The B-movie legend has launched the careers of many writers

Roger Corman, the maverick producer of B movies and iconoclastic themes whose innovative low-budget ventures launched the careers of many great filmmakers, died today. He was 98.

Corman’s career spanned seven decades and more than 500 production appearances, including early works that launched the careers of major Hollywood personalities such as Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Peter Fonda, Frances Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Peter Bogdonavich, Gale Anne Hurd, John Sayles, Ron Howard and Jonathan Demme. But Corman detested the commercial studio system, and as both producer and director he pursued his cheap, no-frills filmmaking style at all costs, while using bland genre tropes as a Trojan horse for socially conscious themes.

Over the years, Corman’s name became most associated with the crazy escapist ventures often referred to as exploitation films – a term he detested. His credits include producing films such as Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Wasp Woman and Death Race 2000. It is easy to see how this connection became established. At the same time, Corman’s groundbreaking work for American International Pictures of the 1960s and 1970s went well beyond the grindhouse tropes thanks to several young filmmakers he captivated, including Scorsese’s debut Boxcar Bertha and Demme’s Caged Heat “.

Behind the camera, Corman is best known for his six colorful adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories, beginning with 1960’s The Fall of the House of Usher, starring Vincent Price. His 1966 bicycle film “The Wild Angels” paved the way for “Easy Rider”, while the title for the 1954 racing thriller “The Fast and the Furious” was used by Universal Pictures almost 50 years later for one of the biggest film films. Franchises have been licensed by all time. Despite all of these successes, Corman’s proudest cinematic achievement was also one of his most painful: “The Intruder,” a black-and-white 1962 drama starring William Shatner as a white supremacist from New York who travels south to fight to fight integration.

The film was a radical work for its time that dealt with American racism on the fringes of the civil rights movement. It was a commercial failure and one of the few Corman films that failed to break even. However, this experience led Corman to a realization about how to address meaningful topics in his future work. Years later, in the documentary Corman’s World, he put it this way: “My theme, my message, what matters to me, should be the subtext.”

Roger William Corman was born on April 5, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan and initially studied industrial engineering at Stanford. He also served in the US Navy during World War II. A few years after graduating, he worked his way up from the mailroom at 20th Century Fox to becoming a script reader, turning down most projects that came his way. A project he described as fascinating later became The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck, and the end result incorporated many of Corman’s ideas. However, as Corman would later recall, his senior story editor received a bonus for the project’s success, while Corman received nothing. Frustrated with the system, he resigned and directed his first feature film, 1954’s The Monster from the Bottom of the Sea, which became the template for many other Corman projects.

Along with his younger brother Gene (who died in 2020), Corman began making energetic genre pictures with a unique economy of resources, which helped him land a three-picture deal at American International Pictures, where Corman did the bulk of the film Work would produce the 1960s. Corman quickly gained confidence in his fast-and-loose approach to filmmaking: his 1960 production of Little Shop of Horrors, starring newcomer Jack Nicholson, was famously shot in two days and one night.

But the brevity of Corman’s filming did not come at the expense of his investment in its content. As the country’s political climate worsened toward the end of the decade, Corman himself became increasingly iconoclastic, identifying with hippie culture, even though his own youthful experiences predated it. For the 1967 psychedelic LSD opus The Trip, written by the young Jack Nicholson, Corman took the drug with him for research purposes.

During this time he also nurtured the careers of many aspiring filmmakers, producing works such as Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha and Bogdonavich’s Targets. He also missed the production of “Easy Rider” after AIP couldn’t agree on a profit share with director Dennis Hopper, and skipped the production of Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” when the director rejected Corman’s request to rewrite the Italian film. The American milieu as a purely black history.

But even as Corman missed out on some big hits, he remained a prominent outsider to independent film production. In the early 1980s, he founded the production and distribution company New World Pictures, which introduced an innovative approach to bringing European arthouse films such as “Cries and Whispers” and “Amacord” to the United States by showing them in drive-in theaters.

Still, the rise of the blockbuster era with 1975’s Jaws had a negative impact on the relevance of Corman’s cheaper brand of escapism, whether or not it gave it more meaning beneath the surface. From that time on, Corman’s work as a producer increasingly took a backseat to the home video market, where projects like “Play Murder for Me,” “Alien Avengers” and “Lady Killer” had far less impact than the more expensive Hollywood tentpoles that dominated popular culture – and continue to dominate. His last directorial effort was 1990’s “Frankenstein Unbound.”

Corman remained frustrated with the tentpole financial equation for the rest of his career. “For $30 or $40 million you could rebuild part of a city’s slums,” he said in an early morning television interview. “From both an artistic and commercial point of view, it is wrong to spend so much money, and besides, I think that this money can be used to do better things in our society.”

After longtime colleagues claimed for years that he wasn’t sufficiently valued by the industry, Corman finally received an honorary Oscar in 2009. “I think to be successful in this world you have to take risks,” he said in his acceptance speech. “The best films made today are made by original, innovative filmmakers who have the courage to take risks and gamble. That’s why I tell you: keep playing, keep taking risks.”

Corman is survived by his wife and long-time producing partner Julie and their four children.