Roger Corman

April 5, 1926 – May 9, 2024

"Legendary Hollywood Director and Producer" fully applies in the case of B-Movie maestro Roger Corman. He was born April 5, 1926, in Detroit, Michigan. He studied literature at England's Oxford University before selling his first script in 1953, "The House in the Sea," which was eventually filmed and released as Highway Dragnet (1954). He said that the way the film was released versus his script is what drove him to take his salary from the project and use it to become a film producer to manage his next efforts. As a producer, he has 491 credits, as a director 56, and as an actor (typically a very small cameo) 46 appearances.

"Roger Corman Was More Than a Great Producer - He Was an Important Director" – The Wrap

"Roger Corman, pioneering independent producer and king of B movies, dies at 98" – NBC News

"Roger Corman Was the Low-Budget Filmmaker Who Remade Hollywood" – The Daily Beast

"Ron Howard, Joe Russo, John Carpenter and More Pay Tribute to Roger Corman: "Profound Loss to Cinema" – Hollywood Reporter

"Five essential films from producer Roger Corman you should check out" – MSN LA Times

"American film director and producer who liked to describe himself as the ‘Orson Welles of the Z movie’" – UK Guardian

"How Roger Corman’s sick, bloody Death Race 2000 drove Hollywood crazy" – Yahoo News - UK Telegraph

King of the B-movies – The UK Times

By the 1960s Corman had established himself enough that he could turn his eye to projects that interested him: he filmed several Edgar Allan Poe stories, including The Fall of the House of Usher and The Raven, most of them starring Vincent Price. One film, though, marked a notable contrast from his exploitation movies: The Intruder, made for $80,000 and released in 1962, was made after Corman adopted the Stanislavski approach to film-making, intended to probe deeper into emotions and issues. The film, about a white supremacist, garnered rave reviews for its courageous stand on segregation and civil rights in America’s Deep South but, unusually for Corman, it proved a failure at the box office. He vowed never again to make a statement piece, instead concentrating on films that would make him money. Corman had been little more than a toddler when America was beset by the Depression but he later attributed his penny-pinching obsession to the memory of his early childhood..."

Roger picks through a few of his films that are on the shelves in the "Criterion closet."

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