Roger Corman has written, directed, produced and acted in some 450 films since 1954. If you were watching a horror movie at the drive-in, or watching Movie Macabre with Elvira, or catching the midnight movie at the mall, or home watching the VCR, a Roger Corman movie probably was screaming and squealing, crunching and munching on the screen.
Born April 5, 1926, Corman got his start in the 1950s supplying product for distribution by American Releasing Corporation (later American International Pictures). He would be given a sum of money and an advertising campaign (or sometimes just a title), and he would have to come up with the scripts and produce the films. If he had to shoot a film on location, he would always try to shoot a second film at that same location in order to spread out the costs.
In his early days, Corman never bothered with permits, shooting films on location and skedaddling before the cops arrived. He was the first to use union crews on low-budget films, figuring correctly that they would give his films a high polish, even though his budget was devoured so fast using union labor that he could never shoot for longer than a week.
Beasie and Beverly Garland in “It Conquered The World (1956) One of his maxims was “In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.” He learned this on such low-budget scream-fests as The Beast With a Million Eyes (1955) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957).
One joke about Corman was that he could negotiate the production of a film on a pay phone, shoot the film in the booth and finance it with the money in the change slot.
In the ’60s, Corman was able to move into more mainstream moviemaking. When American International offered him a sum of money to create a low-budget double feature, he countered with an offer to use the same money to shoot a single feature in color and Cinemascope. The result was House of Usher (1960) starring Vincent Price. The movie was a hit and Corman went on to make seven more in his “Poe Series.”
During the 1970s, Corman began booking his films in theaters but also aggressively in drive-ins that were starting to fade from the scene and thus were desperate for product.
As director and producer, Corman launched the careers of many now-famous film directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, James Cameron and Martin Scorsese. Famously, he told them, “If you do a good job on this film, you’ll never have to work for me again.”
With hundreds of movies to his credit, one of Corman’s most amazing achievements is that less than a dozen of these films failed to turn a profit.
In 1999, Corman was honored with an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Many of Corman’s early movies have been digitized and are available on DVD. Now in his mid-80s, he’s still at it, and what he continues to crank out remains fresh and wild and an utter hoot to watch.