Corman, Roger William,
1926-, American film director, screenwriter, and producer,
b. Detroit, Mi., Stanford Univ. (B.S., 1947). Corman studied industrial
engineering in college, but then pursued work in the movie industry, working
his way up to being a script reader at 20th Century Fox. His first
screenplay was for the film Highway Dragnet (1953), which
he sold to an independent producer, and he made his debut as a director with
1955’s Five Guns West, working for an independent
company later known as American International Pictures (AIP). It became a
leading producer of so-called “B movies” in the
’50s-‘60s, with Corman serving as its leading director
primarily of horror films. He founded the production company Filmgroup in
1959. In 1960, he directed the horror-comedy hybrid Little Shop of
Horrors for AIP, which later inspired a off-Broadway musical
and film. In the 1960s, he became known for his low-budget horror films,
often featuring actor Vincent Price. Also during this period, he began
mentoring young directors just beginning their careers, producing early
films by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin
Scorsese, among
many others. His film The Wild Angels (1966), starring
Peter Fonda, is said to
be the first biker movie, and may have inspired Fonda’s own
Easy Rider (1969). He also made 1967’s
The Trip, which was written by Jack Nicholson and starred Fonda and Dennis
Hopper. In
1970, Corman founded New World Pictures to specialize in low-budget films
and to distribute foreign films. Corman continued to produce comedies and
horror films in the ’70s-’80s, directing his last feature,
Frankenstein Unbound, in 1990. In 1995, he produced a
15-part horror/action film series for cable network Showtime and founded a
short-lived comic book imprint (1995-96). In recent decades, he has
primarily produced films for the Sci-Fi channel. His early films are
particularly celebrated in Europe, where he has won several awards for his
work, and he was honored with the David O. Selznick Award from the Producers
Guild of America (2006) and an Honorary Academy Award (2010), among other
awards, at home.
See his autobiography (1998); biographies by B. Gray (2012) and C. Nashawaty
(2013); interviews with, C. Nasr, ed. (2011); studies by E. Naha (1982) and
A. Silver and J. Ursini (2006).
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