Here’s to You, Roger Corman

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https://variety.com/2024/film/news/roger-corman-dead-producer-independent-b-movie-1235999591/

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Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered such future industry stars as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

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

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“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,'” 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 movies — horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare — and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).

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Service in WWII and his education (he also attended Oxford for a term, studying English literature) slowed him down. After Stanford he worked for four days at U.S. Electric Motors and then tried to break into the business by working as a messenger at 20th Century Fox. When he returned from Oxford (and a short stay in Paris) he became, in his own words, “a bum.” From 1951-53 he did odd jobs and collected unemployment. He briefly worked as a script reader; convinced he could do better, he wrote “Highway Dragnet” and sold it to Allied Artists for $4,00

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Critically, it wasn’t until “Machine Gun Kelly” in 1958 that Corman was noticed. That pic was followed by a studio film, “I Mobster,” for Fox. After “Little Shop of Horrors” in 1960, Corman convinced Arkoff to bankroll some more ambitious projects, in particular, a series of films based on the works of one of Corman’s favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. The horror series, which starting with “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1960, spawned eight low-budget hits including “The Tomb of Ligeia” and “The Masque of Red Death.” They revived the careers of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and became classics of a kind.

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During the same period he was giving unknown actors like Ellen Burstyn, Nicholson and De Niro, screenwriters like Robert Towne and directors like Scorsese, Demme, Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich their starts.

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Corman had produced a movie called “The Fast and the Furious” in 1955, and when producer Neal Moritz discovered the film back when he was launching a car-fueled franchise of his own starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, Moritz decided that he had to have that title for the movie. The two men came to an agreement under which Moritz swapped stock footage for name rights to the 2001 film and its successors.

 

Edited May 12 by atomheartbevo

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Take an hour and a half and watch this

 

[Deej 77162]

A lot of folks owe their careers to him. 

Rest in peace.

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Dana Gould covers Corman's career midway through his latest podcast 

https://www.danagould.com/hecks-angels/

(which is also worth the listen for the Phil Hendrie stuff) 

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Von Richthofen and Brown has some pretty cool aerial shots.

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He was still alive!?

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This melting face from The Terror scared the shit out of this young pup. 

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I feel like linking this is a good way to honor the man.

NSFW link, so hiding.

Spoiler

 

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/topic/282-click-here-if-you-wanna-see-boobs/?do=getNewComment