Roger Corman, producer of low-budget Hollywood films, has died – Culture

The producer of hundreds of classic low-budget films Roger Corman, who launched several great Hollywood filmmakers and actors, died on Thursday at the age of 98, in California, USA, his family announced on Saturday.

According to his wife and children, Corman, known as Hollywood’s “King of B movies”, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California.

“When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said: ‘I was a filmmaker, that’s all’,” they said in a statement.

In 2009, Corman received an honorary Oscar from the American Film Academy.

From 1955 onwards, Corman helped produce hundreds of films as a producer and director, including “Black Scorpion”, “Bucket of Blood” and “Bloody Mama”, and was a noted talent evaluator: hiring aspiring filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron and Martin Scorsese and launched several of the actors who are today Hollywood references.

Jack Nicholson made his film debut as the title character in Corman’s 1958 film, “The Cry Baby Killer.”

Other actors whose careers began in Corman films were Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn.

Peter Fonda’s participation in “The Wild Angels” was a precursor to his independent film “Easy Rider”, a reference about motorcycling, with Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, also a former student of Corman.

“Boxcar Bertha”, with Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, was one of Martin Scorsese’s first films.

Ron Howard, who would go on to win an Oscar for best director for “A Beautiful Mind”, also worked with Corman in the 1977 film “Grand Theft Auto”.

Corman’s directors were given tiny budgets and often had to finish their films in just five days.

Corman’s films were open-ended for the time, focusing on themes of sex and drugs, such as his 1967 release “The Trip,” an explicit story about LSD written by Nicholson and starring Fonda and Hopper.

However, it also released prestigious foreign films in the United States, including “Screams and Whispers” by Ingmar Bergman, “Amarcord” by Federico Fellini and “The Tin Drum” by Volker Schlondorff. The last two won the Oscar for best foreign language film.

Roger William Corman was born in Detroit and raised in Beverly Hills, but “not in the wealthy section,” he once said.

He attended Stanford University, graduating in engineering, and arrived in Hollywood after three years in the Navy.

Corman began working as a courier at Twentieth Century-Fox, eventually becoming a story analyst.

After briefly leaving the business to study English literature for a period at Oxford, he returned to Hollywood, where he worked as a television stagehand and literary agent, before beginning his career as a film producer and director.

He was married to Julie Halloran, also a producer, and they had four children.

Despite his thrifty methods, Corman remained on good terms with his directors, boasting that he never fired any because he “didn’t want to inflict that humiliation”.

Some of his former subordinates returned his kindness in later years. Coppola cast him in “The Godfather, Part II,” Jonathan Demme cast him in “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia,” and Howard gave him a role in “Apollo 13.”

Most of Corman’s films were quickly forgotten by fans, but a rare exception was 1960’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” which featured a bloody plant that fed on humans. and which featured Nicholson playing a pain-loving dental patient.

In 1963, Corman began a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the most notable of which was “The Raven,” which paired Nicholson with veteran horror stars Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone.

Corman’s success led to offers from major studios, and he directed “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” and “Von Richthofen and Brown” on normal budgets, but both films were disappointing.