Created a buzz as B-movie king
Roger Corman Actor, director and producer BORN APRIL 5, 1926 – DIED MAY 9, 2024, AGED 98
PROLIFIC film director Roger Corman was known in Hollywood as “King of the Bs”. With a predilection for shocking audiences, he produced instant cult classic B-movies loved by film buffs.
Among the 55 films he directed, and hundreds more he produced, he will be best remembered for 1960’s Little Shop Of Horrors, about a man-eating plant. Reportedly made in two days, it gave Jack Nicholson his big break and spawned a successful off-Broadway stage adaptation and 1986 musical film version.
Corman’s other notable successes included 1960 Gothic horror House Of Usher, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story; sci-fi thriller
X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes (1963); and influential biker film The Wild Angels (1966).
Corman developed a reputation for nurturing the talent of actors and filmmakers, including Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Martin Scorsese and James Cameron.
In 1967 he made a creative cultural impact with The Trip. It was viewed as a precursor to 1969’s Easy Rider, with both films starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda.
Roger William Corman was born in Detroit but his family moved to California and it was there that he fell in love with filmmaking. He studied engineering at university and started working for US Electric Motors but he quit after four days.
After becoming an errand boy at 20th Century-Fox, Corman studied English literature at Oxford University, then moved to Paris.
Back in the US, he started writing scripts. In 1953 he sold his first one, which became Highway Dragnet.
Critics could be harsh towards Corman’s films, citing a propensity for quantity over quality, but he received praise for his adaptations of Poe works in the Sixties.
His autobiography, released in 1998, was titled How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime.
His family said: “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.’”
In 1970 he married film producer Julie Halloran, who survives him along with their four children.