American director and producer Roger Corman, known for his low-budget films produced at a breakneck pace, has died at the age of 98, his family announced on Saturday, according to American media. His family said he died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California. Roger Corman had directed and produced hundreds of low-budget genre films beginning in the 1950s.
“His legendary ability to stretch a dollar allowed him to quickly conceive and create period films and sci-fi epics on budgets that would not cover the food costs of a modern studio shoot,” according to his biography on the Oscars website. “Thanks to his ingenuity, his boundless energy and his deep love of cinema, Roger Corman has made more films than anyone else,” adds the site.
Honorary Oscar in 2015
An early figure in independent cinema, Roger Corman shot around fifty films and produced more than 300 others, launching the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Denis Hopper. Among his best-known films: The crow, The Fall of House Usherbut also Little Shop of Horrors, a cult film of the Beat Generation and one of Jack Nicholson’s first roles. “He was my blood, my life force and these are not empty words,” the actor recently confided.
Horror, fantasy, gangster films, science fiction, western: this Hollywood figure received an honorary Oscar in 2015, an “incongruity for me who have always made low-budget films”, he said. he amused then. In 2023, Quentin Tarantino paid him a tribute at Cannes: “I like raw, strange, twisted films and if there is a director who embodies this principle, it is Roger Corman”.
A political and sensational cinema
Born in Detroit on April 5, 1926, he studied engineering at Stanford. After the war, he started as a courier at Fox, rose through the ranks and signed his first screenplay in 1953, Highway Dragnet. He joined AIP (American International Pictures), an independent company with a limited budget, specializing in genre cinema. He becomes the flagship producer.
In 1955, he produced his first two westerns and ventured into science fiction with The Day the World ended, introducing one of his favorite themes: the overthrow of the social order after a nuclear attack. A man of the left, he criticizes McCarthyism with It Conquered the Worldracial segregation in The Intruder (1961) and renews the vampire film.
Its tantalizing titles promise humor, thrills and sex to a young audience looking for sensations: Attack of the giant crabs (1957), The Wasp Woman (1959), The Haunted Sea Creature, The mask of the red death (1964)… “My cinema knows no inhibition, it is full of excess, of laughter,” the old man retorted, visibly still amused, to Tarantino in 2023.