Roger Corman, the writer and director who helped turn out such low-budget classics as Little Shop of Horrors and gave many of Hollywood’s most famous actors and directors early breaks, has died aged 98.
Corman died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California, his daughter Catherine Corman said on Saturday in a statement.
“He was generous, open-hearted and kind to all those who knew him,” the statement said. “When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a film-maker, just that.’”
Across a career spanning more than 60 years, Corman developed a cheap and cheerful style that led some to refer to him as the “king of the B-movies”. His films were notable for their low-budget special effects and attention-grabbing titles such as She Gods of Shark Reef (1958) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Yet he also played a significant role in developing the talents of a number of acclaimed directors, including James Cameron and Martin Scorsese, and launching the careers of actors such as Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro and Sandra Bullock.
Corman was born on 5 April, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan to Anne and William, an engineer. He had one younger brother, Gene, a producer and agent, who Roger would later collaborate with on a number of films. Originally Corman looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps, receiving a degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University. However, after four days in his first job as a graduate, at US Electrical Motors in Los Angeles, Corman realised he wanted to work in film instead. He promptly left for 20th Century Fox, where he got a job as a messenger.
After working his way up to the role of story reader, Corman left Fox when he didn’t receive credit for an idea for the Gregory Peck western The Gunfighter. Soon he was working independently, producing as many as nine films a year and more than 400 across his career. All these films were made on low budgets and most would go on to gross many times their production cost.
Though almost all of Corman’s work tended towards lowbrow genre fare, it wasn’t immune from critical acclaim. Between 1959 and 1964 he directed a well-received series of films based on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, most notably 1961’s Pit and the Pendulum. Other works, such as satirical horror Death Race 2000, Piranha and The Little Shop of Horrors, became cult classics and received big-budget remakes. “By mistake Roger would actually make a good picture every once in a while,” Jack Nicholson said of his frequent collaborator. “But I was never in it.”
Nicholson, who appeared in The Little Shop of Horrors as well as several of the Poe adaptations, was one of a number of actors whose careers were launched by Corman. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper appeared alongside Nicholson in The Trip, the Corman-directed 1967 ode to the counterculture, which provided the impetus for Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson to make the hugely influential Easy Rider. Other actors to cross paths with Corman before finding fame included a young Robert De Niro, who featured in Corman gangster film Bloody Mama; Sandra Bullock, who starred in straight-to-video action adventure Fire on the Amazon, and a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, who appeared as a white supremacist in Corman’s race-relations drama The Intruder.
Corman also played a mentoring role to several directors who later rose to prominence. He produced Boxcar Bertha, an early-70s Bonnie and Clyde-style exploitation film directed by Martin Scorsese, who was a year away from releasing career breakthrough Mean Streets. Corman also gave early directorial or crew roles to Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Nicolas Roeg and James Cameron, who once declared that he “trained at the Roger Corman film school”.
Corman cut his own directorial career short by retiring in 1971. He returned to the director’s chair for 1990 horror film Frankenstein Unbound, though predominantly operated as a producer. He also occasionally appeared in acting roles, often for directors who he had mentored. He appeared as a senator at hearing in Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, and an FBI director in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps most fittingly, he appeared in a self-referential role in Scream 3 as a studio executive for Stab 3, a film-within-a-film clearly nodding to the low-budget shockers that had long been Corman’s stock in trade.
Despite his enormous standing in the industry, Corman was self-effacing about the films he made, recognising their cheap and cheerful status. “I don’t know if I would say I’m an artist,” he said in an interview with the Guardian’s Xan Brooks in 2011. “I would say that I’m a craftsman. I attempt to ply my trade in the best possible way. If occasionally something transcends the craft, then that’s wonderful. It doesn’t happen very often.”
