LOS ANGELES – Roger Corman, the “King of Bs” who helped produce low-budget classics like Little Shop of Horrors It is Attack of the Crab Monsters and gave many of Hollywood’s most famous actors and directors an early break, died. He was 98 years old.
Corman died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California, according to a statement released Saturday by his wife and daughters.
“He was generous, open-hearted and kind to all who knew him,” the statement said. “When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, that’s all.’”
Starting in 1955, Corman helped create hundreds of B movies as producer and director, among them Black Scorpio, Bucket of Blood It is Damn mommy. A notable judge of talent, he hired aspiring filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron and Martin Scorsese. In 2009, Corman received an honorary Oscar.
“There are a lot of restrictions associated with working on a low budget, but at the same time there are certain opportunities,” Corman said in a 2007 documentary about 1940s director Val Lewton. Cat People and other underground classics.
“You can play a little more. You can try. You have to find a more creative way to solve a problem or present a concept,” he said.
The roots of Hollywood’s golden age in the 1970s can be found in Corman’s films.
Jack Nicholson made his film debut as the title character in Corman’s 1958 quickie, The Cry Baby Killer, and remained with the company for biker, horror and action films, writing and producing some of them. Other actors whose careers began in Corman’s films included Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn.
Peter Fonda’s appearance in The Wild Angels was a precursor to his own biker film, Easy Knightco-starring Nicholson and fellow Corman alum Dennis Hopper. Bertha wagonStarring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, it was one of Scorsese’s first films.
Corman’s B-movie directors were given tiny budgets and were often told to finish their films in just five days. When Howard, who would go on to win the Oscar for best director for A brilliant mindbegged for an extra half day to reshoot a scene in 1977 for Grand Theft AutoCorman told him, “Ron, you can come back if you want, but no one else will be there.”
“Roger Corman was my first boss, my lifelong mentor and my hero. Roger was one of the greatest visionaries in the history of cinema,” Gale Ann Hurd, whose notable production credits include the Terminator movie franchise, The abyss It is Living Dead television series, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Initially, only drive-ins and specialty theaters booked Corman films, but as teenagers began to show up, national chains relented. Corman’s films were open for the time about sex and drugs, like his 1967 release. The tripan explicit story about LSD written by Nicholson and starring Fonda and Hopper.
Meanwhile, he discovered a profitable sideline releasing prestige foreign films in the United States, among them Ingmar Bergman’s Screams and whispersFederico Fellini Amarcord and Volker Schlondorff The tin drum. The last two won the Oscar for best foreign film.
Corman started out as a messenger for Twentieth Century-Fox, eventually training as a story analyst. After briefly abandoning the business to study English literature for a period at Oxford University, he returned to Hollywood and began his career as a film producer and director.
Despite his petty ways, Corman remained on good terms with his directors, boasting that he had never fired one because “I wouldn’t want to inflict that humiliation.”
Some of his former subordinates returned his kindness years later. Coppola cast him The Godfather, Part IIJonathan Demme included him in The Silence of the Lambs It is Philadelphia and Howard gave him a role in Apollo 13.
Most of Corman’s films were quickly forgotten by all but die-hard fans. A rare exception was the 1960s Little Shop of Horrors, which starred a bloodthirsty plant that fed on humans and featured Nicholson in a small but memorable role as a pain-loving dental patient. It inspired a long-running musical and a 1986 musical adaptation starring Steve Martin, Bill Murray and John Candy.
In 1963, Corman began a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The most notable was The crow, which teamed Nicholson with veteran horror stars Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. Directed by Corman on a rare three-week schedule, the horror parody received good reviews, a rarity for his films. Another adaptation of Poe, House of Usherit was deemed worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress.
“It was a privilege to meet him. He was a great friend. He shaped my childhood with science fiction films and Edgar Allen Poe epics,” John Carpenter, director of Halloween, The thing and other classic horror and action films, said in X. “I’ll miss you, Roger.”
Near the end of his life, Karloff starred in another Corman-backed film, the 1968 thriller. Targetswhich marked Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial debut.
Corman’s success generated offers from major studios, and he directed The Valentine’s Day Massacre It is Von Richthofen and Brown on normal budgets. Both were disappointments, however, and he attributed the failure to front-office interference.
Roger William Corman was born in Detroit and raised in Beverly Hills, but “not in the affluent class,” he once said. He attended Stanford University, graduating with a degree in engineering, and arrived in Hollywood after three years in the Navy.
After his time at Oxford, he worked as a television stagehand and literary agent before finding his life’s work.
In 1964 he married Julie Halloran, a UCLA graduate who also became a producer.
He is survived by his wife, Julie, and children Catherine, Roger, Brian and Mary.
—This obituary was written by the late Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas, who died in 2014.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
