Breaking News: B-Movie King and Indie Cinema Trailblazer Roger Corman Dies at 98!

Roger Corman, a legendary independent Hollywood producer and director renowned for his profitable low-budget films such as “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” “The Little Shop of Horrors,” and “The Wild Angels,” has passed away, earning him the moniker “King of the B’s.”

Corman, known for fostering the careers of many in Hollywood, passed away at his Santa Monica home on Thursday, according to a statement from his family. He was 98 years old.

“His films were groundbreaking, and they captured the essence of an era,” said Corman’s family. “When asked how he would like to be remembered, he simply said, ‘I was a filmmaker, and that’s it.’”

Throughout his nearly 70-year career, Corman directed over 50 films, most of which he also produced. He produced over 350 films in total, mainly for his own production-distribution companies, New World Pictures and its successor, Concorde-New Horizons.

After establishing New World Pictures in 1970, Corman spent the decade producing or supervising films such as “Private Duty Nurses” and “Eat My Dust!” He also distributed notable foreign films in the U.S., like Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord.”

Corman’s significant contribution to Hollywood is his nurturing of young talents and providing in-house training to budding filmmakers who later became major Hollywood figures.

Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, and James Cameron are among the notable names who began their careers with Corman.

“I can’t think of anyone who has discovered more of Hollywood’s most talented filmmakers,” said Gale Anne Hurd, a former Corman assistant who later produced films such as “The Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “The Abyss.”

Corman provided opportunities for several top actors early in their careers, including Jack Nicholson, Charles Bronson, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Sally Kirkland, Talia Shire, Robert De Niro, and Sylvester Stallone.

“I was a nobody, and I will forever be grateful to Roger Corman for sticking with me because I had nothing else going for me,” Nicholson once said. His feature film debut was in “The Cry Baby Killer,” a 1958 crime thriller executive produced by Corman.

Corman, a Stanford University engineering graduate, turned to the sea for his first film as a producer, “Monster From the Ocean Floor.”

The black-and-white movie, which runs for 64 minutes, is about a giant one-eyed octopus terrorizing Mexican villagers. It was shot in six days for $12,000, with Malibu’s beach doubling for the Yucatan Peninsula.

Next came “The Fast and the Furious,” a 1955 race car drama produced by Corman. It was shot in nine days on a $50,000 budget, which secured him a three-picture distribution deal with a new company that later became known as American International Pictures.

This deal marked the beginning of a profitable 15-year, 30-film relationship between Corman and AIP founders James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff.

Corman made his directorial debut with “Five Guns West,” a 1955 western set during the Civil War. It starred John Lund and Dorothy Malone and was shot in nine days on a $60,000 budget.

A slew of similarly low-budget quick films followed, including “Swamp Women,” “The Beast with a Million Eyes,” “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” “Rock All Night,” “Sorority Girl,” “Teenage Doll,” and many others.

Indeed, nine productions directed by Corman were released in 1957 alone.

“The goal was to tell an engaging, visually captivating story that would attract young people to drive-ins and theaters, without taking yourself too seriously along the way,” Corman wrote in his 1990 autobiography.

Corman’s signature as a filmmaker was his ability to work quickly and inexpensively. His early films were all made for less than $100,000 and shot in under two weeks.

As the producer of “The Fast and the Furious,” Corman persuaded established actor John Ireland to take the lead role for much less than his usual fee by allowing him to co-direct the film, which had a budget of $50,000 and was shot in nine days.

Corman managed to cut costs by securing a line of Jaguar racing cars for free and saved money on a stuntman by driving one of the cars in a key action sequence himself.

Corman was known for shooting two movies at once to save on transportation costs for far-off locations.

When a studio manager informed him of a large office set still standing from a recently wrapped film, Corman rented the set for two days of shooting and three days of rehearsal. Only then did he assign his main writer, Charles Griffith, to a script.

The result was “The Little Shop of Horrors,” a 1960 black comedy about a dim-witted flower shop apprentice who creates a giant, man-eating plant that can talk (“Feed me!”).

In the mid-1960s, Corman attempted to work within the major studio system, first at Columbia Pictures, then at 20th Century Fox, but he found the experiences slow-paced and frustrating and returned to AIP. He continued producing films into his 90s.

“Retire?” he pondered in a 2020 tweet. “I’m too young for that.”

Born in Detroit on April 5, 1926, Corman was the son of a successful civil engineer and a former legal secretary. His younger brother, Gene, also became a film producer. The family moved to Beverly Hills when Corman was a teenager.

After graduating from Beverly Hills High School, Corman spent a year at Stanford University before volunteering for a Navy officer training program at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He returned to Stanford for his senior year in 1946 under the GI Bill and graduated with a degree in industrial engineering a year later.

However, by that time, his ambition had shifted from engineering to filmmaking.

In 1948, after six months of unemployment, Corman got his first break in Hollywood. Through a friend’s father who knew someone at 20th Century Fox, he secured a job as a messenger earning $32.50 per week. Six months later, he was promoted to story analyst, doubling his pay.

However, he quickly became frustrated with the job and left for England to study modern English literature on the GI Bill at Oxford University. After one term, he relocated to Paris.

Upon returning to the U.S. after a year abroad, Corman found work at a literary agency. He also worked as a grip at a TV station before selling a script he co-wrote to Allied Artists for $3,500. The script was turned into “Highway Dragnet,” a low-budget 1954 crime film.

Many directors who got their start with Corman paid tribute to their mentor by giving him cameo roles in their films.

Among his many cameo roles were appearances as a U.S. senator in Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II,” a congressman in Howard’s “Apollo 13,” and the head of the FBI in Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs.”

One of his most fitting cameos was in Dante’s horror film “The Howling,” where Corman, known for his frugality, is seen checking a payphone’s coin-return slot for loose change.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic had virtually shut down Hollywood, Corman issued a call on social media to A-list filmmakers to make short films — two minutes or less — and submit them to “The First (And Hopefully Last) Corman Quarantine Film Festival.” Numerous filmmakers submitted entries.