Hommage Roger Corman (1926 - 2024)
If the beginnings of Coppola, Bogdanovitch, Hellman, Dante or Bartel on the Corman team are well documented, Corman’s own début is lesser known. Born April 5, 1926 in Detroit, he settled in Los Angeles in the 30s with his family. He first followed his father’s footsteps as an engineer but resigned two days after being hired by US Electrical Motors. In 1948, he landed an errand boy job at Twentieth Century Fox, where he became a script reader, got bored, obtained a scholarship, studied in Oxford, then lived several months in Paris, before a new start upon returning to the US. He sold a script to Allied Artists. The final result, a catastrophe, compelled him to start a small production company. For the shooting of Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), his first feature film, he borrowed a submarine from another company, with his friend Wyott Ordung creating a mutant octopus for 18 000 dollars.
Corman has been wrongly associated with B cinema at the time it was disappearing from theaters because of television’s arrival. He established a production system, commercial but terribly creative with limited budgets and schedules, a faithful crew, reusable sets from one film to another, and lots of fog to mask shortcomings. "How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime”: his famous autobiography’s title defines him perfectly, to the point that he’s also known for his penny pinching, often playfully evoked by his collaborators, notably by Joe Dante.
After two black humor gems (A Bucket of Blood in 1959 and The Little Shop of Horrors in 1960), he lived his golden years as a filmmaker with American International Pictures (AIP), the company founded by James Nicholson et Samuel Arkoff, where he became an associate in the 60s. At his peak, his Poe cycle was an answer to Italian fantasy films by Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda. With Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont as script writers, The Mask of Red Death, The Fall of the House of Usher, or The Tomb of Ligeia plunge us into gothic neurotic mists, embodied by an imperial and larger-than-life Vincent Price. Sometimes improvisation will give birth to fortuitous experimental masterpieces such as The Terror (1969), co-directed with Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson, written day by day, and with a dream-like beauty.
With over 550 films produced and about 50 directed, from AIP to New World Pictures, which he founded in 1970 (also the US distributor by Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, Kurosawa et Herzog), to Concorde-New Horizons, Corman touched all genres: westerns, gangster movies, women in prison films, juvenile delinquent movies, with a special predilection for science fiction and fantasy films. Roger Corman also surfed on the fads of the times, starting the Wild Angels wave, free living bikers crossing America and antagonizing populations who’d rather eliminate marginality. From psychedelic gems (TheTrip), to unexpected political firebrands (The Intruder), Corman kept evolving until his last movie in 1990, a surprising variation around Frankenstein (Frankenstein Unbound). In terms of production, the 90s are marked by Corman’s complete indifference, and he produces one low-quality film after another up until the 2020s.
His death saw the disappearance of a whole aesthetic and economical concept. His wild career offers a subtle portrait of the evolution of the United States over almost a century. A page has definitely been turned.
