Roger Corman, the indie producer and filmmaker who found success on his own terms and outside of the studio system, has passed away on May 9th at the age of ninety-eight. Known as "The King of the B-Movies", the highly influential Corman helped launch the careers of several directors, giving some their first opportunity behind the camera, like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, John Sayles as well as giving promising young actors starring roles in his films like Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd and Sylvester Stallone.
Corman began his career at 20th Century Fox in the mail room, working his way up to a story reader. Becoming disillusioned by his time with the studio, Corman went on to study at Oxford University. After a few years, he returned to Los Angeles to try the movie business again, getting a job as an assistant to a literary agent. Corman completed his first script and sold it to a producer of an independent studio, Allied Artists. It was made as "Highway Dragnet" in 1954 that starred Richard Conte and Joan Bennett with Corman working as an associate producer for no salary in order to gain experience on a film production.
The film's success began Corman's career as a independent producer, working for American International Pictures, and later directed his first film for them in 1955, "Five Guns West", a low budget Western. Over time with an amazing track record of low budgeted films earning high profits, Corman became established as the leading filmmaker at AIP. By 1959, Corman moved into film distribution, founding The Filmgroup, a company producing and releasing low-budget films to serve as double features for drive-ins and action houses.
One of these early movies, "A Bucket of Blood", a horror-comedy in 1959 had completed filming and the very resourceful Corman came up with the idea to shoot another movie using the same sets, much of the same cast and story structure to make another horror-comedy, "The Little Shop of Horrors", reportedly shot over two days and a night. Corman helped make a star out of Vincent Price, appearing in many films including most of Corman's series of eight films largely based on the works of author, Edgar Allan Poe. Corman was also responsible for handling the distribution of many films by acclaimed foreign-language directors, helping them find an audience in the U.S., which included Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa.
In 1970, Corman founded New World Pictures, which became a small, independently owned production and distribution studio. Some of the films from this time included these cult classics "The Big Doll House", "Black Mama, White Mama", "Boxcar Bertha" (Scorsese's second film as a director), "Candy Stripe Nurses", "Caged Heat" (directed by Demme) and "Big Bad Mama".
Over his seventy year career, Corman directed seventy feature films and produced over three hundred. He went on to earn Lifetime Achievement Awards from more than forty film festivals and received an Honorary Oscar in 2009.
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