B-movie director and mentor to a generation
Roger Corman 1921-2024
Roger Corman described himself as the “Orson Welles of the Z movie”, said The Guardian. And as a director and producer, he was responsible for a lot of schlocky fare: his films include Attack of the Crab Monsters, She Gods of Shark Reef and The Brain Eaters. A handful of them have endured – including The Little Shop of Horrors, which he shot in two days and one night on a set left over from another film, and a series based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, starring Vincent Price. But his real legacy may be the training ground he provided for younger filmmakers. He gave Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard some of their first work behind the camera. And he was a spotter of acting talent too. He gave a 21-year-old Jack Nicholson his first film part, and on the set of the counterculture film The Trip (1967), he united him with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, with whom he’d star in Easy Rider. Other stars to whom he gave early breaks include Robert De Niro, Talia Shire and Sandra Bullock.
Corman “was able to nurture other talent in a way that was never envious or difficult, but always generous”, Scorsese recalled. “He once said: ‘Martin, what you have to get is a very good first reel, because people want to know what’s going on. Then you need a very good last reel, because people want to hear how it all turns out. Everything else doesn’t really matter.’ Probably the best sense I have ever heard about the movies.” But in the 1970s, Corman surprised many in Hollywood by launching a distribution company, which brought films by Bergman, Kurosawa, Truffaut and Fellini to American cinemas. It proved extremely profitable. He called his memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.
Born in Detroit, he credited his drive to make money to his childhood during the Depression, when his father, an engineer, had to take a major pay cut. The family were still comfortably off, but it left him with a sense that the wolf was always close to the door. They moved to California when Corman was in his teens, and he read engineering at Stanford; but he only worked four days in that industry before quitting, to take a job as a messenger at Universal Studios. He graduated to story reader, then spent six months on a literature course at the University of Oxford. Returning to the US, he sold a chase-movie script to Allied Artists, but was so disappointed by the results that he decided to make his own films. His budgets were so tight that he had to take various roles himself, ranging from stunt driver to director. Working into old age, he’d recently produced the monster flicks Piranhaconda (2012) and CobraGator (2015). Movies, he said, had always “been part art, part business. If I have a burning vision, it’s to keep on working.”