ROGER CORMAN
(5 April 1926 - 9 May 2024)
The American film director, producer and actor Roger Corman, who has died aged 98, was an independent and important figure in the film industry. Never one to overspend on many of his productions, he was noted for making movies quickly and cheaply and was responsible for turning out or even churning out literally hundreds of titles mostly at the exploitation end of the market. Low budgets and quick returns appeared to be his motto. It was Corman who gave the cinema some timeless classics such as Little Shop of Horrors, The Wild Angels, The Trip and The Man with the X-ray Eyes but perhaps his most successful contributions were the films he adapted from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. His cheapo productions could always be relied on to put bums on seats whereas many another producer-director might spend a fortune for little return. He furthered the careers of such movie-makers as Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Joe Dante and Jonathan Demme as well as drawing attention to the actors Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern.
Roger Corman was born in Detroit, Michigan, to father William, an engineer, and mother Anne. His brother Gene also became a film producer. Roger studied industrial engineering at Stanford University but then enlisted in a Navy College programme. On leaving the Navy he completed his studies and received a BSc degree. He worked briefly as an engineer but soon became a messenger at 20th-Century Fox before a job as a story reader. Leaving Fox, he worked for a literary agent, wrote a screenplay and sold it for $2,000. Highway Dragnet was filmed in 1954 with Richard Conte and Joan Bennett and it opened the film industry for Corman for the next seventy years.
Somehow he managed to raise enough money for his first sci-fi production, Monster from the Ocean Floor, which did well and led to The Fast and the Furious, a drama about racing cars with John Ireland and Dorothy Malone. Now quite successful, Corman joined the American Releasing Company headed by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, and continued to work with them on Five Guns West, The Beast with a Million Eyes, Apache Woman and Day the World Ended. Eventually ARC became American International Pictures for whom Corman made more exploitationers such as It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth, She Gods of Shark Reef and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Some rock and roll pics followed along with teenage movies and others that most critics wouldn’t even acknowledge. One film that made the grade was Machine Gun Kelly with Charles Bronson, while Jack Nicholson could be seen in his first film, The Cry Baby Killer. The Corman brothers formed The Filmgroup to release schlocky double-bills. Exploitationers continued with A Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman, Beast from Haunted Cave, Last Woman on Earth and Creature from the Haunted Sea.
In the 1960s Corman and AIP adapted the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, beginning with The Fall of the House of Usher with Vincent Price, and then The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, Tales of Terror and The Raven. The last one finished with two days to spare, so Corman used The Raven sets and shot Karloff’s scenes in two days for The Terror – he was never one to waste an opportunity. More Poe stories followed, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia, while he continued with more bizarre titles – Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, Queen of Blood, Blood Bath, Beach Ball and It’s a Bikini World.
The Wild Angels, with Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra, had a script by Peter Bogdanovich, was a big success and spawned a cycle of biker movies such as Devil’s Angels and The Wild Racers. In 1970 Corman formed New World Pictures which continued with exploitation titles. He also started distributing foreign films by Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, Losey, Schlöndorff and Kurosawa. He really never stopped working and even branched out into television with a series of 13 films for Roger Corman Presents and went into publishing with a series of comic books. He appeared as an actor in some of his own films and others such as The Godfather Part II, Cannonball, The Howling, Swing Shift, The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. He directed 55 films and produced nearly 400, albeit often uncredited.
Roger Corman was married to the film producer Julie Halloran from 1970 until he died. They have four children. His awards include one from the Producers Guild of America in 2006, an Academy Honorary Award in 2009, and he had retrospective seasons of his work at the British Film Institute, the Cinematheque Française and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He won the first ever Producer’s Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
MICHAEL DARVELL