Roger Corman

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Biography

Son of William Corman and Anne High

Husband of Julie Halloran

They have 4 children together

A documentary video CORMAN'S WORLD

According to Beverly Gray's book "Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Life", the Hell's Angels insignia worn by the characters in the film NAM ANGELS, was an exact replica of the trademarked one used by the real Angels. As a result, Roger Corman was forced to pay the group unspecified damages for copyright infringement and tarnishing the Angels' "stellar reputation"

It would be a monumental task featuring all of Roger's films here. We bring you 22 of our favorites.

One, two

We start with this pair of movies. A typical Corman tale. Champion rodeo rider Brad Johnson got married. His wife wouldn't let him compete anymore . So, he decided to be an actor. His very first job was to star in Nam Angels (1989) . IMDB [[1]]video [[2]]

Many years later, after a distinguished career in movies and television, he decided to retire and mentioned this to Roger at a social function. Roger asked him how he wanted to go out. Brad said he wanted to have fun. So, New Horizons Productions (Roger) and Rodeo Productions (duh!) hit an unsuspecting tv audience in 2008 with Supergator, an absolutely hilarious effort. Wikipedia[[3]] video[[4]]

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The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967) was one of the few films Roger did for a major studio. wikipedia [[5]] video [[6]] In 2009 Empire magazine named it #7 in a poll of the "20 Greatest Gangster Movies ". Though The St. Valentine's Day Massacre was heralded by critics at the time of its initial release, their opinion of the film has changed with each decade as they waver on the cinematic value of all of Corman's work. Audiences continue to relish the film, which is often shown on the anniversary of the bloody executions. Watch for Jack Nicholson as one of the unfortunate victims.

Roger was a filmmaker known for bringing his projects in on time, and under budget – which made him very popular with producers! He was a principle director for American International Pictures (AIP), a low-budget film studio which made movies for the teenage crowd of the 1950s. While adults were staying home watching television, it was teens and college students who comprised the majority of the movie going public at the time. AIP films generally featured action, violence, fantasy, and opulent dialog. When the studio executives discovered that Poe’s stories were in the public domain, meaning they were free of royalties, the decision was made that they were perfect material for AIP. Corman was the logical choice to oversee these productions, since he had a proven ability to make quality pictures on a small budget.

The first film in what is now known as The Poe Cycle was “The House of Usher”, released in 1960. Corman convinced the studio to shoot the picture in widescreen CinemaScope color. With atmospheric sets and sweeping camera movement, the film looked like it cost far more than its modest price tag. Corman also cast Vincent Price, an aristocratic and cultivated actor with a trained voice, as his lead. He was the ideal choice to project a sense of seriousness and class to the movie, and Price already had a reputation for horror films. The success of Usher guaranteed that Price and Corman would work together on more Poe inspired films.

Ultimately, there were eight films in The Poe Cycle made by Roger Corman. The videos

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“The House of Usher”. (in 2 parts) [[7]] [[8]]

“The Pit and the Pendulum” [[9]]

“The Premature Burial”. [[10]]

“Tales of Terror” [[11]]

“The Raven”. [[12]]

“The Haunted Palace”. [[13]]

“The Masque of the Red Death”. [[14]]

“The Tomb of Ligeia” [[15]]

All but “The Premature Burial” starred Price.

With each subsequent film, Corman was able to demand higher budgets, and other famous names from horror films were added to the casts. Boris Karloff, who originated the role of Frankenstein’s monster, appeared with Price, veteran character actor Peter Lorre, and a young actor named Jack Nicholson in a film inspired by Poe’s poem, “The Raven”. When shooting on that film was completed, and three days remained before the sets were to be torn down, Corman took advantage of the situation and made an entirely new movie starring Nicholson and Karloff employing the same film crew.

Corman had a unique gift of finding just the right collaborators. Most of the scripts for the Poe films were written by Richard Matheson, who ultimately had a lengthy and hugely successful career writing science fiction, horror, and fantasy for films, television, and books and magazines. Nicholas Roeg, who went on to be one of England’s most distinguished film and stage directors was the cinematographer for the Poe/Corman film “The Masque of the Red Death”.

If you watch any of these movies today, no one could fault you for thinking that they are a little…odd. They aren’t particularly faithful to Poe’s original work. “The Masque of the Red Death” comes the closest in that it actually adheres to Poe’s plot and theme. The rest of the films more or less begin with some aspect of Poe’s story, add an atmosphere of gloom and terror, and then veer off in very different directions. In the case of “The Raven”, the movie is actually a rather silly comedy.

You’ll also notice that Price is frequently overacting. The term most often used is that he is a ham actor, or hamming it up. It comes from the Cockney slang of London for (h)amateur actor. Matheson wrote flowery dialog for Price to deliver in that manner, and Corman directed the actor to deliver his lines this way. It was an attempt to wink at the audience, and assure them that the movies weren’t to be taken too seriously. Because of the violence and lurid nature of the films, the studio had to take this approach to prevent censors from cutting out large sections of the films, or banning them outright.

The result is eight classic films rich in style, hugely entertaining, and more than a little bit peculiar. They are, however, perfect Halloween entertainment.

The Pit and the Pendulum Interview [[16]]

What about “The Pit and The Pendulum” then, what attracted you to the Edgar Allen Poe novel?

I had done a number of low budget horror films. The way we worked at that time was you would put together two 10-day black and white horror films and send them out to the theaters as two pictures for the price of one. American International, the company I was at, wanted me to continue to do that, but I was getting tired of it. I thought it was a sales gimmick that was wearing itself out. So I said, ‘Let me have 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks and shoot in color and send it out as a single film.’ They asked me what I wanted to do and I said, ‘’The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ with Vincent Price.’ Who I thought was perfect for Roderick Usher. The film was quite successful, and I was asked to do another Poe film. I had always liked “The Pit And The Pendulum.”

What made Vincent Price such a star? He was a highly intelligent man. He was a very creative actor that could play on many levels. So sophisticated as an actor. He brought so much neurosis to Roderick Usher. Vincent was absolutely perfect to bring out the sensitivity, aristocratic and intelligence of the character, who also had a trace of insanity about him.

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1963 X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes wikipedia [[17]] video [[18]] The film won the 1963 "Silver Spaceship" award at the first International Festival of Science Fiction Film (Festival internazionale del film di fantascienza) in Trieste, Italy

Stephen King, in his book Danse Macabre, claims there were rumors that the ending originally went further with Milland crying out "I can still see" after removing his eyes.[5] Corman has denied the existence of that ending but expressed enjoyment of the idea saying "Now it’s interesting, Stephen King saw the picture and wrote a different ending, and I thought, 'His ending is better than mine

thirteen

1963 The Terror wikipedia [[19]] video [[20]] Jack Nicholson's and Roger Corman's third film together.

Los Angeles Times thought it was "spooky" with a "slow, lazy plot" and Excellent photography and settings... it moves like a stately pavan but the authors exhibit some of that old Edgar Allan Poe touch for haunted happenings". Francis Ford Coppola took eleven days to shoot his second unit footage, only ten minutes of which wound up in the finished film.

Roger Corman made this picture in the midst of a cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and considers it an "honorary member" of that cycle. The previous Poe pictures had ended with the castle or mansion being destroyed by fire (Corman's crew had come to look forward to "fire day") but with this one, Corman decided to change the formula and have the castle destroyed by a flood instead. Noting the abundance of Second Unit Directors who had worked on the film, four, to that point, Jack Nicholson requested and received permission to direct the climactic flood sequence himself.

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Cry Baby Killer (1958). Wikipedia [[21]] video [[22]] The movie that launched the career of one of the most talented actors ever born, JACK NICHOLSON

Always on the look out for young talent willing to work cheap, Roger Corman met Nicholson in a Hollywood acting class and the two struck up a friendship that would lead to a string of drive-in cheapies that gave the future star steady employment for the first decade of his not-so-promising career.

While Corman would cast Nicholson in biker flicks, gothic horror chillers, and, of course, 1960’s cult hit Little Shop of Horrors, the 21-year-old’s big-screen debut was in this tense hostage drama. “I hadn’t really worked at all before,” says Nicholson. “When I got the lead in the movie, I thought, This is it! I’m here! I’m gonna be big! Then I didn’t get an interview for the next year. Roger’s the only guy who hired me for ten years.”

fifteen.

1962 The Intruder wikipedia [[23]] video. [[24]]

Interview [[25]] What do you remember about working with William Shatner?

Bill was brilliant in the film. It was his first film in fact. He was playing leads on Broadway and came to Hollywood, it might have even been his first audition. I just knew he was the best choice for Adam Kramer, the lead in the film. He was an actor of great depth. Because Adam Kramer was an agitator who had come to this small southern town. On the surface he had to be gracious and smiling and pleasant to everybody. But under the surface he was a very vicious man, intent on creating a riot. And Bill had the complexity to do it on both levels. intellectual austerity of the German with the sensationalist populism of Corman? Maybe, and this is a film where Corman repeatedly grabs you by the collar and thumps you in the guts, never letting up on the violence or shock, while Lang would keep a more intense distance; but they both achieve the same ends with different results.

This is Corman's most painstakingly worked-out film, which is why it is so powerful, suggesting, like Lang, a set of mathematical propositions that seem simple but, add up to a theorem that seems to negate mathematical principles of logic, order etc. As in a Lang film, there is no 'hero" to root for.

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1961 Creature from the Haunted Sea wikipedia [[26]]. video [[27]] This movie is so bad, it's a great Saturday night "guilty pleasure ".

seventeen

1960 The Little Shop of Horrors wikipedia [[28]] video [[29]] If you haven't seen it, you must be from a different planet.

eighteen

1959 The Wasp Woman wikipedia [[30]]video[[31]] Every woman wants to be a ravishing beauty FOREVER

nineteen

1957 Attack of the Crab Monsters [[32]]video[[33]] Brain eating giant crabs want to rule the Earth.

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1957 Not of This Earth wikipedia [[34]] Video [[35]] A whole planet full of "people" want us for our blood. Only the beautiful Beverly Garland can save the Earth.

twenty-one

1956 It Conquered the World wikipedia [[36]] Video [[37]]

You have to love this movie! Everyone is so sincere and Lee Van Cleef has a moustache. And the beautiful Beverly Garland doesn't save us this time but she gives it a darn good try.

twenty-two

In the beginning a terrifying tentacled critter came forth and Roger Corman took it to the bank and beyond. The humble foundation of a grand destiny ?

1954 Monster from the Ocean Floor Wikipedia [[38]] video [[39]]

Reviewing the Master [[40]] If there were a Bible of independent postwar exploitation B-movies, the first verse of Genesis would read, “In the beginning, Roger Corman produced Monster from the Ocean Floor, and saw that it was profitable.” Although Corman had been knocking around Hollywood for some seven years by 1954, no one except perhaps the man himself would have expected very much from an engineering student turned low-ranking 20th Century Fox aparatchik. Indeed, even Corman’s expectations might have been slipping, since he eventually quit Fox and went to Oxford for an extremely abortive bid at pursuing a more advanced engineering degree— and when that didn’t work out, either, the film-industry jobs Corman was able to finagle throughout the opening years of the 1950’s were scarcely any more promising than the one he’d already found too disillusioning to retain. However, in 1953, Corman rather unexpectedly managed to sell a script he had co-written to Allied Artists, the studio formerly known as Monogram Pictures, and such was his excitement that he immediately signed on to work as an unpaid assistant to whomever needed one on the film that was to become Highway Dragnet. Corman found Highway Dragnet an inspiring experience, but in a very curious way. What most impressed him was the sheer wastage of time and resources that he saw on even a severely cash-strapped Allied Artists production, and he immediately perceived that a careful producer could bring in a much better movie on a similarly impoverished budget, simply by spending that scant money more wisely than the industry old-timers were accustomed to doing it. Almost immediately after Highway Dragnet wrapped, he set about putting his ideas into practice with his first film as an independent producer, Monster from the Ocean Floor.

There’s a point here that demands attention, especially because I can’t ever remember seeing it raised directly, even in Corman’s own memoir. What gave Corman the impetus to strike out on his own as a motion picture producer was the experience of observing a faulty system in action, inspiring him to design a new one that would work more efficiently. That is to say, Roger Corman the Stanford-trained ex-wannabe engineer was pushed to make his mark on film history when presented with a situation that encouraged him to think of movie-making as an engineering problem. And furthermore, some aspect of that conceptual framework would visibly stick with him throughout the hands-on phases of his career, regardless of what title would be attached to his name in each movie’s opening credits. He engineered his choice of shooting locations to suggest the impossible-to-film disintegration of the island in Attack of the Crab Monsters. He engineered secondhand special effects footage into production value his own resources could never buy in Battle Beyond the Sun and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. He engineered existing sets and superfluous studio time into entire movies in The Little Shop of Horrors and The Terror. He even engineered whole new business models when he set up New World Pictures after leaving American International in 1970, and again with Concorde-New Horizons after selling off New World in 1983. The tension between Corman the artist and Corman the businessman is a common theme in discussions of his work over the years, and the precipitous decline in the quality of his movies beginning in the late 1980’s is often explained in terms of the businessman finally winning out, but I think there may be something missing from that analysis. Maybe it wasn’t just Corman the artist who got pushed aside when the Concorde-New Horizons production schedule grew too busy to permit individual films to receive much of his personal attention. Maybe the disengagement reported by so many of the people who worked for Corman during the last twenty years stems as much from a paucity of new challenges for Corman the engineer.

Take a close look at how Monster from the Ocean Floor was made, and you’ll really see what I’m talking about. If you can believe Corman about what the film cost to produce, then Monster from the Ocean Floor was funded to the tune of a paltry $12,000. Even accounting for the notorious eagerness of Hollywood people to lie about how much money goes into their movies (Corman himself was certainly not above inflating or deflating his reported budgets to make a point later in his career), that’s probably fair enough as a first-order approximation. In any event, he can’t have raised much more than that by the method he used to secure funding; Corman simply canvassed his friends, family, and acquaintances, selling profit-participation shares at $500 apiece. Everything was shot on location at Malibu Beach, with blocking and camera angles carefully selected to keep hints of modern-day Los Angeles out of the frame. The monster sequences were shot using two of Georges Méliès’s old tricks: double exposure for the scene in which it looms up out of the water to frighten the heroine on a moonlit night, and a murky fish tank between the camera and the miniature set for the one depicting the clash between hero and monster in the creature’s lair. Corman shaved crew costs by acting as his own truck driver and grip, dodging the relevant unions by making sure that everything was set up before the cast and crew arrived in the morning, and by waiting to disassemble it all until after everyone had gone home at the end of the shooting day— with no witnesses onsite, it was his word against the Teamsters’. And in what might be the biggest production value-adding coup of all, Corman finagled the use of an experimental, pedal-powered, single-seat submarine with what we would today describe as a product-placement deal. The fledgling Aerojet General company let Corman use the sub for free in return for one plug in the opening credits and another in the dialogue itself. He even got his director to pay him $500 by offering character actor and aspiring director Wyott Ordung (whom we’ve met before as the writer of Robot Monster) a chance at the folding canvass chair in exchange for a financing buy-in. Yes, most of the above counts as shrewd deal-making, but underneath that deal-making are clear signs of a holistic problem-solving approach; to return to the… hmm… “dichotomy” doesn’t have enough pieces, so howsabout we call it a trichotomy?… from the preceding paragraph, it’s Corman the businessman following Corman the engineer’s blueprints.

The isolated stretch of nowheresville for which Malibu Beach is standing in here is located somewhere along the coast of Baja California, which was presumably not yet overrun all summer long by drunken gringo tourists in 1954. In fact, we’re asked to believe that our three main characters are the only white folks who’ve set foot here since pretty much ever— which is particularly ludicrous given that one of those characters, Julie Blair (Port Sinister’s Anne Kimbell), is in fact an American on vacation. Julie works as an advertising illustrator, and when we meet her, she’s sketching a seascape from the rocks along the shoreline and chatting with a little boy from the nearby village about how the cove where she likes to swim is supposedly haunted by some sort of sea monster. She inevitably writes off the sea monster stories as rustic superstition, but the child is adamant that his own father was eaten by the cove’s mysterious denizen.

And now it’s time for a meet-cute. After the little boy with the monster-eaten dad understandably storms off in a huff, Julie strips down to her bathing suit, and splashes out into the cove she was just warned away from. The filmmakers would like us to imagine that Julie is about to receive her just deserts for scoffing at the kid’s monster stories, but we know from the moment she unbuttons her shirt that whatever she’s destined to encounter in the water, it isn’t going to be any Monster from the Ocean Floor. Julie’s one-piece is black, you see, and everybody knows that sea monsters are attracted by white one-piece swimsuits. No, the big, strange thing that bumps into Julie from below is an experimental, pedal-powered, single-seat submarine manufactured by the Aerojet General Corporation of Los Angeles, California, and piloted by marine biologist Steve Dunning (Stuart Wade, from Teenage Monster and The Thing that Couldn’t Die). Evidently Julie appreciates an unconventional pickup line, because the next thing we know, Steve is taking her out to the boat where he and his mentor, Dr. Baldwin (Dick Pinner), are studying marine microorganisms with an eye toward developing them into a source of food for humans. You know the drill— mankind is multiplying faster than the Earth’s agricultural resources can support, and will be needing exotic new foodstuffs to avert worldwide famine within a generation or two. While the trio discuss this work, another boat speeds over toward Dr. Baldwin’s, its pilot (Jonathan Haze, of Swamp Women and Not of This Earth) hollering all the while about how his partner has suddenly disappeared while diving for abalone in the cove. Yes, that cove. Steve hops back into his sub to mount a search, but all he turns up is the missing man’s empty diving suit, its glass faceplate smashed out.

Now Julie (setting a pattern that would recur sporadically throughout the whole of Corman’s career) is a great deal sharper than the typical 50’s monster-flick heroine, and she quickly makes the connection between the diver’s curious fate and the little boy’s stories of a man-eating monster. She begins asking around in the village, and discovers that there’s a lot more circumstantial evidence in favor of something unusual at work in those waters than she had been willing to credit. The vanished man’s partner reports that almost everyone in these parts has a strange story to tell about the cove, and more interestingly, that the tales don’t go back to time immemorial, but merely to 1946 or thereabouts. One of the housekeepers at the inn where Julie is staying (One Million B.C.’s Inez Palange) tells her that her dog was taken from her own backyard on the last night of the full moon, and that the beach leading up to the doghouse was marked by bizarre tracks the following morning, as if some huge, amorphous object had been dragged onto and off of her property. The most detailed report comes from an old fisherman named Pablo (Ordung himself), however. Not only has he seen tracks similar to those described by the cleaning lady on the morning after nearly every full moon since 1946, but he claims to have seen the thing that made them once. Obviously the mere fact that this happened in the middle of the night means that viewing conditions were far from ideal, but the combination of a full moon and a cloudless sky undeniably must be taken to mitigate any objections raised thereby. And what Pablo says he saw— a single, luminous, red eye in the center of a spheroid mass atop a forest of waving tentacles— is just as undeniably hard to reconcile with the appearance of any known marine animal, including even the Pacific giant octopus that scares the bejabbers out of Julie the next time she goes diving in the cove with Steve. Much to the distaste of the scientist whom we can legitimately describe as Julie’s boyfriend by this point, she begins making a veritable crusade out of discovering and exposing the secret of the cove.

You know what? Roger Corman was absolutely right. A sufficiently careful producer could make a modestly entertaining and effective movie on Monster from the Ocean Floor’s pocket-change budget, and Corman in fact did so here. It’s true that the 64-minute running time helps a lot, and that another half-hour this heavily freighted with placid scuba-diving footage would have been straight-up lethal. It’s true again that Jonathan Haze and Wyott Ordung make Speedy Gonzalez look like a paragon of ethnic sensitivity with their impersonations of Mexican watermen, and that it is impossible to square the appearance of the utterly adorable monster puppet with the origin story that eventually emerges for the creature. (It’s worth pointing out, however, that the original cut of the film reputedly featured an altogether different monster design, one which dovetailed more sensibly with the explanation put forward in the dialogue. That monster didn’t go over well at a preview screening, however, and its two scenes were hastily reshot.) Nor can I deny that the two male leads are respectively an arrogant jackass and a complete vacancy, impossible roles palmed off on players whose abbreviated resumés speak eloquently to their inadequacy in the face of them, or that the romance that develops between Julie and Steve is harder to swallow than any sea monster yarn. But neither can I deny the effortless charm of Monster from the Ocean Floor for any fan of unassuming 1950’s monster movies, and the plain fact is that it doesn’t look any cheaper or shittier than the similar films that guys like Edward Cahn and Nathan Juran were making contemporaneously for four and five times the reported cost. Indeed, Monster from the Ocean Floor looks better than a few of Corman’s own early movies for American International Pictures and Allied Artists. In particular, those cribs from Méliès I mentioned demonstrate exactly the right way to handle a monster puppet of such woeful insufficiency— when realism is blatantly impossible, shoot for cooler-than-real instead, and hope for the best. Anne Kimbell does a lot with her inconsistently written role (we’re talking, after all, about a girl who in the space of 72 hours flees in terror from a harmless octopus and then goes diving alone and unaided in a cove that she has proven to her satisfaction to contain a man-eating, radioactive super-amoeba from Bikini Atoll), and the sequence in which Julie ingratiates herself to one native after another while seeking the inside scoop on the cove could serve as a model to future filmmakers looking to portray non-condescending relations between “primitive” indigenes and “advanced” outsiders. And there are a few small touches scattered about that are effective enough that they probably deserved to be scattered about a rather better film. My favorite example is Julie’s brush with the octopus. On a technical level, it’s much better executed than I’m accustomed to seeing in scenes edited together from purpose-produced diving footage and stock film of exotic marine life. But of at least equal importance, the scene is positioned in such a way as to make us think about the monster when the octopus shows up. Obviously this particular cephalopod isn’t the Killer of the Cove, but maybe she has a big sister somewhere? In light of the reworked monster design, it’s actually a little disappointing that Corman didn’t also post-loop a bit of the dialogue so as to make the thing explicitly a mutated octopus. Then Julie’s early encounter would have been foreshadowing instead of just an atypically well-handled red herring.

Jonathan Haze was working at a gas station in California when he was discovered by Wyott Ordung. Ordung was directing the movie Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), which was being produced by Corman, and offered a small part to Haze. Corman was impressed by Haze, and cast him in many of his films over the next ten years, including Apache Woman (1955), Day the World Ended (1955), Gunslinger (1956), The Oklahoma Woman (1956), It Conquered the World (1956), Swamp Women (1956), Naked Paradise (1957), Not of This Earth (1957), Rock All Night (1957), The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (1957), Carnival Rock (1957), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and The Terror (1963). He also appeared in non-Corman films, such as Bayou (1957), Stakeout on Dope Street (1958), Ghost of the China Sea (1958) and Forbidden Island (1959). His work for Roger Corman ended in bitter contention. A mediocre talent, Jonathan wanted to be a star. He didn't have the right stuff and when Roger refused to give him a major role, Jonathan began a series of magazine and newspaper interviews denouncing and denigrating the Corman crew. His career fizzled out. Jack Nicholson, during that same ten years, accepted what work Corman gave him, paid his dues with gratitude and respect, and we know how that turned out !

Interview [[41]]

Roger Corman interview: 'Audiences will turn away from gory films' Roger Corman, the grand old man of B movies, on discovering Coppola and Scorsese, making Jack Nicholson cry, and the problem with modern horror

There are so many Corman stories out there that I first wonder if there are any he’d like to debunk. Did he really tell Coppola not to go to the Philippines to shoot Apocalypse Now? “Having made films there myself, I said, ‘Francis, don’t go! You’re going into the rainy season.’ He said, ‘Oh, it’ll be a rainy picture.’ But it’s not rain as we know it. It starts in May and continues through to October. His set was wiped out. And the insurance paid out on the basis of a monsoon. But there was no monsoon! It was just normal July weather. He went back in good weather and made the film.”

It’s pretty incredible how many of these Oscar-winning American film careers were hatched under the auspices of American International Pictures (AIP), for which Corman was the in-house director/producer, and New World Pictures, a production-distribution company which he founded personally in 1970 with his brother Gene. He produced Coppola’s Dementia 13 (1963), Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968), Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Demme’s Caged Heat (1974). All served an apprenticeship under Corman for a film or two, then moved on to their celebrated studio heyday. But he remained in good touch with the lot.

Jack Nicholson was a different case. They met in a Hollywood acting class where Corman was scouting for talent. The budding impresario gave Nicholson the lead as a juvenile delinquent in his screen debut, The Cry Baby Killer (1958), and for the next 10 years, used him in a whole string of drive-in exploitation cheapies, playing rebel bikers and the endlessly terrorised heroes of Gothic chillers. Nicholson’s career obstinately refused to take off until his mainstream breakthrough with Easy Rider (1969), at which point it was time for these two to go their separate ways. But it was much more than just a professional bond – in the 2011 documentary Corman’s World, Nicholson spontaneously tears up when talking about the importance of Corman in his life.

The movies Corman directed himself started out as the definition of shoestring, but he sometimes feels their rough-and-ready qualities get exaggerated. “The myth that when I was directing that I was always printing the first take. I would generally go two, three, four takes. First take is generally not exactly what you’re looking for.”

There are a couple of directors who do famously like to use first takes – Clint Eastwood, Jean-Luc Godard. And then there are the Stanley Kubricks, obsessively calling for another and yet another, at the opposite end of the spectrum.

“With me, Jack Nicholson would generally go second, third take,” remembers Corman. “Kubrick on The Shining went over 100 takes on one scene. I can’t remember exactly but it was 120, 130 takes or something. And Jack is a good guy, and stood there doing his lines 120, 130 times. And he told me he went up to Kubrick afterwards and said, ‘Stanley, I’m with you all the way, but I want you to know I generally peak about the 70th or 80th take’.”

As the Corman name started to mean something, he was entrusted with higher budgets, and set to work on a more ambitious series of projects – eight period adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe between 1959 and 1964, all but one of them starring Vincent Price. Marked by striking use of colour and the wide screen – The Masque of the Red Death (1964) was even shot by Nicolas Roeg – they proved his mettle as a horror director, and hold up eerily well, as the definitive film versions of Poe. “I was learning on the job,” he explains, “so it wasn’t a specific change of technique, it was just learning, from film to film.”

'I was learning on the job': Roger Corman on set in 1991 (Alamy) How does he feel about contemporary horror films? “The cycle of horror right now is more explicit than when I was doing horror films. Indirection used to be the word. We suggested, we implied the horror by the cutting, camera movements and storyline, the horror was built up and built up. Now you’re more likely just to cut somebody’s hand off, and blood spurts across the screen, and you get horror that way. I think that will start to fade. I’ve been around long enough to see cycles start, build and come to an end. One director cuts off someone’s hand at the wrist, the next at the shoulder. It just gets gorier and gorier. The audience will react and turn away from this.” In 1998, Corman published his autobiography, entitled How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. The title wasn’t his choice but the publisher’s. “I made more than a hundred films. And I lost a couple of times! I called the editor to say the title wasn't really correct, and he said, ‘Has the title of every film you’ve made reflected exactly what was in it?’. I said ‘Use any title you like!’”.

One film that did lose money – Corman’s first flop, in fact – was his provocative 1962 drama The Intruder, starring William Shatner as a segregationist who arrives in a small Southern town to stir up racist animus among the locals. Not only did the crew receive death threats during the shooting of the film, once townspeople realised that Shatner’s character was anything but the film’s hero, but no one ended up coming to see it. Corman was chastened. “It changed a lot of my feelings about filmmaking. It went to festivals and got really great reviews. One New York critic said, ‘The Intruder is a major credit to the entire American film industry’. And it was the first movie I made that lost money! I analysed it. Even though it got all the critical acclaim and so forth, it was too much of a lesson, trying to teach the audience. I had to get back to entertainment.”

“From that I developed a style. What I tried to do is make a film on two levels. On a surface level, it might be, say a gangster film. But on a subtextual level it might be about some thing or concept that was important to me. Maybe some people would understand the two levels, and maybe they wouldn’t, but for me it was the way I preferred to work.”

Corman devotees have a particular fondess for a film called The Terror (1963) – the quickest of his quickies, the cheapest of his cheapies, and a movie which demonstrates his hucksterish resourcefulness in extracting money from old rope. It was entirely filmed on leftover sets from other AIP productions from that year, such as The Raven and The Haunted Palace. Boris Karloff happened to be in California for a couple more days, having finished shooting the former. But I should let Corman explain.

“The whole picture was only made because it rained on a Sunday. We were supposed to be playing tennis. I called [screenwriter] Leo Gordon. We worked out a storyline, and Leo wrote just the two days in which I used Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff, before Boris went back to England. Because of my Union commitments I couldn’t shoot the rest of the picture. Coppola shot a few days, and then he got a job at Warner Bros and his career took off. Monte Hellman shot a bit of it, Jack Hill shot a bit of it. And on the final day Jack Nicholson said to me, ‘Roger, every idiot in town has shot part of this picture, let me shoot a day!’ So I said, ‘Go on, be a director for a day.’”

“We cut it all together, and frankly, every director had a different interpretation and the picture didn’t make any sense whatsoever. I was shooting another picture, so I wrote a quick scene and had Jack Nicholson throw his co-star Dick Miller up against a wall. He said, ‘I’ve been lied to ever since I’ve come to this castle. Now tell me what has been going on!’ At which point Dick Miller explains what the picture has been about. People actually took it seriously and tried to figure it all out, but it had no plot whatsoever, that picture. That didn’t stop it making money.”

Newcomers to the delightfully grotty world of Corman’s filmmaking might be surprised to hear of his importance as an arthouse distributor, too. He made major successes in America of Fellini’s Amarcord (1974) and Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (1979), both of which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1973), which was even nominated for Best Picture.

Though it’s hard to imagine the stony Swede directing, say, Teenage Caveman (1958), there’s actually a certain kinship in themes and style between Bergman and Corman, who delayed making The Masque of the Red Death because The Seventh Seal, with its strikingly similar vision of Death stalking the land, had just come out.

I tell him that Scorsese is on record, at least the way film chronicler Peter Biskind tells it in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, for preferring the Corman-directed Peter Fonda biker flick Wild Angels (1966) to Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). Corman laughs. “I think Marty sometimes says things just to startle people. But we can certainly agree that Wild Angels had more action than Wild Strawberries.

10 Ways B-Movie Master Roger Corman Changed Filmmaking. [[42]]

The legendary king of B-movies has produced or directed close to 400 films, including cult classics like 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors (which he famously shot in just two days), 1975’s Death Race 2000 (co-starring a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) and the so-bad-it’s-good Carnosaur horror series from the ’90s. In the process, he launched the careers of protégés like James Cameron and Martin Scorcese, and inspired dozens of today’s other top filmmakers with his low-cost, highly entertaining movies

10.) He brought some of the world’s biggest actors to the screen. Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Dennis Hopper — why did so many of Corman’s stars go on to become Hollywood legends? “Because he had the ability to find actors that gave it their all, no matter what the material was,” Stapleton says. “He hired people whose attitude was, ‘If I’m going to be in a women-in-prison movie, I’m going to make it the best damn women-in-prison movie that has ever seen the light of day.

9.) He brought credibility to exploitation films. Before Corman came onto the scene, science fiction, horror and action movies were seen by most mainstream filmgoers as kids’ stuff. “But by the 1970s, Roger had gotten so good at genre films that it became actually really cool for people to go see them,” Stapleton says. “Many film fans decided they liked Corman-style pictures more than they liked the more serious, celebrated, artistic films that were coming out at the time.”

8.) He laid the groundwork for the explosion of “movies your parents don’t want you to see.”

Corman and his colleagues pioneered the idea of making teen movies transgressive, with the explicit purpose of appealing to young people’s rebellious spirit. “Before then, teen pictures were like Rebel Without a Cause, where you could tell that the filmmaker was an adult,” Stapleton says. “In a Corman picture, there’s no adult voice of reason, there’s no ‘I told you so’ quality, whether it’s Teenage Doll in the ’50s or Rock ‘n’ Roll High School in the ’70s. You just can’t imagine a movie that ends with the kids blowing up their high school before Roger Corman came around.”

7.) He gave some of Hollywood’s biggest directors their first shot.

James Cameron, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard, John Sayles and Martin Scorsese all got their starts working for Corman. “He’s a very rare Hollywood person in that he’s not competitive,” Stapleton says. “Other people may not have wanted a young Coppola working for them, because they’d feel threatened. But Corman always played a paternal role with these guys.”

6.) He made indie filmmaking cool.

With Corman’s choice to make movies independently came the freedom to indulge the kinds of wild creative choices he often made. “Corman’s films looked different, sounded different, and definitely portrayed things that wouldn’t have been able to show up in a studio production,” Stapleton says. “There was a particular aesthetic that developed out of Corman’s independence, and it inspired lots of other filmmakers who decided that they also wanted to work outside of the system.”

5.) He pioneered guerrilla filmmaking.

In the course of making 400 extremely low-budget movies, Corman invented a wide variety of ways to get the job done on the cheap. “He was the master of optimizing any opportunity to get something juicy for the camera,” Stapleton says. “Nancy Sinatra, Peter Fonda and others told me that Corman used to tell cameramen to go chase ambulances and fire trucks and just film whatever action was happening. He’d figure out later how to use the footage in a film.”

4.) He perfected the formula that became the Hollywood blockbuster.

In the ’70s, the era of the blockbuster emerged with filmmakers who took Corman’s formula to the next level by adding big money and more refined talent to the mix. “Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were obviously influenced by Corman when they made Jaws and Star Wars,” Stapleton says. “And James Cameron, who started his career working for Corman, has consistently proven that you can make epic films that are based 100 percent on the structure of Corman-style genre pictures.”

3.) He brought art films to the masses.

Although Corman is known primarily for the hundreds of B-movies he has directed and produced, he was also responsible for bringing the artful foreign films of Kurosawa, Bergman and Fellini to American drive-ins. “These were movies that people outside of Los Angeles and New York had never had a chance to see before,” Stapleton says. “Corman loved these films and knew there would be an audience for them. It was a huge move, and something that Miramax and a lot of other independent movie companies in the ’80s and ’90s would use as their model.”

2.) He brought ’60s counterculture to the screen.

In the early ’60s, Corman tried to get away from straight-up genre movies with The Intruder, an uncharacteristically serious film about racism. Although it did poorly at the box office (he calls it the only film he ever lost money on), Corman was determined to continue making movies with social messages. “He began setting his films in all of the counterculture stuff that was happening back then,” Stapleton says. “It was a radical thing for a filmmaker to do at the time. He made the first movie about LSD, The Trip, and another one about the Hells Angels, called Wild Angels. He was able to show people all the stuff that was going on in the counterculture while also delivering the action, the fights, the blood and guts that people wanted.”

1.) His work continues to influence filmmakers today.

While Corman’s aesthetic directly inspired helmers like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, you can spot his more subtle influence in the work of dozens of other directors. “If they weren’t watching Corman’s films, they were watching films made by guys that worked for Corman,” Stapleton says. “Everyone from Jonathan Demme to Ron Howard to Martin Scorcese told me that Roger Corman taught them that you have to make your antagonist even more interesting than your protagonist. And if you look at today’s big movies, that’s how they’re all set up.

The Money

Roger Corman's life is a tale in three acts. The first tells how the 89-year-old director and producer made more than 400 B-movies, reaping far more than $100 million in an extraordinary career that saw him help invent the independent film business; tutor such talents as Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron and Ron Howard; and win an honorary Oscar along the way. In the second act, he lost most of the money; it's a tragic twist that involves a bitter dispute with his children, an overseas bank account that held his life savings and a disgraced hedge fund manager who insists he's "not the black [Bernie] Madoff." Then there's the third act — still being written — in which Corman is fighting to recover all that he lost in litigation set for a trial later this year in Los Angeles.

"If you're just a straight businessman, your pictures will not be good," Corman says of his career, seated in the living room of the Santa Monica house he shares with Julie, his wife and business partner of 46 years. "And if you're just a straight artist, you'll lose money. You have to be a businessman to understand art, and an artist to understand business."

Their home is a modest hideaway by Hollywood standards and a bit of an aesthetic mess, with modern-looking paintings hanging above such antique pieces as an Egyptian throne. Corman, a professorial presence in person, admits he's angry at being stuck in court over money at an age when most of his contemporaries are enjoying retirement, but he does so in a calm and collected way, as if a bit of anger is what has propelled him through a career that began in the early 1950s when he scraped together the money for his first film, The Monster From the Ocean Floor.

Having moved to Beverly Hills with his family when he was 14, Corman went to work at 20th Century Fox after college at Stanford, until he became frustrated and asked his father for a loan to make his own movie. His dad said no, so Corman sold $500 and $1,000 shares in the film to friends from school, put in $3,500 of his own money from a script he had sold, and got a huge break when the president of a film lab offered to defer payment until after the picture came out. In total, Monster From the Ocean Floor cost $30,000 and Corman earned twice that from Lippert Releasing Co., which in 1954 distributed the film. Corman repaid investors and immediately went into production on his next project, The Fast and the Furious, a drama about a wrongly convicted man who escapes from prison and joins a police-eluding racing circuit. (He would later license the title to Universal for its own car-racing franchise.)

With competing offers on Fast and the Furious from three studios, including Columbia Pictures, Corman demanded that the winning bidder not only take that picture, but advance costs on two more films. "To the best of my knowledge, nobody had ever done that before," says Corman. "The idea of putting together a series of pictures with a guaranteed pickup against the profits for the distribution, I believe that was original."

The multipicture output formula — which he repeated again and again — allowed Corman and, later, his and Julie's New World Pictures and New Horizons Pictures, to become a bona fide low-budget film factory at a time when the demand for product in theaters, drive-ins and then television was booming. Corman, often in association with Samuel Z. Arkoff's American International Pictures, birthed an astonishing number of movies with titles such as Attack of the Giant Leeches, A Bucket of Blood and, of course, The Little Shop of Horrors, which famously took just two days to shoot and starred a young Jack Nicholson.

Corman recognized the emergence of youth culture in the '60s and '70s long before the studios did, putting up-and-coming actors onscreen and touching on counterculture subjects like drugs and sex. In the process, '70s filmmaking icons such as Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, along with such actors as Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern, came up under his wing. James Cameron, before he went off to write and direct Terminator, headed special effects at New World, and created spaceships and set designs that were reused on many films. Ron Howard's directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto, was financed by Corman, who acknowledges the irony that his acolytes went on to make some of Hollywood's most expensive films. Proteges often would cast him in small acting roles in their movies, including Apollo 13 and Silence of the Lambs, just to have him on set. Playing a senator in The Godfather: Part II, Corman remembers, "On the first day I was shooting, Francis came to my dressing room and he said, 'Roger, you will see there's a lot of wastage going on here. I could save Paramount a million dollars on this picture, but that's not my job.' "

Corman has been called the "King of B-movies," a moniker that prompted the Academy to award him a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2009. But he hates that term. Instead, he sees himself as a master of genre pictures and of cost-conscious filmmaking, slashing away at inefficiencies in budgets and arriving at a low-risk model for profitable films. That model hasn't always won him friends. Corman drove an on-set equipment truck himself until being warned by the Teamsters he wasn't allowed to do this. He once hired members of the Hells Angels to be background drivers on a film called The Wild Angels — until they were unruly on set and demanded the film's profits. "The Hells Angels weren't very fond of Roger," recalls Peter Bogdanovich. "And they hated me because I was always standing next to Roger, whispering in his ear. So they started to beat the hell out of me. That was the diciest moment of my life with Roger."

By paying his staff very little (Coppola drew just $90 a week as his assistant in the late '60s) and holding back the millions it would cost to fund wide releases (he opened films regionally instead, moving the prints from town to town), Corman was comfortably in the black on most projects: Attack of the Crab Monsters, made for $70,000, earned $1 million in revenue in 1957 ($8.4 million today); House of Usher, made for $270,000, earned another $1 million in 1960; and so forth. "He's famous for knowing how to squeeze as much production out of a buck as you can imagine," says actor Bill Paxton, who worked in the art department on Corman's 1974 film Big Bad Mama.

As he churned out product, Corman was building a library that he could further monetize. "For instance, HBO, their first year in business, we were their number one supplier because the major studios didn't want anything to do with them," says Corman.

Perhaps most important, he took a big chunk of these profits and plowed them into non-Hollywood investments. For instance, when investor George Soros established his massively successful Quantum fund in the early 1970s, Corman was one of his first backers.

By 2008, the Cormans' fortune had become so great that their four children, all of whom had worked for the family film company, allegedly were told by Roger that trusts had been set up to pay them "the collective amount of $120 million to $160 million, with each beneficiary's share to be between $30 million and $40 million," according to a lawsuit.

Then in September of that year, as the U.S. financial crisis was unfolding, Cirio Santiago, Corman's close friend, film partner and godfather to his four kids, died unexpectedly. Santiago's death was an important event in Corman's life because much of the Corman family's money was held through a tax-sheltering entity called Pasig Ltd. in an offshore account. At Corman's direction, Santiago had been held out as an owner of Pasig. When Santiago died, an investigation ensued into who was the real owner of the entity. Corman believed the answer was simple — the money was his — but the probe would set off a multiparty proceeding in an obscure court in the British Virgin Islands.

A few months after Santiago died, having now heard about the offshore funds, Corman's oldest son (named Roger M. Corman) wrote a letter to his father to request an accounting of family assets. According to a lawsuit that soon would be filed by Roger M. and another son against New Horizons, they began to suspect trust money had been improperly removed to secret accounts overseas. The sons claimed they warned their parents about the tax ramifications of such a move, but that such talk particularly upset their mother, Julie, who allegedly became "increasingly violent," would "verbally castigate" their father for even discussing finances, "threatened to leave" him if he did so and declared the assets were hers. In August 2009, the sons would file petitions in probate court over the trust assets, later trying to remove their parents as trustees. They were then fired from New Horizons, which led to another lawsuit claiming the employment termination had been an illegal retaliatory salvo. The Cormans would later respond by telling the court that their sons merely were drawing a paycheck with no real job responsibilities at the family film company. The suit eventually was dismissed, while the trust dispute dragged on.

What all the Cormans didn't know at the time was that this family drama was merely a sideshow to something a lot more disastrous and unforeseen: The fortune that everyone was fighting over already had mostly been lost.

In 2008, about the same time the Cormans began feuding, the family money crossed paths with Buddy Fletcher, a Harvard-educated hedge fund manager who was named by Forbes as one of the country's 20 richest African-Americans alongside Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods and Bill Cosby. Fletcher, whose brother Geoffrey Fletcher is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Precious, lived with his wife, Ellen Pao, at the Dakota, New York's iconic apartment building. (The two would bring a pair of discrimination lawsuits — his against the Dakota for racial discrimination, hers against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins for sex discrimination — that would rocket them to larger recognition.) In the midst of the economic downturn, Fletcher ran into trouble repaying investors who had submitted redemption requests. His funds were thrown into bankruptcy, and, as a Chapter 11 trustee wrote in 2013 after investigating the matter, "in many ways, the fraud here has many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme."

Fletcher had a deep relationship with the financial services giant Citco Group. His primary contact there was an executive named Ermanno Unternahrer, who had met Corman back in 1996, though there is a bit of a disagreement over the circum­stances. According to an affidavit from Unternahrer filed in the British Virgin Islands case, a Citco trading manager had informed him that the Cormans were considering diversifying their offshore investments because Soros' funds were not performing as they previously did. By contrast, Corman says, in a declaration in another suit, it was Unternahrer who initiated the meeting and then pitched the filmmaker on the need to diversify, the chance to work with the largest offshore money manager in the world and to have personal involvement from the "Soros" of Citco, CEO Christopher Smeets.

Regardless of how they met, Corman began to transfer millions upon millions of dollars for Citco to administer, according to court documents. Over the next few years, Corman and Unternahrer would meet regularly. Unternahrer even attended a Corman family Christmas party in 2001. The next year, Corman says Citco recommended that Pasig — the offshore entity — be set up to streamline all of the Cormans' investments under Citco control. By 2008, the Cormans had a whopping $73 million invested with Citco, their lawsuit claims.

According to that suit, Citco handed management of Pasig's investments to Fletcher in June 2008. Citco allegedly did so despite knowing that Fletcher had not made a single profitable investment in the 10 months prior, that Fletcher was having difficulty repaying $20 million to Citco and that Fletcher had taken money from state pension funds he was overseeing to repay his debt. In transferring the Corman money to Fletcher, Citco allegedly paid itself $28 million. And Unternahrer is said to have arranged a side deal in connection with this transfer where he got $6.6 million in cash from Fletcher. "No one at Citco asked us or gave us an opportunity to decline to put our monies with Fletcher," Corman says in a declaration filed in the case. He claims he wouldn't learn about Fletcher until 2012, after the British Virgin Islands court made a ruling on the ownership of Pasig.

When that court finally ruled, the Cormans say they were stunned to discover their $73 million had dwindled to $13 million, with Citco taking an additional $2 million in fees. Corman now claims in the suit against Citco that damages from mismanagement run as high as $170 million. That's the amount calculated for what the Cormans might have earned had they kept their money with Soros back in 1996.[[43]]

Sources

• "United States Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:KH9Y-824 : accessed 2 September 2016), Roger Corman in household of William Corman, Ward 16, Detroit, Detroit City, Wayne, Michigan, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 84-1039, sheet 5A, family 95, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 1871.

• "New York, New York Passenger and Crew Lists, 1909, 1925-1957," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:24Y6-HP8 : 2 October 2015), Roger W Corman, 1950; citing Immigration, New York City, New York, United States, NARA microfilm publication T715 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Corman