Pioneering 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 years old.

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

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an era. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he replied, ‘I was a filmmaker, no less,'” 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, and even some family films – and his company became a training ground for a wide variety of major talents, 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 received an Oscar at the first AMPAS Governors Awards in November 2009, Ron Howard praised him for hiring women in key executive and creative roles and entrusting them with great roles, and Walter Moseley was quoted as saying that Corman offered “one of the few open doors” beyond age, race and gender.

Corman hailed cinema as “the only truly modern art form.” But he stressed that the need to pay cast and crew involves a constant compromise between art and business.

Howard also joked that when he made his first film, “Eat My Dust,” he complained to Corman about the low budget and few extras for a crowd scene, only to be told: “If you do a good job on this movie, you’ll never have to work for me again!” »

Quentin Tarantino toasted him with “thank you to the movie fans of planet Earth.” Jonathan Demme praised his acting, saying Corman gave “tremendous value at a really affordable price”. In several films for Demme, Corman wanted the same compensation he had paid actors in more than 50 films he had directed: a markup plus 10 percent.

For nearly half a century, he took over the B-movie market, which had largely disappeared in the wake of television, and kept it alive almost single-handedly (along with American Intl’s Sam Arkoff . Pictures, which financed most of Corman’s early films). achievement/production of efforts). Well into the 90s he was producing B’s for $5 million and less and releasing them for video and television broadcast.

After giving up directing in the late ’60s (only returning briefly in the mid-’80s with “Frankenstein Unbound”), he founded New World Pictures, which also imported foreign art films like “Cries and Whispers.” by Ingmar Bergman and teaches the industry how to effectively market and distribute such rarefied films.

Born in Detroit, Corman moved with his family in 1940 to Los Angeles. He attended Beverly Hills High School and then Stanford University, majoring in engineering. He admitted to having been fascinated by cinema since his arrival in California. “There was no way I couldn’t be interested in cinema, having grown up where I grew up,” he once said.

Service in World War II and his education (he also attended Oxford for a term to study English literature) slowed him down. After Stanford, he worked for four days at US Electric Motors, then tried to break into the industry by working as a messenger at 20th Century Fox. On his return from Oxford (and a short stay in Paris), he became, in his own words, “a tramp”. From 1951 to 1953, he worked odd jobs and received unemployment benefits. 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 earned from the 1954 release and contributions from his family and friends, he produced “The Monster from the Bottom of the Ocean” and secured a deal with AIP of Arkoff. In exchange for cash advances, Corman agreed to direct a series of films.

From 1955 to 1960, Corman produced or directed more than 30 films for the AIP, all budgeted at 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 Ends,” “The Living Dead” in 1956 and 1957); as well as teen films like “Carnival Rock” and “Rock All Night.”

Very quickly, he became the hero of drive-in theaters.

What’s critical is that it wasn’t until 1958’s “Machine Gun Kelly” that Corman got noticed. This picture was followed by a studio film, “I Mobster”, for Fox. After “Little Shop of Horrors” in 1960, Corman convinced Arkoff to finance more ambitious projects, including 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 Mask of the Red Death.” They revived the careers of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and became classics of sorts.

During the same period, he gave debuts 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 one and 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 and far between. “I decided at that moment that I would never again make a film that was so obviously a personal statement,” he once told a New York Times interviewer.

He was also unhappy with his venture into “big” films for Columbia Pictures when that company’s executives were trying to cut his budgets. Returning to AIP, he directed “The Wild Angels,” a biker film starring Peter Fonda that cost $360,000 and grossed more than $25 million.

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

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

Foreign films accounted for a fifth of New World’s $55 million in annual revenue in 1980. It also added to its mix family films like “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich” and more expensive projects (approximately 5 million dollars) like the science fiction film. -proud “Battle Beyond the Stars”. In 1983, he sold New World for $16.5 million and launched Concorde/New Horizons. He continued to unearth new talent like director Luis Llosa, and by 1989 he boasted of Variety from a series of 40 consecutive beneficiaries. But the market had changed and its profits never reached the heights of the AIP or the early New World. Fortunately for Corman, the ever-expanding overseas market picked up some of the slack – it ended up accounting for half or more of his business – and CNH arrived at the perfect time to capitalize on the new home video market. With his enormous catalog, he was perfectly positioned to bring out his old photos on video while creating new ones specifically aimed at this market.

Returning to the director’s chair for the first time in two decades for 1990’s “Frankenstein Unbound,” Corman disappointed fans of the genre and didn’t direct again.

There is no doubt, however, that its high-volume strategy for home video has been a financial success. Corman renamed the company New Concorde in 2000 and reorganized 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 he was launching his own car-fueled franchise starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, Moritz decided that he had to do it. have this title for the film. The two men reached an agreement under which Moritz exchanged archival footage for the naming rights to the 2001 film and its successors.

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

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

Together they launched a home entertainment series called Roger Corman’s Cult Classics. The first tracks 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 frequently made appearances in…