The legendary North American B-film producer Roger Corman, who directed and produced a huge list of low-budget films and was responsible for discovering great names in cinema such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron or Jack, has died. Nicholson. He was 98 years old.The producer died on May 9 in Santa Monica, California, surrounded by his loved ones, his family confirmed.”His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic and captured the spirit of an era”, you can read- in the statement sent by the family to the North American media. “When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said: 'He was a filmmaker, that's all',” the statement added. Born in Detroit in 1926, Corman began his career as a producer in 1954 with “Monster from the Ocean Floor”, which cost him just 12 thousand dollars, and from there he launched a career as leader of a team that specialized in the production of independent series B films, at very low costs, focused on a young audience that the big ones studios did not agree, and focused on all the different genres that were becoming fashionable, from science fiction, to horror and biker films. He gathered around him a team of young people who were required to work quickly and efficiently, reusing footage from previous films and using all possible means to save money, thus helping, over the years, to launch some of what would become the greatest actors and directors who would emerge in American cinema from the mid-1960s onwards, in production companies such as AIP or New World Pictures. He began his career as a director in 1955, with the “western” “The Damned Gunmen”, which continued in hundreds of films, with titles such as “The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent”, “Teenage Caveman”, “The Cry Baby Killer”, which gave Jack Nicholson his first leading role , or the classic “A Loja dos Horrores”, shot in two days and one night. From 1958 onwards, with “Machine-Gun Kelly”, in which Charles Bronson debuted as the protagonist, he began to receive critical praise, which was repeated in several films, notably in a long series of very free adaptations of works by Edgar Allan Poe. : “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Crow”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Cursed, the Black Cat and Death”, “The Tomb of Ligeia” or what is considered his best film , “The Masque of the Red Death”. For this reason, in 1964 he became the youngest director to be the subject of a retrospective at the prestigious French Cinematheque. His work as a director continued until the early 1970s in films such as “Wild Angels”, “The Chicago Massacre” and “The Red Baron”, but the role of producer never stopped (and he accumulated almost 500 titles…) to which was added in that decade a lucrative side as distributor in the USA of art and essay films, by authors such as Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini or Akira Kurosawa. As a producer, he allowed the first steps of directors who would later become legendary, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante or John Milius, giving some young actors such as Jack Nicholson or Ron Howard their first experiences in directing, and to others a definitive boost in their career, such as Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. The recognition of all these filmmakers towards Roger Corman never wavered and led to him being given small acting roles in some of his films, including classics such as “The Godfather – Part II”, “Howl of the Beast”, “The Silence of the Lambs”, “Philadelphia” or “Apollo 13”.Corman remained very active as a producer until the end, returning punctually to filming, in films such as “Frankenstein Revisited”. In 2009, the director and producer received an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement.
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