ROGER CORMAN 1926-2024
Mike Renaut remembers film director Roger Corman, the B-movie King who made some of the best car chase and crash movies of Seventies…
Born in Detroit on April 5, 1926, Roger William Corman was a film producer, director and actor. Best known for titles such as Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and his series of films adapted from Edgar Allen Poe stories starring Vincent Price, Corman was instrumental in giving countless household names their big break – from Martin Scorcese, Peter Bogdanovich and James Cameron to Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
After studying English literature at Oxford (where he bought an MG and developed a lifelong interest in sports cars) Corman returned to American and drew attention with his second film, the 1955 production of The Fast and the Furious. A tale about sports car racers. Corman scripted and produced, and even did some of the stunt driving himself. That movie title would later be sold for reuse on the 2001 movie and sequels.
Corman then made a number of cowboy films and monster movies becoming a director for American International Pictures on films including Machine-Gun Kelly (1958) and Hot Car Girl (1958.) He would make films extremely fast; it’s said Little Shop of Horrors was filmed in two days and one night. It used the same sets as his 1959 classic black comedy A Bucket of Blood.
Corman spent the summer of 1961 directing The Intruder, starring William Shatner as a racist stranger who tries to put paid to a small town’s newly integrated schooling. It’s a powerful movie that still shocks today. The following year Corman took off for Europe with a Volkswagen Microbus and a $90,000 budget to follow the Formula One circuit. In the van were a skeleton production crew (including a young Francis Ford Coppola.) The result was The Young Racers (1963) a film that got unprecedented access to the racing teams and circuits of the period. A sequel of sorts, The Wild Racers, followed in 1968. It starred singer Fabian, “a nice guy,” remembers Corman, “but he couldn’t act”.
Alongside Peter Fonda, Corman made the 1966 biker movie The Wild Angels, which kicked off the Hell’s Angels biker movie genre and, via 1967’s The Trip, lead to the classic motorcycle film Easy Rider (1969.) Corman had been earmarked as executive producer on Easy Rider until a change of studio saw him unceremoniously dropped. “It lost me a fortune,” Corman admitted.
Tired of having his finished films later edited before distribution, in 1970 Corman founded his own studio, New World Pictures. There he made a stream of motorcycle flicks and exploitation movies about nurses or set in women’s prisons... Done quickly and cheaply, these films still tended to make money and were particularly successful at drive-in movies.
The late Seventies brought a Cormaninduced wave of car chase flicks such as Death Race 2000 (which returned $4 million in profit), Carquake!, Eat My Dust, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, Thunder and Lightning and Grand Theft Auto – the latter being Ron Howard’s directorial debut. Smokey Bites The Dust followed in 1981.
I was lucky enough to interview him in 2022 and noted that Corman was proud of every one of them. He never considered he’d ever made a bad movie. “If you think about it, Jaws was just a very well-made B-movie monster flick,” he told me, “and look how successful that was. They made movies the way I did, just with better equipment and bigger budgets so they came out better. When Star Wars was released, I thought, they’ve done it again…”
Minor acting parts were taken in titles including Silence of the Lambs and Apollo 13, while Roger Corman continued to make movies in the following decades with titles that were self-explanatory such as Slumber Party Massacre, Cocaine Wars, Stripped to Kill and Terminal Virus. Although wacky and clearly lowbudget, these films are often very entertaining with action and humour throughout. Monster horror movies remained one of his first loves and he made Sharktopus in 2010, following it up two years later with Piranhaconda.
Roger Corman died at the age of 98 in his home in Santa Monica, California on May 9, 2024. Frequently hailed the king of the B-movies, Corman produced or directed in excess of 450 films in an incredible career spanning eight decades. He influenced countless producers and directors and will no doubt continue to do so.