05/21/2024
Legendary “B-movie” director and producer ROGER CORMAN has died at the age of 98. He made almost 500 low-budget films in a career than began seven decades ago in 1954. Corman helped discover some of Hollywood’s future A-list actors like Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro and soon-to-be elite directors Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich and Ron Howard.
According to “Variety” magazine, Corman’s family confirmed he passed away on May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, California, surrounded by family members.
Roger Corman specialized in low-budget films also known as B-movies with various plots that encompassed the genres of science fiction, action, teen angst and even family releases. He formed several movie studios including New World Pictures and Concorde/New Horizons that stayed as busy — and as profitable — as many of the major studios.
For almost 50 years, Corman’s studios remained the leaders in the B-movie market — along with American International Pictures. He also produced or directed more than 30 films in the mid-‘50s to the early ‘60s for AIP. These productions were mostly made for drive-in movie double features with micro budgets of less than $100,000 and that could be wrapped up usually in less than two weeks.
Corman started pumping out these Bs for American Intl. Pictures like the Westerns “Five Guns West” (1955), “Apache Woman” (1955) and “Gunslinger” (1956); “creature features” and sci-fi flicks that included “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957), “War of the Satellites” (1958) and “The Wasp Woman” (1959); as well as teen rock ‘n’ roll movies including “Rock All Night” (1957), “Teenage Doll” (1957) and “Carnival Rock” (1957).
After Corman’s successful film “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960), Samuel Z. Arkoff, the co-founder of AIP, financed a series of films for him based on the works of Gothic fiction writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe. Starting with “House of Usher” (1960), seven more low-budget hits followed including “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1961), “Tales of Terror” (1962) and “The Raven” (1963). This so-called “Corman-Poe cycle of films” also helped to revive the careers of several Hollywood Golden Era actors like Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Ray Milland, Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney Jr.
Since the television networks were filming their own made-for-TV movies, Corman also started producing these B features — mostly with budgets of $5 million or less — and selling them to distributors for TV and for release to straight-to-video.
Roger Corman gave up directing in the early 1970s to start up his own film studios, New World Pictures, and began producing and distributing such B-movies as “Death Race 2000” (1975), “Eat My Dust!” (1976) and “Grand Theft Auto” (1977), starring and directed by Ron Howard (in his feature film directorial debut). - Chuck Halley, Classic Music/TV/Film blogger
Graphic—Roger Cornan (left) and Vincent Price on the set of “The Pit and the Pendulum” in 1961 (Photo credit: American International Pictures); (inset) Corman in 2009 (Photo credit: Chris Pizzello / AP) (Creator: glory2glory graphix)
