ROGER CORMAN (1926)

PRODUCER SUPREMO

In addition to his credits as a director, producer, occasional writer and actor, Roger Corman was responsible for encouraging a generation of filmmakers who came to dominate the US cinematic landscape.

Corman directed 50 films between 1955 and 1969, plus a handful more up to his final feature, Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound (1990). But this figure pales against the 400-odd features – and counting – he produced for both cinema and television over a 60-year career. Few have been quite so prolific; nor has anyone supported the nascent careers of such a rich generation of filmmakers, which includes Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard, among others. The films they made with Corman might lack the prestige or elan of their greatest successes, but he allowed them to cut their teeth on genre films, offering the invaluable experience of working on a film set and indulging them to experiment with the medium.

The ‘Pope of Pop Cinema’, as he became known, was born in Detroit, Michigan. He studied engineering at Stanford University and English at Oxford University before spending time in Paris. He sold his first script, Highway Dragnet (1954), for $12,000, which he used to fund his first feature as producer, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954). With its outrageous title and B-movie production values, it set the standard for the films Corman would produce over the next decade. Occasionally, the titles were the only good quality of a film, but regard for Corman’s oeuvre gradually improved. Machine-Gun Kelly (1958) received positive notices, and his series of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations in the 1960s, which includes House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), along with countercultural classics such as The Trip (1967), remain high points in his career.

Corman’s body of work is so vast, it is best regarded in its entirety. He was the youngest filmmaker to be given a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, and both the British Film Institute and New York’s Museum of Modern Art followed suit. His encouragement of the film careers of so many great directors was repaid with roles in their films, from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II (1974) and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995) to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Philadelphia (1993).