By Will Dunham, from Reuters.- The master of low budget cinema Roger Corman, which produced hundreds of films over six decades and helped launch the careers of acclaimed directors Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron y Ron Howarddied Thursday at age 98, family members said.
Corman, producer and director acclaimed as the “king of B movies”died at his home in Santa Monica (California), as reported by his wife and daughters in a post on his Instagram account late on Saturday, without specifying the cause of death.
“It is with deep sadness, and boundless gratitude for his extraordinary life, that we remember our beloved husband and father, Roger Corman,” his wife Julie and daughters Catherine and Mary said in the post.
“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an era,” they wrote.
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Corman received an honorary lifetime Oscar in November 2009 for his “rich spawn of films and filmmakers.”
“Roger, for everything you have done for cinema, the Academy thanks you, Hollywood thanks you, independent cinema thanks you,” the filmmaker told Corman. Quentin Tarantino, winner of an Oscar, at his award ceremony. “But most importantly, for all the weird, cool, crazy moments you’ve put on screen, movie lovers on planet Earth thank you.”
Corman’s work – he produced more than 300 films and directed about 50 – was full of those strange, cool and crazy moments.
The films were shot quickly at low cost and only a few lost money.
They covered genres such as science fiction, horror, rebellious adolescence, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and many more.
Their titles weren’t exactly subtle: “Attack of the Giant Crabs” (1957), “The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent” (1957), “Teenage Cave Man” (1958), “A Bucket of Blood” (1959). ), “Creature from the Haunted Sea” (1961), “Bloody Mama” (1970), “Gas-sss” (1970), “Galaxy of Terror” (1981) and “Piranhaconda” (2012).
Well into his 90s, he was still prolific, producing films with titles like “Cobragator” and “Death Race 2050.”
“I think to be successful in the long term, unless you’re a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a true genius of cinema, you have to understand that you’re working on both an art and a business,” Corman told a website. of pop culture in 2010.
Corman introduced future stars such as Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock, Talia Shire, William Shatner, Peter Fonda y Dennis Hopper.
