Roger Corman 1926-2024

Roger Corman died on May 9th, at the age of 98.

As a filmmaker, he is not particularly associated with San Francisco like Francis Ford Coppola or Clint Eastwood.  He did write, produce, and direct the 1968 hippie B-Movie classic, Psych Out.  

Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood of San Francisco, immortalized by Roger Corman's Psych Out

There was no internet in 1968, so what the world knew of the Summer of Love was from the pop music and TV news stories, usually from the perspective of "hung up old, Mr. Normal!"  Roger Corman's Psych Out was the first opportunity for the world to see San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood at this pivotal cultural and historical moment.

Amongst his many talents, Roger Corman was particularly keen at identifying pop culture trends, and made low budget films to capitalize on them.  When tens of thousands of hippies flocked to San Francisco in 1967 to “tune in turn on and drop out,” mainstream culture was slow to pick up on it.   Roger Corman knew that Hollywood was not making films to appeal to that demographic.

When referencing San Francisco's Summer of Love, most people cite the pop music associated with the era.  Performers like Jefferson Airplane, Carlos Santana, and Janis Joplin cemented the San Francisco sound in pop culture.  Psychedelic music became synonymous with the Summer of Love, but Hollywood was slow to capitalize on the burgeoning Baby Boomers.  If any one singular film is synonymous with the Summer of Love, it's Psych Out.

If you don’t know who Roger Corman was, just think about any movie you have ever liked over the last 50 years, there is a good chance it was made by one of his protégés.

It may starred Robert De Niro (Raging Bull, Cape Fear),  Pam Grier (Jackie Brown), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky, Rambo), or Jack Nicolson (Terms of Endearment, Batman, The Departed).  And oh, these actors as well: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, and William Shatner.

Or think of any film directed by James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), Martin Scorsese (Good Fellas, Casino, Killers of the Flower Moon), Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia , Silence of the Lambs), Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind), Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon, What's Up Doc), or Ed Zwick  (Legends of the Fall, Glory, 30 Something, and The Last Samurai).  

He personally gave all of them their first big break in the film business, if not their first job.  If fact Psych Out starred an unknown Jack Nicolson, Bruce Dern, Dean Stockwell,  and the actor turned director Garry (Happy Days, Pretty Woman) Marshall.

And to pay tribute to their mentor, you will see Roger Corman's face pop up in small roles, in many of these aforementioned filmmakers'  movies.

Have you ever heard of the musical Little Shop of Horrors?   He wrote, produced, and directed the original film from which the musical is based (again, featuring an unknown Jack Nicolson). Did I mention he shot it in 60 hours.   

That's right, I said hours!

He was notorious for shooting feature-length films in under a week.   In fact, some were shot in only four days, and had titles like Bucket of Blood (starring a young Burt Convy, if you know who that is?), The Beast with a Million Eyes,  Attack of the Crab Monsters,  X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, and Death Race 2000 (starring an unknown Sylvester Stallone).  

There are many other artists who owe their careers to him, but the list would be so long that it may crash some servers.

Beginning with American International Pictures (and later under his own production company, New World Pictures) he personally wrote, produced, and directed over two hundred films.   Despite his jumpstarting the careers of just about every actor, director, and screenwriter you’ve ever loved, you would think he would move on to big-budget Hollywood movies.  Yet he never stopped defaulting to his stock and trade: low budget B movies.  The kind seen before the main feature at a drive-in theater.  Only there is no drive-in theater market anymore.  That is why he was known as 'King of the B's'

Ron Howard shared a story about inviting Roger to the set of Apollo 13, hoping to impress him as a protégé who now commands hundred-million-dollar movies.  In his own soft and polite manner, he informed Ron Howard how he could save a few dollars here by adjusting a light, or a few dollars there by doubling up extras to give the impression there were more than there really were.

In his book (my Bible/Tora/Dead Sea Scrolls all rolled into one) How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood and Never Lost A Dime, he shared a story about distributing Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergmans' films to a chain of drive-in theaters across the deep south.  Not exactly the demographic for those kinds of films, but that's how Roger Corman worked.  They needed content, and he had it.  And through the distribution arm of New World Pictures, he exposed internationally renowned filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, and François Truffaut to American audiences in rural and small-town America.

It wasn't just the low-budget genre movies he made, he is probably most famous for a series of films adapted from the works of Edgar Allen Poe, starring Vincent Price in the early 1960s.  Peter Lorre, Ray Milland, and a number of other classic Hollywood notables found work from Roger when the luster of their stars began to fade.

Today it’s the Sci-Fi channel where you can find many of his latest productions as he never really stopped working.  If you look it up on IMDB you’ll see he was working on upcoming projects, at 98!

In my limited history working in the San Francisco film business, Roger Corman was always the North Star I guided my career by.