Roger Corman
Roger Corman titled his autobiography How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. Critics have titled him “The King of B Movies.” Fellow filmmakers have titled him the “Godfather of Independent Film.” Certainly, few have been more consistent in turning out profitable films; no one has done more to help start the careers of so many. For over fifty years, Corman has been the screenwriter, producer, director, and distributor of some of the quirkiest, schlockiest, scariest, and just plain fun movies. Born in 1926, Corman graduated from Stanford University with plans to be an engineer. A trip to Europe, and time spent studying at Oxford University, changed his idea of a career. The formula for his movies was to use the smallest budget, shoot in the fewest possible days, and make a profit from stories with a little sex, a little violence, occasions of aliens, prisons, or monsters, and plenty of wit, such as: A Bucket of Blood (1959); The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) which was rehearsed in three days, shot in two days, and introduced Jack Nicholson; Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965); Bloody Mama (1970); Women in Cages (1971); The Wild Angels (1966); The Trip (1967); Caged Heat (1974); Death Race 2000 (1975) introducing David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone; Android (1982); and, a group of films based on Edgar Allen Poe stories, Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) whose cinematographer was Nicolas Roeg, with used sets from the film Beckett, and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). Corman also gave jobs early in their careers to Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Peter Fonda, Diane Ladd, John Sayles, Ron Howard, Martin Scorcese and Robert Towne. In 1970, Corman formed New World Pictures. While he produced films such as Candy Stripe Nurses, his company distributed films by Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, and the classic, The Harder They Come.
