Devotees of American independent film, cult movie aficionados and exploitation film buffs are mourning the death of Roger Corman—mentor to the “New Hollywood” generation of filmmakers, distributor of Bergman, Truffaut, and Fellini, and the producer and/or director of upwards of 500 films, ranging from Little Shop of Horrors to his acclaimed cycle of eight movies based on stories by Edgar Allen Poe.
Corman, dubbed the “Pope of Pop Cinema,” died May 9 at his Santa Monica home, Variety confirms. He was 98 years old.
Corman’s staggering output encompassed nearly every film genre: adventure (She Gods of Shark Reef) biker (The Wild Angels), dystopia (Death Race 2000), film noir (1955’s The Fast and the Furious), gangster (The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre), horror (Pit and the Pendulum), monster (Attack of the Crab Monsters), psychedelia (The Trip), racing (The Young Racers), rock and roll (Carnival Rock), sci-fi (Not of This Earth), social drama (The Intruder), space opera (Battle Beyond the Stars), teenage rebellion (Rock and Roll High School), war (Von Richtofen and Brown), westerns (Five Guns West), women-in-prison (Caged Heat), and W.T.F. (Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf).
The end credits of Alex Stapleton’s 2011 documentary, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, distill the not-so-discreet charms of the Corman canon with an exhilarating montage of clips featuring cheesy monsters, fiery car explosions, party-crashing piranhas, Vincent Price, the leading man of his Poe cycle, kickass Blaxploitation, and Mary Woronov with a gun and a point-blank glare. But Corman may be best remembered for the budding talents he nurtured and the careers he launched. It is testament to his influence that the 47th Academy Awards ceremony, presented in 1975, was more like a reunion of the so-called Roger Corman School, with six of the top eight Oscars awarded to former Corman “graduates:” Francis Ford Coppola, Ellen Burstyn, Robert Towne, and Robert De Niro.
In addition, Jack Nicholson, nominated that year for Chinatown, made his film debut in Corman’s Cry-Baby Killer. Diane Ladd and Talia Shire, nominees for best supporting actress, also got their starts in Corman films (The Wild Angels and Gas-s-s-s, respectively). And Corman’s New World Pictures distributed that year’s best foreign film, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.
The sometimes-schlocky titles of Corman’s films belied a signature style, and a subversive wit and worldview. His most memorable work threw in with society’s outcasts, underdogs and rebels. In Corman’s 1990 autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, he playfully agreed with the suggestion that Creature from the Haunted Sea was his most personal film. “It’s got my favorite ending of all time,” he wrote. “We have always killed off our monsters…This time, the monster wins.”
