Roger Corman, 98, Dies; Prolific Master of Low-Budget Cinema

 

"Mr. Corman produced more than 300 films and directed roughly 50 of them, including cult classics like “A Bucket of Blood” (1959), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1964), “The Wild Angels” (1966) and the original “The Little Shop of Horrors” (1960), which he shot for $35,000 in two days on a set left over from somebody else’s movie.

When he got tired of directing, he opened the door to Hollywood for talented young protégés like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”), Martin Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”), Jonathan Demme (“Caged Heat”), Peter Bogdanovich (“Targets”) and Ron Howard (“Grand Theft Auto”).

 Among the others Mr. Corman nurtured was Jack Nicholson, who was 21 when Mr. Corman gave him his first movie role, the lead in “The Cry Baby Killer” (1958), and 23 when he had a small part as a masochistic dental patient in “The Little Shop of Horrors.” Before he went on to stardom, Mr. Nicholson acted in eight Corman movies and wrote three of them, including “The Trip,” an uncautionary tale about LSD.

Bruce Dern and Peter Fonda were also part of the Corman repertory company, working together in “The Trip” and “The Wild Angels.” An unknown Robert De Niro played Shelley Winters’s heroin-addicted son in “Bloody Mama” (1970). The first script by Robert Towne, who later went on to write the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Chinatown,” was Mr. Corman’s nuclear-catastrophe love triangle, “The Last Woman on Earth” (1960)

 In 1970 Mr. Corman formed his own production and distribution company, New World Pictures. What he did next surprised Hollywood: He became the American distributor of Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers.He booked Bergman into drive-ins, and New World went on to distribute films by Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut and Federico Fellini."

 more in the obit by Aljean Harmetz