Former Fox courier
Roger Corman has specialized in the art of producing films with a high rate of return on investment at low cost. His autobiography summed up his profession of faith: How I made 100 films without ever losing a cent (ed. Capricci, 2018).
Among other future stars or internationally renowned directors, Roger Corman set foot in the stirrup, in addition to Coppola (The Terror and Dementia 13), Charles Bronson, Jack Nicholson, David Carradine, Monte Hellman, Peter Bogdanovich (The Target , 1968), Joe Dante or Martin Scorsese (Bertha Boxcar, 1972).
Born April 5, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan, he entered the film industry through the back door, as a studio courier at Twentieth Century Fox. Having become a script reader for the studio, he learned the ropes of narrative efficiency. After studying at Oxford, on a scholarship, he returned to the United States where he decided to become a producer after discovering the distressing result of one of his first screenplays.
In a resourceful maverick way, Corman produced his first film by persuading a submarine-building company to lend him one for free. The scenario is built around this unique setting and prop: a story, then in vogue, of a mutant creature Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954). The weak-willed producer imposes himself at a pivotal moment: the monopoly of classic studios is weakened by the 1948 antitrust laws (which require studios to distribute productions other than their own) and the emergence of television.
The prototype of independent cinema
Because of his poverty economy, Roger Corman has been wrongly called the “King of the B Movie.” Which, technically, he wasn’t. B-Movies – the second part of double-bills – were precisely disappearing from screens and studio production.
Corman is, rather, the prototype of independent producers and of what we will call exploitation cinema. Or the art of surfing on popular genres, of adapting successful formulas, at a lower cost. He also perceives the youthful evolution of the public in the America of the post-war economic boom.
Associated with James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff’s company, American International Picture (AIP), which distributed his films, he produced a host of westerns, biker films, gangsters, science fiction and, soon, horror. In the 1960s, Corman developed a series of films based on the novels of Edgar Allan Poe. The Corman economy involves teamwork, in a stable, where everyone pitches in. Coppola starts as an editor. He meets Robert Towne, a screenwriter who sometimes improvises as an actor and who will sign the final dialogue between Michael and Don Corleone in The Godfather before winning an Oscar for the screenplay of Chinatown (1974) with Jack Nicholson, who was an actor, screenwriter and even producer for Corman.
Alongside ambitious young talents, Corman enhances his films with the names of old glories of classic Hollywood like Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre or Boris Karloff, without forgetting Vincent Price, star of many of his horror films. Some of Corman’s productions have become cult, even classics of their kind: The Last Woman on Earth (1960), Little Shop of Horrors (with the young Nicholson, 1960), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Bloody Mama (1970), Piranha (1978)…
Anxious to preserve his autonomy and make every cent profitable for his benefit, Roger Corman freed himself from AIP, creating his company New World Pictures. He then anticipates the emergence of slashers, with their share of naked and tortured young women and a certain action cinema. In addition to Joe Dante, he also accompanied the future director of Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme (Five Women to Kill, 1974) or Sylvester Stallone (The Death Race of 2000, 1975). The clever producer will be able to make profitable the films of his former collaborators who have become famous on the video market.
If he did not construct an aesthetically decisive work, he showed the way to two generations who wrote the history of Hollywood, from 1970 to the dawn of the 2000s, and he served as a canvas for directors and producers independents of the 1990s. Without Corman, no Easy Rider, no Tim Burton, no Tarantino, no Scream…
