The King of the B's
American movie producer and
director, born in 1926 in
Detroit, Michigan. He studied
engineering when he was in college and went to work for
20th Century Fox as a
messenger and later as a
story analyst. The first movie that we worked on directly was "
Highway Dragnet" in 1954 -- he was the
screenwriter and a producer. He made his debut as a director in 1955's "
Five Guns West."
Corman is best known as a very
fast, very
cheap filmmaker. He was capable of making a half-dozen movies a year, usually using
leftover film sets, and usually put together for
American-International Productions, or AIP. He also drove down costs by utilizing a
reperatory company of actors who sometimes even pulled double-duty as production crew members. Even his most
expensive movies, like his
Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with
Vincent Price in the 1960s, were made for much less money than the stuff mainstream
Hollywood was putting out. He often shot films in less than a
week -- his
record was just two days and a night to put 1960's "
Little Shop of Horrors" together.
Despite working so quickly and inexpensively, Corman's work was nearly universally
okay. I'm not going to claim that all of his films are works of high art, but they are at least
entertaining and very definitely
not bad. That alone is quite an
accomplishment, considering how awful your average low-budget fantasy movie is. If Corman's flicks had been merely cheaply and quickly produced, he would've made money and been otherwise utterly forgettable. But his movies are quite
fun to watch, and that's why he's important.
Some of the movies that Corman has directed include: "
The Day the World Ended," "
The Beast with a Million Eyes," "
It Conquered the World," "
Not of This Earth," "
Attack of the Crab Monsters," "
Teenage Doll," "
Sorority Girl," "
Rock All Night," "
War of the Satellites," "
Teenage Cave Man," "
Machine-Gun Kelly," "
A Bucket of Blood," "
House of Usher," "
The Little Shop of Horrors," "
The Wasp Woman," "
The Pit and the Pendulum," "
Creature from the Haunted Sea," "
The Premature Burial," "
Tower of London," "
The Raven," "
The Young Racers," "
The Terror," "
The Haunted Palace," "
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes," "
The Masque of the Red Death," "
The Tomb of Ligeia," "
The Wild Angels," "
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre," "
The Trip," "
Gas-s-s-s," "
The Red Baron," and "
Frankenstein Unbound." I'm not even going to try to list all the movies he's produced -- there have been well over 300 of them.
Corman also has the uncanny ability to pick out promising
talent and encourage them. There are many directors who got their starts working for Corman, including
Martin Scorsese,
Francis Ford Coppola,
Jonathan Demme,
John Sayles,
James Cameron,
Peter Bogdanovich,
Joe Dante,
Jonathan Kaplan,
Irvin Kershner,
Paul Bartel,
Ron Howard, and
Nicolas Roeg. He's also helped launch the careers of numerous actors, including
Jack Nicholson,
Peter Fonda,
Dennis Hopper,
Bruce Dern,
Diane Ladd,
Charles Bronson,
Tommy Lee Jones,
Talia Shire,
Sandra Bullock,
Robert De Niro, and
David Carradine. In fact, Corman received an Honorary
Academy Award in 2009 specifically for his legacy of nurturing and teaching new talent.
He
retired from most directing duties in the early '70s to focus on
production and on one of his companies,
New World, which made low-budget
exploitation films, then used the
profits made from the low-budget flicks to distribute
highbrow art films, including
Ingmar Bergman's "
Cries and Whispers" and
Federico Fellini's "
Amarcord."
Corman has also had a number of
cameo appearances in films, usually directed by his former
proteges. He's had bit parts in "
The Godfather, Part II," "
The Howling," "
Swing Shift," "
The Silence of the Lambs," "
Philadelphia," "
Apollo 13," "
Scream 3," and others.
Corman's
autobiography is called "
How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime." It was published in 1990.
Research from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)