Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered such future industry stars as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.
Corman died May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., surrounded by family members, the family confirmed to Variety.
“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,'” the family said in a statement.
Corman’s empire, which existed in several incarnations, including New World Pictures, and Concorde/New Horizons, was as active as any major studio and, he boasted, always profitable. He specialized in fast-paced, low-budget genre movies — horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare — and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).
When Corman was awarded an Oscar at the AMPAS’ first Governors Awards ceremony in November 2009, Ron Howard saluted him for hiring women in key exec and creative jobs, as well as for giving them big roles, and Walter Moseley was quoted as saying Corman offered “one of the few open doors,” looking beyond age, race and gender.
Corman hailed film as “the only truly modern art form.” But he pointed out that the need of cast and crew payments mean a constant compromise between art and business.
Howard also joked that when he directed his first film, “Eat My Dust,” he complained to Corman about the low budget and the sparse extras for a crowd scene only to be told, “If you do a good job on this film, you won’t ever have to work for me again!”
Quentin Tarantino toasted him with “the movie lovers of planet Earth thank you.” Jonathan Demme praised his acting, saying Corman gave “tremendous value at a really affordable price.” In several movies for Demme, Corman wanted the same fee he gave actors in the 50-plus films he’d directed: scale plus 10%.