the Library of Congress.
He was inducted into the VES Hall of Fame in 2017. Last year, he was honoured by the Los Angeles Press Club with its Distinguished Storyteller Award recognising his contributions to the film industry.
Corman is survived by his wife, producer Julie Corman, and daughters, Catherine and Mary.