Pioneer producer and king of B movies was 98

Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered future industry stars such as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

Corman died on May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, California, surrounded by his family, the family confirmed diversity.

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, capturing the spirit of an era. 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 specialized in fast-paced, low-budget genre films – horror, action, science fiction, even some family films – and his company became a training ground for a host of great talent, including actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).

When Corman was awarded an Oscar at AMPAS’s first Governors Awards ceremony in November 2009, Ron Howard praised him for hiring women in key leadership and creative positions and giving them major roles, and Walter Moseley was quoted as saying quoted Corman as offering “one of the few open doors” that looks beyond age, race and gender.

Corman called film “the only truly modern art form.” However, he pointed out that the need to pay cast and crew means a constant compromise between art and business.

Howard also joked that when he directed his first film, “Eat My Dust,” he complained to Corman about the low budget and sparse extras for a crowd scene, only to tell him, “If you do a good one on this movie job, you will never have to work for me again!”

Quentin Tarantino toasted him: “Thank you, the film lovers of planet Earth.” Jonathan Demme praised his acting and said Corman offered “tremendous value at a truly affordable price.” In several films for Demme, Corman wanted the same fee he gave actors in the 50-plus films he directed: sliding scale plus 10%.

For nearly half a century, he took over the B-movie market that had largely disappeared in the wake of television and almost single-handedly kept it alive (along with Sam Arkoff of American Intl. Pictures, who made the majority of Corman’s early films financed). directing/producing efforts). Well into his 90s, he produced B-movies for $5 million and under and released them for video and television release.

After he stopped directing in the late ’60s (only to return briefly in the mid-’80s with “Frankenstein Unbound”), he founded New World Pictures, which also imported foreign art films such as Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and taught the industry how to effectively market and distribute such exquisite films.

Corman was born in Detroit and moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1940. He attended Beverly Hills High School and then Stanford U. with a major in engineering. He admitted that he had been fascinated by films ever since he arrived in California. “Growing up where I grew up, there was no way I could be interested in movies,” he once said.

Service in World War II and his education (he also attended Oxford for a semester and studied English literature) slowed him down. After Stanford, he worked at US Electric Motors for four days and then tried to break into the business by working as a delivery boy at 20th Century Fox. After returning from Oxford (and a brief stay in Paris), he became, in his own words, “a bum.” From 1951 to 1953 he did odd jobs and collected unemployment. He worked briefly as a script reader; Convinced he could do better, he wrote “Highway Dragnet” and sold it to Allied Artists for $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 exchange for cash advances, Corman agreed to make a series of films.

From 1955 to 1960, Corman produced or directed more than 30 films for AIP, all with budgets of 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” 1956 and 1957); and teen films like “Carnival Rock” and “Rock All Night.”

Soon he was the hero of the drive-in cinema.

Crucially, Corman only came to attention with Machine Gun Kelly in 1958. This picture was followed by the studio film “I Mobster” for Fox. After Little Shop of Horrors in 1960, Corman convinced Arkoff to finance some more ambitious projects, notably a series of films based on the works of one of Corman’s favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. The horror series, which began with “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1960, spawned eight low-budget hits, including “The Tomb of Ligeia” and “The Masque of Red Death.” They revitalized the careers of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and became classics.

At the same time, he gave the go-ahead to unknown actors like Ellen Burstyn, Nicholson and De Niro, screenwriters like Robert Towne and directors like Scorsese, Demme, Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich.

His only “message film,” 1962’s “The Intruder,” starring William Shatner, was about racism. Reviews were good, but because the film used the “N” word, it was denied the Production Code Seal, so bookings were few. “I decided then that I would never again make a film that was so obviously a personal statement,” he once told a New York Times interviewer.

He also wasn’t happy with his plan to make “big” films for Columbia Pictures when the executives there tried to go easy on his budgets. Back at AIP, he made The Wild Angels with Peter Fonda, a biker film that cost $360,000 and grossed more than $25 million.

This was followed by “The Trip” about LSD and other youth-oriented hits. But around the time of “Bloody Mama” in 1970, he began to run out of steam, and after “Von Richthofen and Brown” he retired from directing. In 1970, he founded New World Pictures to produce and distribute the kinds of films that Arkoff had once financed. By the end of his first year, he was in the black with releases like “Women in Cages” and “Night Call Nurses.” He later produced films such as “Piranha”, “Eat My Dust” and “Death Race 2000”.

His hunger for art films began with Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” in 1972 and continued with “Autumn Sonata,” “The Story of Adele H,” “Amarcord” and “Fitzcarraldo.” He reinvented their marketing and distribution, booking them into a wider variety of venues and giving audiences outside major cities a taste of world cinema that they had not previously enjoyed.

Foreign films accounted for a fifth of New World’s $55 million annual revenue in 1980. He also added to his mix family films like “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich” and higher-budget (e.g. $5 million) projects like the sci-fi-heavy “Battle Beyond the Stars.” In 1983 he sold New World for $16.5 million and founded Concorde/New Horizons. He continued to discover new talents such as director Luis Llosa and bragged about it in 1989 diversity a series of 40 consecutive profit makers. But the market had changed and its profits never reached the heights of the AIP or the early days of the New World. Luckily for Corman, the ever-growing foreign market was able to pick up some of the slack – it accounted for half or more of his business – and CNH arrived at the perfect time to capitalize on the new home video market. With his huge back catalog he was perfectly positioned to release his old pictures on video while creating new ones tailored specifically to this market.

Corman returned to the director’s chair for the first time in two decades for 1990’s Frankenstein Unbound, disappointing genre fans and not directing again.

However, there is no question that his big home video strategy was financially successful. Corman renamed the company New Concorde in 2000 and reorganized it to form New Concorde Home Entertainment.

Corman had produced a film called The Fast and the Furious in 1955, and when producer Neal Moritz discovered the film while starting his own car franchise starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, Moritz decided he would I had to do this title for the film. The two men agreed that Moritz would exchange stock footage for naming rights to the 2001 film and its sequels.

Corman also found a new outlet for his pictures on Showtime and the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy). CNH produced a “Roger Corman Presents” series of science fiction, horror and fantasy films for the pay channel. The 2001 science fiction series Black Scorpion was based on two of his more popular direct-to-video films. Telepics for Syfy included “Dinoshark,” “Dinocroc vs. Supergator” and “Sharktopus.”

In 2005, Concorde signed a 12-year deal with Buena Vista Home Entertainment, giving the latter distribution rights to the more than 400 pictures produced by Corman. In 2010, Corman then signed a deal with Shout Factory, giving the latter exclusive North American homevid rights to 50 Corman-produced films.

Together they started a home entertainment series called Roger Corman’s Cult Classics. The first titles available were “Piranha,” “Humanoids From the Deep,” “Up From the Depths,” and “Demon of Paradise.”

In 1990, Corman published his memoir Maverick: How I Made 200 Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.

He often made cameo appearances in the pictures of successful filmmakers who had started with him, for example in Demme’s “Philadelphia”, Howard’s “Apollo 13”, Coppola’s “The Godfather: Part II” and Dante’s “Looney Tunes: Back”. in action.”

In 1998, he received the first producer award ever presented by the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2006, Corman received the David O. Selznick Award from the Producers Guild of America. That same year, his film “Fall of the House of Usher” was among 25 pictures selected for the National Film Registry, a compilation of significant films to be preserved by the Library of Congress.

Alex Stapleton’s 2011 documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel examined the filmmaker’s activities. Last year, Corman was honored by the Los Angeles Press Club with the Distinguished Storyteller Award for his contributions to the film industry.

Corman is survived by his wife, producer Julie Corman, and daughters Catherine and Mary.

(Carmel Dagan contributed to this report.)