Los Angeles, May 12. – (beraking latest news) – Roger Corman, the legendary producer and director “king of B-movies”, legendary for his speed in making films (six/seven a year, some in less than two days) has died at the age of 98 ), which gave impetus to the careers of young talents who were not yet established (many of whom were protagonists of the renewal of American cinema) such as Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Paul Bartel, Monte Hellmann, Jack Hill, John Sayles, James Cameron , Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Ellen Burstyn, so much so as to form a factory, a true ‘Cormanian school’.
The American filmmaker, considered a giant of independent cinema, who in 2009 received an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards, died on Thursday 9 May at his home in Santa Monica, California, as his family told The Hollywood Reporter today ‘. “Roger was generous, open and kind to all who knew him,” his family said in a statement. “When asked how he would like to be remembered, he replied: ‘I was a director, just that’.”
Corman had become known for a series of horror films such as ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ (1960) and the series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with Vincent Price (‘The Living and the Dead’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’). but he had become famous for drug and biker sagas such as ‘The Savages’ (1966), which premiered, amid controversy, at the Venice Film Festival. He also achieved fame for ‘The Valentine’s Day Massacre’ (1967) and ‘The Fire Serpent’ (1967) which starred Peter Fonda as a man on a dreamlike, hallucinatory odyssey who has just used for the first time of LSD. The controversy aroused the enthusiasm of Corman, who was one of the first producers to recognize the power of negative publicity. His blend of sex, nudity, violence and social themes was taken seriously in many nonconformist circles, especially in Europe, and in 1964 he was the first American producer-director to be honored by the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris with a retrospective of his movie. According to the Imdb database, Corman produced 491 films, directed 56 and starred in 45.
Born in Detroit (Michigan) on April 5, 1926, after studying at Beverly Hills College in Detroit, during the Second World War Roger Corman attended a training course with the US Navy, and in 1947 he graduated in industrial engineering from Stanford University. Having completed an apprenticeship in Hollywood in 1948 at 20th Century-Fox, first as a delivery boy and then as a script assistant, he undertook a ‘cultural trip’ to Europe, to Paris and Oxford, with a scholarship in English literature. Back in the United States, after having been a journalist and literary agent, he worked for American International Pictures and began his tireless activity as a producer, distributor and director. At a frenetic pace, Corman has made hundreds of films for mass consumption over time, from westerns to gangster films, to teen movies, to soft-core, to science fiction, to his favorite horror films.
His debut as a director came with the western “Five Gunshots” (1955) which was followed, in the 1950s alone, by more than twenty films, including “Law of the Machine Gun” (1958) and “Life of a Gangster” (1959 ), pervaded by the physical and psychological violence of that gangster world that would later return with “The Valentine’s Day Massacre” (1967) and “The Barker Clan” (1970), with Shelley Winters, Robert De Niro and Bruce Dern , precursors of the climate of the films of Martin Scorsese or John Milius. The anti-racism of “Hatred Explodes in Dallas” (1962), the anarchism of “The Savages” (1966), the psychedelic visions of “The Serpent of Fire” (1967) anticipated the radical imagination inaugurated by the 1968 rebellion .
But it was the horror films taken from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, marked by baroque fantasy, a dreamlike sense of mise-en-scène, orchestration of rhythm, the ability to mix horror effects and grotesque notes, that best summarized the aesthetic redefinition of Corman’s cinematic fantasy. “The living and the dead” (1960) inaugurated the construction of a disturbing and morbid universe but also pervaded by a mocking and sarcastically funereal vein, emphasized by the furnishings of Daniel Haller, the lights of Floyd Crosby and the screenplays of Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont , Robert Towne and the acting of Vincent Price or Peter Lorre. The first film was followed by “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1961), “Buried Alive” (1962), “Tales of Terror” (1962), “The Wizards of Terror” (1963), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1964), “The Tomb of Ligeia” (1964). These films, with other horror films such as “The Wax Maiden”, “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes”, “City of Monsters”, all from 1963, contributed to the visual elaboration of a fantastic world, which soon became cult’ in which the monstrous no longer only has a terrifying function but becomes a figurative emblem and even moral significance, loaded with psychoanalytic allusions.
After the corrosive and sarcastic foray into the world of youth in “Gas, it was necessary to destroy the world in order to save it” (1970) and “The Red Baron” (1971), an individualistic elegy on the legendary German pilot of the First World War, Corman dedicated himself throughout the Seventies and Eighties only to the production and commendable distribution activity in the United States of films by great European filmmakers such as Federico Fellini, François Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman. He used his brazen mass marketing sensibilities to distribute Fellini’s “Amarcord,” “The Story of Adele H.” by Truffaut, “Dersu Uzala” by Akira Kurosawa and “Fitzcarraldo” by Wener Herzog.
In 1970 he founded his production and distribution company New World Pictures, replaced in 1983 by the production company New Horizons Pictures and the distribution company Concorde. In 1990 Corman returned to directing with a contamination of horror and science fiction, “Frankenstein Beyond the Frontiers of Time”, inspired by a novel by Brian Aldiss, full of visionary inventiveness, black humor and cultured irony. In 1990 he published his autobiography, written with Jill Jerome, “How I made a hundred films in Hollywood without ever losing a dollar” (published in Italian by Edizioni Lindau in 1998).
His friends and students lovingly cast Corman in cameo roles, including Coppola in “The Godfather: Part II” (1974) and Demme in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), “Philadelphia” (1993) and “Rachel is to get married” (2008).
In March 2015, Corman and his wife Julie filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming they lost up to $60 million when their money was mismanaged by an investment fund. They later said the damage reached $170 million. In addition to his wife Julie, he is survived by his daughters Catherine and Mary.