Producer of hundreds of classic low-budget films Roger Corman, who brought fame to several great Hollywood directors and actors, died on Thursday at the age of 98 in California, US, his family said on Saturday.
Corman, known as Hollywood’s “king of the B-movies,” died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California, according to his wife and children.
“When asked how he would like to be remembered, he replied: ‘I was a director, that’s all,'” the statement said.
In 2009, Corman received an honorary Oscar from the Academy.
Since 1955, Corman has worked as a producer and director on hundreds of films, including The Black Scorpion, A Bucket of Blood and Bloody Mama, and was also a renowned talent evaluator, hiring first-time directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard. , James Cameron and Martin Scorsese and introduced several actors who are landmarks in Hollywood today.
Jack Nicholson made his film debut as the title character in Corman’s 1958 film Killer Crybaby.
Other actors whose careers began in Corman’s films included Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn.
Peter Fonda’s involvement in Wild Angels was a precursor to his independent motorcycle-themed film Easy Rider, starring Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, also a former Corman student.
Boxcar Bert, starring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, was one of Martin Scorsese’s first films.
Ron Howard, who would go on to win a Best Director Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, also worked with Corman on the 1977 film Grand Theft Auto.
Corman’s directors were given tiny budgets and often had to complete their films in just five days.
At the time, Corman’s films were open-ended, focusing on themes of sex and drugs, such as his 1967 film The Journey, a frank tale of LSD written by Nicholson and starring Fonda and Hopper.
However, it has also released prestigious foreign films in the United States, including Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Federico Fellini’s Amarcord and Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum. The latter two won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Roger William Corman was born in Detroit and raised in Beverly Hills, but “not in a rich neighborhood,” as he once said.
He attended Stanford University, graduating with an engineering degree, and arrived in Hollywood after three years in the Navy.
Corman began working as a courier for Twentieth Century-Fox and eventually became a story analyst.
After briefly retiring from business to study English literature at Oxford for a while, he returned to Hollywood, where he worked as a television worker and literary agent before embarking on a career as a film producer and director.
He was married to Julie Halloran, also a producer, and they had four children.
Despite his lean methods, Corman maintained good relationships with his directors, boasting that he never fired anyone because he “didn’t want to subject myself to that humiliation.”
Some of his former subordinates reciprocated his feelings in later years. Coppola cast him in The Godfather Part II, Jonathan Demme cast him in The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and Howard cast him in Apollo 13.
Most of Corman’s films were quickly forgotten by fans, but a rare exception was 1960’s Little Shop of Horrors, which featured a bloody human-eating plant and Nicholson playing a pain-loving dental patient.
In 1963, Corman began a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the most famous of which was The Raven, in which Nicholson starred with horror veterans Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone.
Corman’s success led to offers from major studios, and he made Valentine’s Day Massacre and Von Richthofen & Braun on normal budgets, but both films were disappointments.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal

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