Roger Corman was master of ‘exploitation’ movies and helped launch gifted directors

Roger Corman, the film producer and director who has died aged 98, was one of the most influential film makers in Hollywood. Although critics dismissed the majority of his films as (in the words of one) “brutal, exploitative and irresponsible”, many cinema-goers loved them.

Corman made, directed and produced hundreds of films. His productions, typically B movies, were lessons in ingenious speed and cost-cutting, making returns of perhaps $60,000 on budgets of $6,000 to $12,000.

His policy of employing unknown actors and technicians meant he was responsible for launching or encouraging the careers of a number of stars (including Robert de Niro, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper and Sylvester Stallone) and an equally large number of directors (among them Francis Ford Coppola, Nicolas Roeg, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron and Martin Scorsese).

In his early career, Corman’s concentration on directing cheaply-made exploitation films such as Teenage Cavemen, Bucket of Blood and SheGods of Shark Reef earned him the sobriquet “The King of Schlock”. His creativity as a director peaked in the 1960s, when he moved into his preferred genre and produced a string of cult horror classics including The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia.

He then enjoyed further financial success tapping into what he described as “the drop-out beatnik market”. With films such as Wild Angels, a graphically violent account of motorcycle gangs in LA, and The Trip the following year (described by critics as “an advertisement for LSD”), he won a new audience.

He maintained his reputation for cheaply made productions with The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), where he used old sets from The Sound of Music and Hello Dolly to represent Chicago in the 1920s. In the space of 17 years he directed more than 40 films; over his whole career he produced or executive produced at least 300.

In 1970 Corman set up his own distribution and production company, New World Pictures. Projects such as Lady Frankenstein, Night Call Nurses and The Velvet Vampire made a considerable profit and Corman surprised detractors by investing the money in distributing what he called “high-quality art films”.

He used the same marketing techniques that had publicised films such as Night of the Blood Beast to promote movies by European directors including Ingmar Bergman (Cries and Whispers) as well as Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut and Werner Herzog.

He also had a liking for taking small parts in films made by his various proteges, appearing in Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, and in Jonathan Demme’s

The Silence of the Lambs.

Roger Corman was born on April 5, 1926, in Detroit, Michigan, the elder of two sons of William Corman, a civil engineer, and his wife Anne.

When he was 14 his family moved to Los Angeles, where he attended Beverly Hills High School. In 1944 he joined the Navy, where he remained until the end of World War II.

On his father’s advice, Corman enrolled as an engineering student at Stanford University and after graduating, began work as an engineer with US Electric Motors. He left the job four days later and became, in his own words, “a bum”. He left the US for Europe in 1950.

While in Britain he studied English literature at Balliol College, Oxford, before moving to Paris in 1951. Later that year he returned to the US and found a job as a manuscript reader with a Hollywood literary agency.

“I saw all the B movie crap guys were sending in,” he recalled, “and I thought, ‘This is an easy way to make a buck’. So I wrote a script called Highway Dragnet.” The agency sold the script to Allied Artists for $3,500 and Corman was employed as executive producer when the film was made.

Highway Dragnet was released in 1954 and Corman used the profits to finance another project later that year,

The Monster from the Ocean Floor. He persuaded American International Pictures (AIP) to fund a series of films to be produced or directed by him.

Over the next five years, he churned out 32 films for AIP, ranging from westerns such as Apache Woman and Five

Guns West (1955) to horror films including Beast with a Million Eyes (1955) and

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957).

He enjoyed his first critical success with Machine Gun Kelly (1958), starring Charles Bronson in the leading role, and was then approached by 20th Century Fox to make I Mobster.

While enjoying a degree of acclaim that followed both films, Corman never stopped making the kind of films that had brought him financial success. In 1960 he made The Little Shop of Horrors, a spoof horror film.

He had been a devoted fan of Edgar Allan Poe since childhood and persuaded AIP to finance a more lavish production, House of Usher (1960). The film was very successful and gave rise to a series of adaptations of Poe’s horror writings.

In 1964, Corman shot two films in Britain that ranked among his best work. The first, The Masque of the Red Death, was distinguished by its impressive, surrealistic sets.

In his second British-based film, The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), Corman departed from his usual style and filmed the story in naturalistic settings, using ruined churches for outdoor locations.

Returning to the US, in 1966 he started work on The Wild Angels, which starred Peter Fonda as the sadistic leader of a violent biker gang. Critics condemned the film as “vicious and irresponsible”, but it appealed to Europeans and the film was nominated as the American entry in the Venice Film Festival. The film cost $360,000 to make and earned more than $24m at the box office.

Buoyed by its success, Corman directed another film starring Peter Fonda, The Trip (1967); with a screenplay by Jack Nicholson, it revolved around the protagonist’s experiences with LSD. The Trip gave Corman another big cult success.

His final film as director for AIP was

Gas-s-s-s (1970). But AIP made cuts to the film of which Corman disapproved.

Corman gave up directing to form New World Pictures, for whom he continued to produce the type of films he knew best – low-budget “shockers”.

Among films he produced in this period, often given an opportunity to up-and-coming directors, were Boxcar Bertha (1972, directed by Scorsese) and

Grand Theft Auto (1977, directed by a young Ron Howard).

In 1972 Corman married Julie Halloran, a former researcher for The New York Times. In 1983 he sold New World Pictures for a profit of $16m.

He returned to directing in 1990 after a gap of nearly 20 years with a complicated adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s futuristic horror novel Frankenstein Unbound.

In the 1990s, he was executive producer on Roger Corman Presents for Showtime, a series of low-budget TV movies.

Corman received an honorary Academy Award in 2009 for “his unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers”. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.

‘I saw the B movie crap guys were sending and thought “This is an easy way to make a buck”’

Roger Corman